Hard times and all, theater lives in San Francisco

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November 01, 2009

By Bill Varble

Mail Tribune

They say San Francisco is not a theater town. I don't think there are theater towns anymore in the sense that New York City was back in the day.

But you just gotta poke around. In an extended weekend we saw four plays at three of the Bay Area's top theaters — eight, actually, since one evening comprised five one-acts — and can report that the patient is alive and kicking.

Downtown, taxis flock to the Theater District as shows let out, and gospel-belting buskers time their thing to catch the crowd coming and going at the grand old American Conservatory Theater.

Across the Bay at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, people cruise the lounge with drinks in hand and an unspoken feeling it's a cool place to be.

At the Magic Theater at Fort Mason they congratulate themselves on scoring that holiest of San Francisco holies: a parking place.

The crowd comes early to Berkeley Rep, where Tony Kushner's "Tiny Kushner," an evening of one-acts, is playing. It's a younger crowd than the Oregon Shakespeare Festival's audience. That could be just Berkeley, or it could be the Green Day punk musical, "American Idiot," in the Rep's 600-seat Roda Theatre next door to the intimate Thrust Stage where the one-acts are. But the Rep cultivates younger people with pizza events for teens, half-price tickets for young folks and more (the OSF has begun similar experiments).

There are tables of crayons and line drawings of characters from the Kushner plays (Richard Nixon, Laura Bush). People post outlandish portraits and study them and laugh.

American Conservatory Theater on San Francisco's Geary Street is the flagship for live drama in the Bay Area. It was built after the 1906 quake and opened in 1910 as the Columbia Theatre.

Later known as the Geary, it got a $28-million makeover after the Loma Prieta quake of 1989. In 2006 it took the name of the company that's called it home since 1967.

Walking into the 1,000-seat, beaux arts room with its high, gilt ceiling and proscenium arch, you feel the ghosts of the Barrymores, Paul Robeson, Lunt and Fontanne, Cornelia Otis Skinner, Laurence Olivier, Judith Anderson. A.C.T. is also an acting school granting master of fine arts degrees. Among the alumni are Denzel Washington, Annette Bening, Winona Ryder, Amy Irving, Danny Glover.

For the run of David Mamet's satirical "November" they're having a David Mamet Writing Contest. You write a scene in the master's style, and the winner gets a reading on stage (sorry, deadline was Oct. 28).

There are more suits here than at the Rep, more gray hair, more limos and taxis. The opulence is still impressive, even with a patina of age, and it contrasts sharply with the gritty streets outside with the Tenderloin looming nearby.

The Magic Theatre is beginning its 43rd season with two new plays by John Kolvenbach running in repertory. The theater began in the Steppenwolf Bar in Berkeley in 1967 and took its name from a passage in Herman Hesse's novel of that name.

Sam Shepard became the group's playwright in residence in 1975, and many of his plays had their premieres here. The Magic became one of the first groups to move to Fort Mason when it was converted to a multi-cultural center by the Bay in 1976 in a swords-into-plowshares thing. It dodged a money bullet earlier this year in dramatic fashion.

You park in the large lot (yes!), find Building D and climb three flights of stairs. It's an intimate space without a bad seat. "Goldfish" played at 6:30 p.m., and "Mrs. Whitney at 8. There's not time to run out for dinner, so the theater had croissants with meat and cheese and fruit available between the shows. The crowd is a dedicated one, and there's a palpable feeling of being in a special place.

Let the plays begin.

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