Progressive

Theater Listings: April 2 – 8, 2014

Michael Redmond
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Stage listings are compiled by Guardian staff. Performance times may change; call venues to confirm. Reviewers are Robert Avila, Rita Felciano, and Nicole Gluckstern. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com.

THEATER

OPENING

E-i-E-i-OY! In Bed with the Farmer’s Daughter NOHSpace, 2840 Mariposa, SF; www.vivienstraus.com. $20. Opens Fri/4, 8pm. Runs Fri-Sat, 8pm. Through May 10. Vivien Straus performs her autobiographical solo show.

Painting the Clouds With Sunshine Eureka Theatre, 215 Jackson, SF; www.42ndStMoon.org. $25-75. Previews Wed/2-Thu/3, 7pm. Opens Fri/4, 8pm. Runs Wed-Thu, 7pm; Fri, 8pm; Sat, 6pm (also April 12, 1pm); Sun, 3pm. Through April 20. 42nd Street Moon performs a world premiere, a first for the company: Greg MacKellan and Mark D. Kaufmann’s tribute to songs from 1930s movie musicals.

BAY AREA

The Hound of the Baskervilles Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, 500 Castro, SF; www.theatreworks.org. $19-73. Previews Wed/2-Fri/4, 8pm. Opens Sat/5, 8pm. Runs Tue-Wed, 7:30pm; Thu-Sat, 8pm (also Sat, 2pm); Sun, 2 and 7pm. Through April 27. TheatreWorks performs Stephen Canny and John Nicholson’s comedic send-up of Sherlock Holmes.

The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee Julia Morgan Theater, 2640 College, Berk; www.berkeleyplayhouse.org. $18-60. Previews Sat/5, 1pm. Opens Sat/5, 6pm. Runs Fri, April 24, and May 1, 7pm; Sat, 1 and 6pm; Sun, noon and 5pm. Through May 4. Berkeley Playhouse performs the Tony-winning musical comedy.

Wittenberg Aurora Theatre, 2081 Addison, Berk; www.auroratheatre.org. $32-60. Previews Fri/4-Sat/5 and April 9, 8pm; Sun/6, 2pm; Tue/8, 7pm. Opens April 10, 8pm. Runs Tue, 7pm; Wed-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2 and 7pm. Through May 4. Aurora Theatre Company performs David Davalos’ comedy about reason versus faith.

ONGOING

Bauer San Francisco Playhouse, 450 Post, SF; www.sfplayhouse.org. Tue-Thu, 7pm; Fri-Sat, 8pm (also Sat, 3pm); April 13, 2pm. Through April 19. San Francisco Playhouse presents the world premiere of Lauren Gunderson’s drama about artist Rudolf Bauer.

Every Five Minutes Magic Theatre, Fort Mason Center, Marina at Laguna, SF; www.magictheatre.org. $20-60. Previews Wed/2, 8pm. Opens Thu/3, 8pm. Runs Tue, 7pm; Fri-Sat, 8pm (also April 9, 2:30pm); Sun, 2:30pm (also Sun/6, 7pm). Through April 20. Magic Theatre presents the world premiere of Linda McLean’s drama about a man’s homecoming after years behind bars.

Feisty Old Jew Marsh San Francisco Main Stage, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $25-100. Sat, 8pm; Sun, 7pm. Extended through May 4. Charlie Varon performs his latest solo show, a fictional comedy about “a 20th century man living in a 21st century city.”

Foodies! The Musical Shelton Theater, 533 Sutter, SF; www.foodiesthemusical.com. $32-34. Fri-Sat, 8pm. Open-ended. AWAT Productions presents Morris Bobrow’s musical comedy revue all about food.

The Habit of Art Z Below Theatre, 470 Florida, SF; www.therhino.org. $15-25. Wed-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 3pm. Through April 13. Theatre Rhinoceros performs a “very British comedy” by History Boys author Alan Bennett.

Hundred Days Z Space, 450 Florida, SF; www.zspace.org. $10-100. Wed/2 and Sun/6, 7pm; Thu/3-Sat/5, 8pm. Married musical duo the Bengsons (Abigail and Shaun) provide the real-life inspiration and guiding rock ‘n’ roll heart for this uneven but at times genuinely rousing indie musical drama, a self-referential meta-theater piece relating the story of a young couple in 1940s America who fall madly in love only to discover one of them is terminally ill. As an exploration of love, mortality, and the nature of time, the story of Sarah and Will (doubled by the Bengsons and, in movement sequences and more dramatically detailed scenes, by chorus members Amy Lizardo and Reggie D. White) draws force from the potent musical performances and songwriting of composer-creators Abigail and Shaun Bengson (augmented here by the appealing acting-singing chorus and backup band that also feature El Beh, Melissa Kaitlyn Carter, Geneva Harrison, Kate Kilbane, Jo Lampert, Delane Mason, Joshua Pollock). Playwright Kate E. Ryan’s book, however, proves too straightforward, implausible, and sentimental to feel like an adequate vessel for the music’s exuberant, urgent emotion and lilting, longing introspection. Other trappings of director Anne Kauffman’s elaborate production (including an inspired set design by Kris Stone that echoes the raw industrial shell of the theater; and less-than-inspired choreography by the otherwise endlessly inventive Joe Goode) can add texture at times but also prove either neutral figures or distracting minuses in conveying what truth and heft there is in the material. Ultimately, this still evolving world premiere has a strong musical beat at its core, which has a palpable force of its own, even if it’s yet to settle into the right combination of story and staging. (Avila)

I Never Lie: The Pinocchio Project Phoenix Theatre, 414 Mason, SF; www.99stockproductions.org. $15. Fri-Sat and April 10, 8pm; Sun, 5pm. Through April 12. 99 Stock Productions performs Meredith Eden’s bold fairytale retelling.

Lottie’s Ghosts Brava Theater Center, 2781 24th St, SF; www.brava.org. $20. Thu/3-Sat/5, 8pm; Sun/6, 3pm. Dancer, storyteller, and Brava artist-in-residence Shakiri presents a new work based on her novel of the same name.

Lovebirds Marsh San Francisco Studio, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Thu-Fri, 8pm; Sat, 8:30pm. Extended through April 12. Theater artist and comedian Marga Gomez presents the world premiere of her 10th solo show, described as “a rollicking tale of incurable romantics.”

Pearls Over Shanghai Hypnodrome Theatre, 575 10th St, SF; www.thrillpeddlers.com. $30-35. Thu-Sat, 8pm. Through May 31. Thrillpeddlers present the fifth anniversary revival production of its enormously popular take on the 1971 Cockettes musical.

The Scion Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $15-60. Thu-Fri, 8pm; Sat, 5pm. Through April 18. In his latest solo show, Brian Copeland (Not a Genuine Black Man; The Waiting Period) explores an infamous crime in his hometown of San Leandro: the 2000 murder of three government meat inspectors by Stuart Alexander, owner of the Santos Linguisa Factory. The story is personal history for Copeland, at least indirectly, as the successful comedian and TV host recounts growing up nearby under the common stricture that “rules are rules,” despite evidence all around that equity, fairness, and justice are in fact deeply skewed by privilege. Developed with director David Ford, the multiple-character monologue (delivered with fitful humor on a bare-bones stage with supportive sound design by David Hines) contrasts Copeland’s own youthful experiences as a target of racial profiling with the way wealthy and white neighbor Stuart Alexander, a serial bully and thug, consistently evaded punishment and even police attention along his path to becoming the “Sausage King,” a mayoral candidate, and a multiple murderer (Alexander died in 2005 at San Quentin). The story takes some meandering turns in making its points, and not all of Copeland’s characterizations are equally compelling. The subject matter is timely enough, however, though ironically it is government that seems to set itself further than ever above the law as much as wealthy individuals or the bogus “legal persons” of the corporate world. The results of such concentrated power are indeed unhealthy, and literally so — Copeland’s grandmother (one of his more persuasive characterizations) harbors a deep distrust of processed food that is nothing if not prescient — but The Scion’s tale of two San Leandrans leaves one hungry for more complexity. (Avila)

She Rode Horses Like the Stock Exchange Thick House, 1695 18th St, SF; www.crowdedfire.org. $15-35. Wed-Sat, 8pm. Through April 12. Crowded Fire offers a fine West Coast premiere of a clever if less than satisfying satire of the nouveaux riche and pauvre by American playwright Amelia Roper, in which two married couples meet on the grass of their neighborhood park and unravel their tangled, starkly childlike relations and dreams. Amy (a sharp and spirited Zehra Berkman) is a smart and restless woman who knows what she wants and can get it too, but without the slightest idea of how to sit comfortably still and enjoy a sunnySunday morning. Her husband, Henry (a droll, unfussy, good-natured George Sellner), is clearly the antidote to the corporate jungle Amy works in, an agreeably boyish nurse and nurturer, who alleviates the stress of his own workweek in a children’s cancer ward with a scoop of strawberry-flavored ice cream on a cone. Soon they are sharing their modest picnic blanket with a bounding, slightly older couple, well-pampered housewife Sara (Marilee Talkington, alternately splendid and deflated in a beautifully modulated performance) and bank-owning breadwinner Max (an equally dynamic Kevin Clarke, outwardly suave yet reveling in Ubu-esque paroxysms of infantile yearning). Against a backdrop of post-pastoral suburban ease (succinctly evoked in scenic designer Maya Linke’s dangling mobiles, a lovely abstraction of dappled light and trees), we see the couples first commiserate then trade places, like pirate ships on the high seas of finance capitalism. Yet their viciousness has a gentleness around it too, like children playing pirates. In their jockeying, they seem both utterly willful and beyond their ken, while the triumphs and possibilities of a bygone innocence reassert themselves in unguarded moments like a lost Eden. If anything, the play hits its themes (including this sandbox metaphor) a little too forcefully even for satire, and its fleet 80 minutes get only so far in producing a sense of personal and systemic exhaustion as well as transcendence. The play’s agile humor and director M. Graham Smith’s strong and astute cast make the going a pleasure, however, even if we leave wanting a deeper excavation of that pristine lawn. (Avila)

Shit & Champagne Rebel, 1772 Market, SF; shitandchampagne.eventbrite.com. $25. Fri-Sat, 8pm. Open-ended. D’Arcy Drollinger is Champagne White, bodacious blond innocent with a wicked left hook in this cross-dressing ’70s-style white-sploitation flick, played out live on Rebel’s intimate but action-packed barroom stage. Written by Drollinger and co-directed with Laurie Bushman (with high-flying choreography by John Paolillo, Drollinger, and Matthew Martin), this high-octane camp send-up of a favored formula comes dependably stocked with stock characters and delightfully protracted by a convoluted plot (involving, among other things, a certain street drug that’s triggered an epidemic of poopy pants) — all of it played to the hilt by an excellent cast that includes Martin as Dixie Stampede, an evil corporate dominatrix at the head of some sinister front for world domination called Mal*Wart; Alex Brown as Detective Jack Hammer, rough-hewn cop on the case and ambivalent love interest; Rotimi Agbabiaka as Sergio, gay Puerto Rican impresario and confidante; Steven Lemay as Brandy, high-end calf model and Champagne’s (much) beloved roommate; and Nancy French as Rod, Champagne’s doomed fiancé. Sprawling often literally across two buxom acts, the show maintains admirable consistency: The energy never flags and the brow stays decidedly low. (Avila)

The Speakeasy Undisclosed location (ticket buyers receive a text with directions), SF; www.thespeakeasysf.com. $70 (gambling chips, $5-10 extra; after-hours admission, $10). Thu-Sat, 7:40, 7:50, and 8pm admittance times. Extended through May 24. Boxcar Theater’s most ambitious project to date is also one of the more involved and impressively orchestrated theatrical experiences on any Bay Area stage just now. An immersive time-tripping environmental work, The Speakeasy takes place in an “undisclosed location” (in fact, a wonderfully redesigned version of the company’s Hyde Street theater complex) amid a period-specific cocktail lounge, cabaret, and gambling den inhabited by dozens of Prohibition-era characters and scenarios that unfold around an audience ultimately invited to wander around at will. At one level, this is an invitation to pure dress-up social entertainment. But there are artistic aims here too. Intentionally designed (by co-director and creator Nick A. Olivero with co-director Peter Ruocco) as a fractured super-narrative — in which audiences perceive snatches of overheard stories rather than complete arcs, and can follow those of their own choosing — there’s a way the piece becomes specifically and ever more subtly about time itself. This is most pointedly demonstrated in the opening vignettes in the cocktail lounge, where even the ticking of Joe’s Clock Shop (the “cover” storefront for the illicit 1920s den inside) can be heard underscoring conversations (deeply ironic in historical hindsight) about war, loss, and regained hope for the future. For a San Francisco currently gripped by a kind of historical double-recurrence of the roaring Twenties and dire Thirties at once, The Speakeasy is not a bad place to sit and ponder the simulacra of our elusive moment. (Avila)

“Standing On Ceremony: The Gay Marriage Plays” New Conservatory Theatre Center, 25 Van Ness, SF; www.nctcsf.org. $25-45. Wed-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2pm. Through April 27. New Conservatory Theatre Center performs short plays about marriage equality by Mo Gaffney, Neil LaBute, Wendy MacLeod, Paul Rudnick, and others.

Tipped & Tipsy Marsh Studio Theater, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Sat/5, 5pm; Sun/6, 7pm. Last fall’s San Francisco Fringe Festival began on a high note with Jill Vice’s witty and deft solo, Tipped & Tipsy, and the Best of Fringe winner is now enjoying another round at solo theater outpost the Marsh. Without set or costume changes, Vice (who developed the piece with Dave Dennison and David Ford) brings the querulous regulars of a skid-row bar to life both vividly and with real quasi–Depression-Era charm. She’s a protean physical performer, seamlessly inhabiting the series of oddball outcasts lined up each day at Happy’s before bartender Candy — two names as loaded as the clientele. After some hilarious expert summarizing of the do’s and don’ts of bar culture, a story unfolds around a battered former boxer and his avuncular relationship with Candy, who tries to cut him off in light of his clearly deteriorating health. Her stance causes much consternation, and even fear, in his barfly associates, while provoking a dangerous showdown with the bar’s self-aggrandizing sleaze-ball owner, Rico. With a love of the underdog and strong writing and acting at its core, Tipsy breezes by, leaving a superlative buzz. (Avila)

Top Girls Gough Street Playhouse, 1620 Gough, SF; www.custommade.org. $15-35. Thu-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 7pm. Through April 13. Custom Made Theatre Company performs Caryl Churchill’s celebration of powerful women.

Twisted Fairy Tales Shelton Theater, 533 Sutter, SF; www.leftcoasttheatreco.org. $15-25. Thu/3-Sat/5, 8pm. Left Coast Theatre Co. performs the world premiere of seven one-act LGBT-themed plays based on classic children’s stories.

The Two Chairs Bindlestiff Studios, 185 Sixth St, SF; www.performersunderstress.com. $10-30. Thu-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2pm. Through April 13. In this world premiere by Performers Under Stress of its cofounder Charles Pike’s play, two chairs, per title, come matched with two cameras projecting two angles on two characters — He (Vince Faso, alternating nights with Duane Lawrence) and She (Juliana Egley, alternating nights with Valerie Fachman) — who sit at right angles to one another in a series of terse, vaguely clinical encounters. Introduced and concluded each time with cheeky inter-titles (à la Beckett) and the sound of a buzzer (à la Beckett — pretty much everything here is à la Beckett), their interactions unfold as progressive variations on a theme, freighted with references to the Goldberg Variations and other pretentious class markers (belied somewhat by the characters’ less than wholly sophisticated demeanors). Each mysterious not to say unorthodox session also concludes with a limp slap and the exchange of an envelope, as a banal male heterosexual masochist fantasy is jokily and tediously pursued to the point of He’s final erasure. Directed by PUS’s Scott Baker, the production adds a generational variation too across the alternating casts. But at least with the younger cast (Faso and Egley), the exploration comes across as glib and lifeless, and Pike’s self-conscious regression to an old-school avant-garde style feels too ersatz to be persuasive. (Avila)

Venus in Fur Geary Theater, 415 Geary, SF; www.act-sf.org. $20-120. Wed-Sat and Tue, 8pm (also Sat, 2pm); Sun, 7pm. Through April 13. American Conservatory Theater performs a new production of David Ives’ 2012 Tony-nominated play.

The World of Paradox Garage, 715 Bryant, SF; www.paradoxmagic.com. $12-15. Mon/7, 8pm. Footloose presents David Facer in his solo show, a mix of magic and theater.

The World’s Funniest Bubble Show Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $8-11. Sun, 11am. Extended through May 25. The popular, kid-friendly show by Louis Pearl (aka “The Amazing Bubble Man”) returns to the Marsh.

Wrestling Jerusalem Intersection for the Arts, 925 Mission, SF; www.theintersection.org. $20-30. Thu/3-Sat/5, 7:30pm; Sun/6, 2pm. Intersection for the Arts presents Aaron Davidman in his multicharacter solo performance piece about Israel and Palestine.

BAY AREA

Accidental Death of an Anarchist Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Roda Theatre, 2015 Addison, Berk; www.berkeleyrep.org. $29-99. Tue and Thu-Sat, 8pm (no show April 18; also Sat and April 17, 2pm); Sun, 2 and 7pm. Through April 20. Berkeley Rep presents comic actor Steven Epp in Dario Fo’s explosive political farce, directed by Christopher Bayes,

Arms and the Man Barn Theatre, 30 Sir Francis Drake, Ross; www.rossvalleyplayers.com. $13-26. Thu, 7:30pm; Fri-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2pm. Through April 13. Ross Valley Players perform George Bernard Shaw’s romantic comedy.

Bread and Circuses La Val’s Subterranean, 1834 Euclid, Berk; www.impacttheatre.com. $20-25. Thu/3-Sat/5, 8pm; Sun/6, 7pm. Impact Theatre performs “a cavalcade of brutal and bloody new short plays” by various contemporary playwrights.

The Coast of Utopia Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby, Berk; www.shotgunplayers.org. $20-35 (three-show marathon days, $100-125). Part One: Voyage runs through April 17; Part Two: Shipwreck runs through April 19; Part Three: Salvage runs through April 27. Three-play marathon, Sat/5 and April 26. Through April 27. Check website for showtime info. Shotgun Players performs Tom Stoppard’s epic The Coast of Utopia trilogy, with all three plays performed in repertory.

East 14th Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston, Berk; www.themarsh.org. $20-50. Fri, 8pm; Sat, 8:30pm. Through April 26. Don Reed’s hit autobiographical solo show returns to the Marsh Berkeley.

Fool For Love Pear Avenue Theatre, 1220 Pear, Mtn View; www.thepear.org. $10-35. Thu/3-Sat/5, 8pm; Sun/6, 2pm. Pear Avenue Theatre performs Sam Shepard’s iconic play, about a pair of former lovers who reunite at a lonely desert motel.

Geezer Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston, Berk; www.themarsh.org. $25-50. Thu, 8pm; Sat, 5pm. Through April 26. Geoff Hoyle moves his hit comedy about aging to the East Bay.

Johnny Guitar, the Musical Masquers Playhouse, 105 Park Place, Point Richmond; www.masquers.org. $22. Fri-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2pm. Through April 26. Masquers Playhouse performs the off-Broadway hit based on the campy Joan Crawford Western.

Sleuth Center REPertory Company, 1601 Civic, Walnut Creek; www.centerrep.org. $33-54. Wed, 7:30pm; Thu-Sat, 8pm (also April 26, 2:30pm); Sun, 2:30pm. Through April 26. Center REPertory Company performs Anthony Shaffer’s classic, Tony-winning thriller.

Vampire Lesbians of Sodom and Sleeping Beauty or Coma Live Oaks Theater, 1301 Shattuck, Berk; www.viragotheatre.org. $28. Thu-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2pm. Through April 19. Virago Theatre Company performs Charles Busch’s outrageous double bill.

PERFORMANCE/DANCE

“California Dreamin’, A Musical Celebration of our Golden State” Ebenezer Herchurch, 678 Portola, SF; www.sflgfb.org. Sun/6, 4pm. Free. The San Francisco Lesbian/Gay Freedom Band performs. Check website for info on Davis and Woodland concerts.

Caroline Lugo and Carolé Acuña’s Ballet Flamenco Peña Pachamama, 1630 Powell, SF; www.carolinalugo.com. Sun/6, April 12, 19, 30, May 4, 10-11, 17, and 25, 6:15pm. $15-19. Flamenco performance by the mother-daughter dance company, featuring live musicians.

“Conjuring Wonder” Prescott Hotel, 545 Post, SF; www.miraclemagic.com. Thu/3, 7pm. (Ongoing first Thursday of every month). $35. Dennis Kyriakos performs close-up magic to a small audience; advance ticket purchase recommended.

“Dance Discourse Project #18: Exploring Choreographic Thinking” CounterPULSE, 1310 Mission, SF; www.counterpulse.org. Thu/3, 7:30pm, Free. CounterPULSE and Dancers’ Group present a panel discussion exploring “choreographic thinking.” Participants include moderator Megan Nicely and choreographers Christian Burns and Christy Funsch, and dancer-scholar Rebecca Chaleff.

“Drone Magic: San Francisco Bagpipe Festival” Croatian American Cultural Center, 60 Onondaga, SF; www.croatianamericanweb.org. Sun/6, 2-6pm. $15 (children free). With bagpipe music from around the world.

“Dying While Black and Brown” ZACCHO Studio, 1777 Yosemite #330, SF; www.zaccho.org. Fri/4, 8pm; Sat/5, 2pm. Free. ZACCHO Dance Theatre presents two free performances of Joanna Haigood’s San Francisco Equal Justice Society-commissioned work investigating capital punishment and incarcerated people of color.

“Falsehoods & Fairytales” Exit Theater, 156 Eddy, SF; www.mindofkevin.com. Fri/4-Sat/5, 8pm. $20. Kevin Ferguson — “mind-screwer, thought-fiddler, and perception-twiddler” — performs his new magical stage show.

“The Flow Show” Dance Mission Theater, 3316 24th St, SF; www.theflowshow.org. Fri/4, 8pm. $20. “A cutting-edge showcase of object manipulation” with dance, circus acts, and more.

“Interlace” ODC Dance Commons, 351 Shotwell, SF; www.odctheater.org. Sat/5, 8pm; Sun/6, 4 and 7pm. $10-15. Teen dancers performs works by KT Nelson, Kimi Okada, and others in this 17th season of the ODC Dance Jam.

Morgan James Venetian Room, Fairmont San Francisco, 950 Mason, SF; www.bayareacabaret.org. Sun/6, 7:30pm. $48. The Broadway and jazz singer performs.

“The Life You’ll Never Have” Stage Werx Theatre, 446 Valencia, SF; www.foulplaysf.com. April 8-9, 7pm writing party; 8pm performance. $20. The audience crafts each evening’s soap opera-inspired play at this interactive, immersive performance by Exquisite Corpse Theatre.

“Magic at the Rex” Hotel Rex, 562 Sutter, SF; www.magicattherex.com. Sat, 8pm. Ongoing. $25. Magic and mystery with Adam Sachs and mentalist Sebastian Boswell III.

Margaret Jenkins Dance Company Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF; www.ybca.org. Thu/3-Sat/5, 7:30pm; Sun/6, 3pm. $30-35. The company marks its 40th anniversary season with the West Coast premiere of Times Bones, plus a collaboration with Kolben Dance Company of Jerusalem, The Gate of Winds.

“Mi Corazón es tu Piñata” Stage Werx Theatre, 446 Valencia, SF; www.corazonpinata.com. Fri/4-Sat/5, 8pm. $16-20. Fully improvised telenovela (in English) based on audience suggestions.

“Mutiny Radio Comedy Showcase” Mutiny Radio, 2781 21st St, SF; www.mutinyradio.fm. Fri/4, 8pm. $10. Also Sat/5, 5pm, $10, Purple Onion at Kells, 530 Jackson, SF; www.mutinyradio.fm. Local comedians perform.

“Point Break Live!” DNA Lounge, 373 11th St, SF; www.dnalounge.com. Fri/4, 7:30 and 11pm. $25-50. Dude, Point Break Live! is like dropping into a monster wave, or holding up a bank, like, just a pure adrenaline rush, man. Ahem. Sorry, but I really can’t help but channel Keanu Reeves and his Johnny Utah character when thinking about the awesomely bad 1991 movie Point Break or its equally yummily cheesy stage adaptation. And if you do an even better Keanu impression than me — the trick is in the vacant stare and stoner drawl — then you can play his starring role amid a cast of solid actors, reading from cue cards from a hilarious production assistant in order to more closely approximate Keanu’s acting ability. This play is just so much fun, even better now at DNA Lounge than it was a couple years ago at CELLspace. But definitely buy the poncho pack and wear it, because the blood, spit, and surf spray really do make this a fully immersive experience. (Steven T. Jones)

“Schubertiade” Salle Pianos, 1632 C Market, SF; modernschubertiade.brownpapertickets.com. Fri/4, 8pm. $30. Kathryn Roszak’s Danse Lumière performs an updated version of an 1820s salon, with music, dance, and poetry.

“Strange Things” One Grove Street, SF; www.ftloose.org. Sat/5, 8pm. $20-30. Magician Christian Cagigal and mentalist Paul Draper perform together.

Terminator Too: Judgment Play DNA Lounge, 373 11th St, SF; www.dnalounge.com. Thu/3 and May 1, 9pm. $25-50. The creators of Point Break Live! take on James Cameron’s 1991 sci-fi classic, with an audience member picked on the night of the show to embody Schwarzenegger’s iconic role.

BAY AREA

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater Zellerbach Hall, Bancroft at Telegraph, UC Berkeley, Berk; www.calperformances.org. Wed/2-Sun/6, 8pm. $30-92. The company performs new works by top choreographers, as well as company classics, as part of its annual Cal Performances residency.

“Feisty Old Jew” Osher Marin JCC, 200 N. San Pedro, San Rafael; www.marinjcc.org. Sun/6, 2pm. Free. Charlie Varon performs his latest solo, a fictional comedy about “a 20th century man living in a 21st century city.” Opening the show is Maxine Epstein’s 15-minute monologue, Pushin’ the Pushka.

“IMPACT” Odell Johnson Theater, Laney College, 900 Fallon, Oakl; www.destinyarts.org. Fri/4-Sat/5 and April 11-12, 7:30pm (also April 12, 2pm). $13-30. Destiny Arts Youth Performance Company celebrates the youth arts and violence prevention organization’s 25th anniversary with this world-premiere show, a mix of dance, theater, spoken word, rap, and song.

“MarshJam Improv Comedy Show” Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston, Berk; www.themarsh.org. Fri, 8pm. Ongoing. $10. Improv comedy with local legends and drop-in guests. *

 

Talk it through

Michael Redmond
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0
Talk it through

arts@sfbg.com

DANCE

“She started right away on the collaborative process. I have this wonderful image of the Bryant Street studio. There was no real mirror, only one leaning against the wall. I remember Margy sitting with her back against it — I was afraid that it might fall on her — and her saying, ‘I have so many ideas in my head that I am afraid I can’t all get them out.’ What I really liked was that she also was interested in the ideas in my head, and she wasn’t going to impose her ideas, and this was going to be a conversation.” — Ginny Matthews, Margaret Jenkins Dance Company, 1974-1980

That’s how one of the country’s most remarkably individual companies was born. After moving back to her hometown in 1970 at a time when San Francisco was barely a dot on the map in terms of modern and postmodern dance, Margaret Jenkins has created over 75 works. Now 70, she has just renewed the lease on her spacious Margaret Jenkins Dance Lab studio on Eighth Street for another five years. CHIME, Jenkins’ mentorship program for professional dancers, is a wild success locally and in Los Angeles.

In 2006, she took her conversation global, collaborating with India’s Tansuree Shankar Dance Company on A Slipping Glance; in 2009, she created Other Suns with China’s Guangdong Modern Dance Company. And she is still at it, intrigued by questions that pop up in discussions with her again and again: “Wouldn’t be interesting if…”

As the light streams in through the studio’s floor-to-ceiling windows on this March afternoon, Jenkins is watching 15 dancers, seven of her own and eight from the Jerusalem-based Kolben Dance Company. They have just taken a break from rehearsing The Gate of Winds, which came about after Jenkins traveled to Jerusalem, a city she had always wanted to visit. “Having been raised in a progressive Jewish family, and as an atheist, I was curious what it would feel like putting my feet on the ground,” she observed.

She is aware that she and Kolben’s artistic director, Amir Kolben, have quite different approaches to the creative process. But working with his dancers in Jerusalem, she found them “fierce and wonderful movers.” Kolben, who had never worked with a collaborator before, was intrigued “more with the way we think than with how we create,” he explains.

Jenkins seems pleased with what she has just witnessed: two beautifully trained groups of performers who are stretching themselves emotionally and physically in exploring paths that they may not even know to have existed.

“Margy is very brave. She has an intellectual honesty about her that I really appreciated and [that she] communicated with me. I was doing solo work, and it was a very difficult time for me, and I learned to trust myself. [Being with the company] buoyed me up in so many different ways. Besides, it was nice to be on stage with others.” — Rinde Eckert, MJDC, 1987-1995

Still, Jenkins seems to have just a touch of melancholy about her when she looks forward and backward. Will she renew her lease again five years? “All too often, I ask myself whether there will be any money,” she sighs. “Every year, I start from absolute zero.”

Perhaps it was some of those thoughts that gave rise to the second piece on this 40th anniversary bill. For Times Bones, which premiered at the University of Maryland last September, Jenkins took a look at her past repertoire — at least the 68 pieces of which video exists — to see whether there were “untold stories” in them. She was struck by “how little contact the dancers had with each other. Now they partner each other. I have no idea why that’s the case.” This became another “wouldn’t it be interesting…” question. She had her present company learn fragments of pieces she had chosen, and then told the dancers to have their own conversations with them.

“I found her democratic process, her way of giving everyone voice in the process, to be infuriating and enlightening all at the same time. I hated the idea that she didn’t tell us what to do. It wasn’t enough to make movement that got you from here to there; it had to be thoroughly investigated. We were constantly throwing out anything that felt familiar or ‘already been done before.’ And the enlightening part was her willingness to let divergent types of material exist together. I still use this idea of colliding materials together, in an effort to surprise my original conception of things.” — Joe Goode, MJDC, 1980-1984 *

MARGARET JENKINS DANCE COMPANY

Thu/3-Sat/5, 7:30pm; Sun/6, 3pm, $30-35

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF

www.ybca.org

 

Massage therapists hope for a happy ending

Michael Redmond
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Massage therapists hope for a happy ending

The California Massage Therapy Council, a statewide body that licenses massage practitioners, may expire at the end of this year unless extended by the California Legislature. Some anti-prostitution crusaders say reverting to local control will make it easier to shut down covert brothels, but the practitioners fear a return to the bad old days, when stigmas and stereotypes overcomplicated their lives.

On one side of the debate are the massage therapists, who say that the council protects them from unfair discrimination, replaces a patchwork of local ordinances, and provides a greater level of respectability to their profession. However, an array of city officials, police departments, and powerful groups such as the League of California Cities argue that the CAMTC makes it easier for illicit massage parlors to get away with prostitution and human trafficking.

“I receive complaints from neighbors all the time about certain establishments,” said Sup. Katy Tang about her supervisorial district in San Francisco’s Sunset District. “We can inspect, but we have no ability to enforce any of our regulations. If there are any penalties, we can’t enforce them.”

Tang’s frustration stems from Senate Bill 731, legislation that was signed into law in 2008. That bill created the CAMTC, a nonprofit organization that has the authority to certify massage practitioners and therapists in California. Prior to the creation of this body, each city and county enacted its own certification procedures, leading to a messy patchwork of rules all over the state.

Before the CAMTC, “there were 550 different kinds of regulations from city to city,” said Ahmos Netanel, CEO of the organization. “Within a radius of one mile, you can have a situation where different cities have their own standards. One city may require no training, and another right next door may require 1,000 hours.”

A massage provider working in California pre-2009 not only had to be savvy with the medley of laws, but also needed to purchase expensive licenses for each city he or she planned to practice in. The CAMTC creates a universal—though voluntary—system, where licensed practitioners can travel and work freely around the state.

The contentious part of the law comes from the protection that it offers to licensed practitioners. Any establishment that employs all CAMTC-certified massage providers is exempt from city ordinances that target massage businesses. Law enforcement agencies claim that these restrictions impede their ability to crack down on illegal parlors, but the massage therapists say that they are necessary to fight off discriminatory laws.

Some of these unfair regulations targeted entire establishments, such as zoning rules that forced all massage businesses into run-down or dangerous parts of town, with the assumption that they were brothels. Massage providers argued that this was neither fair nor safe for, say, a 75-year-old woman seeking out massage for arthritis, or a soon-to-be mom trying to obtain a pre-natal massage.

Other laws targeted the therapists themselves. Stacey DeGooyer, a certified massage therapist in the Bay Area, remembers times when practicing massage meant mandatory STD testing and reminders from police to not wear undergarments as exterior clothing.

“I remember thinking, ‘Wow, this is for my profession?'” DeGooyer said, decrying being subjected to “archaic prostitution laws.” Most massage providers aren’t looking to be on par with physicians, but they also don’t want to be on par with prostitutes.

Currently, San Francisco has its own certification program that is regulated by the Department of Public Health. To practice massage in the city, the provider must have a license from either the city or the CAMTC. However, only those who have the state CAMTC license can legally call themselves a “licensed massage” therapist or practitioner.

Tang has been one of the most outspoken critics of the CAMTC in San Francisco, urging the Legislature to let the body sunset at the end of the year.

“I wouldn’t say that I’m against [the CAMTC], but there are structural flaws in how it was designed,” Tang said. “It was created for good reasons, since there were so many jurisdictions and they wanted to standardize it and create a cohesive process. But there are jurisdictions like San Francisco where we have our own robust process.”

The number of massage establishments have surged since the adoption of the CAMTC, which critics use as evidence for a growing number of illicit parlors. But Netanel said his group’s worked to prevent prostitutes from getting licensed in the first place. Out of over 63,000 applicants, Netanel said, the group has never certified a single person who has been convicted of illicit activities. It also utilizes an online complaint form to report questionable behavior, and respond to all complaints within 24 hours.

“Even with those who criticize [the CAMTC], we share the same goals,” Netanel said. “We want a safe, healthy, and reliable certification process, so consumers can trust their therapists. Even more, we want to put an end to illegal massage parlors so they are no longer categorized with honest providers.” (Brian McMahon)

HOT MAIL

Last week’s Bay Guardian featured a cover story on homelessness in San Francisco (“San Francisco’s untouchables”), including communications between local residents and the city’s Homeless Outreach Team, which we obtained in a public records request. So we thought we’d share a few message from the more than 100 we received.

“I don’t know where to begin,” one resident wrote. “I feel between mad, disgusted, and frustrated. This homeless encampment keeps growing. … The city has put up wire fencing only to be cut through by the homeless. … It is within 100 yards of my $1.2M condo.”

Another said: “Something is deeply wrong with San Francisco policy. Cultivating the Bohemian San Francisco style is nice but … it is as if we were in a deteriorated undeveloped country. We live in downtown San Francisco, not in the favelas, which is what it feels like.”

Still another complainant wrote: “Bags distributors are installed in the parks in order to help dog lovers clean up after their dogs, which is completely normal, but nothing is done for all the human beings who stroll, do drugs, eat, sleep, urinate, defecate and so on, on the sidewalks.”

Sometimes these complaints result in HOT visits to homeless encampments. But the emails suggest that while the HOT does approach homeless folks to try and persuade them to access services or go to a shelter, the service workers don’t always have full services to direct them to if the homeless individuals agree to do so.

Psychiatric social worker Jason Albertson, who is part of the HOT, explained this dilemma in an email sent in mid-January. His email noted that the HOT had encountered some homeless people in the vicinity of Harriet Alley and Manolo Draves Park, in response to a neighbor’s urging.

They’re “primarily in transit, meaning that they camp in different places each night and are not regulars,” he explained. “So far, nobody has wanted to enter into shelter or discuss other access to treatment or services.” But even if they had, he said, there wouldn’t be too many options for moving forward with recovery.

“At this time, our case management support is limited with identified clients waiting,” he wrote. “So capacity for full service is limited.” (Rebecca Bowe)

WHITHER GOOGLE BUSES

As the Board of Supervisors prepared for an April 1 hearing to consider an environmental appeal of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency’s program for regulating Google buses and other private shuttles to the Silicon Valley, which charges them one dollar per stop, both sides marshaled their troops.

The pro-business Bay Area Council released a poll of San Franciscans claiming that most of us love tech, we’re totally cool with the Google buses, and we care more about job creation than the cost of living. The group wrote: “Despite what it may look like from recent media coverage, a majority of voters have a positive opinion of the shuttle buses and support allowing buses to use Muni stops.”

SF.citi, an alliance of San Francisco tech companies, touted the poll as it sent out an email blast that reads like a call to arms: “Divisive shuttle opponents are now suing the City to challenge this pilot program before it has the chance to get off the ground. We need YOU to tell the Board of Supervisors in person that you want them reject this lawsuit and let the pilot program go forward.”

Progressive activists countered in a similar tone: “Please join us to support the appeal and to tell the city to hold Big Tech accountable for the actual impact they have on our communities and neighborhoods.”

The hearing was scheduled after Guardian press time, so check www.sfbg.com/politics to find out what happened. (Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez)

Yee had a reputation for political corruption even before the federal indictment

Sasha Cuttler
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Yee had a reputation for political corruption even before the federal indictment

Long before Sen. Leland Yee’s surprise arrest and arraignment on federal corruption charges today, Yee already had a reputation for, at best, political pandering and influence peddling; or at worst, corruption, a label for Yee long used in private conversations among figures in the local political establishment.

It was usually assumed to be the kind of low-level, quasi-legal corruption that is endemic to the political system: voting against one’s values and constituent interests in order to curry favor and financial contributions from wealthy special interests. In Yee’s case, his recent voting record seems to indicate that he was cultivating support from landlords and the pharmaceutical, banking, oil, and chemical industries for his current campaign for the Secretary of State’s Office.

But today’s indictment — which is expected to be released at any minute, and which we’ll detail in a separate post — seems to go much further, the culmination of a four-year FBI investigation tying Yee to notorious Chinatown gangster Raymond “Shrimp Boy” Chow, who was also arrested today. They and 24 others arrested in the case today are now being arraigned in federal court.  

The Bay Guardian has covered Yee throughout his 26-year political career, and we wrote a comprehensive profile of this controversial figure when he ran for mayor in 2011. More recently, in September, we wrote about some of his suspicious votes and refusal to offer credible explanations for them to activists he’s worked with before.

After that article, confidential sources contacted us urging us to investigate a series of strange votes Yee had cast in the last year, and we’ve been holding off on publishing that until Yee would sit down to talk to us about them. But each time we scheduled an interview with him, starting in November, he would cancel them at the last minute.

Maybe he was aware of the federal criminal investigation, or perhaps he had just decided that he not longer needed to cooperate with the Guardian as he sought statewide office, but he became increasingly hostile to our inquiries. Last month, when Yee saw San Francisco Media Co. (which owns the Guardian) CEO Todd Vogt having dinner with Board of Supervisors President David Chiu in a local restaurant, Vogt said Yee angrily accused the Guardian of being motivated by an anti-Asian bias in our inquiries and criticism, an incident that Vogt described to us as bizarre.

Guardian calls to staffers in Yee’s office, today and in recent weeks, haven’t been returned.

Yee has been a champion of sunshine (last week, the Society of Professional Journalists NorCal gave him a James Madison Freedom of Information Award for defending the California Public Records Act) and gun control, last year getting three such bills signed into law. SB 755 expands the list of crimes that would disqualify and individual from owning a gun, SB 374 prohibited semiautomatic rifles with detachable magazines, and SB 53 made background checks a requisite step in purchasing ammunition.

But he’s disappointed liberal and progressive constituencies — renters, environmentalists, seniors, students, the LGBT community — in San Francisco and beyond with most of his other votes, some of which ended up killing important legislation.

Yee voted against SB 405, which would have extended San Francisco’s plastic bag ban statewide. He also said no to regulating gasoline price manipulation by voting against SB 441, siding with the Big Oil over his constituents. And then he sided with Big Pharma in voting against SB 809, which would have taxed prescription drugs to help fund a state program designed to reduce their abuse, partially by creating a database to track prescriptions.

In addition to the Pharma-loving, ocean-shunning, oil-chugging votes Yee has cast, he has also turned a cold shoulder towards the elderly (by voting against SB 205, a bill that would make prescription font larger or, as the elderly would like to say, “readable”), the LGBTQ community (by voting against SB 761, which protects employees that use Paid Family Leave), students (by abstaining from a vote on AB 233, which would allow debt collectors to garnish the wages of college students with outstanding student loans), and tenants (by voting against the SB 510, the Mobile Home Park Conversion bill, and SB 603, which protects tenants from greedy landlords).

This year, as San Francisco’s other legislative representatives — Sen. Mark Leno and Assemblymembers Tom Ammiano and Phil Ting — announced efforts to reform the Ellis Act to address the escalating eviction epidemic in San Francisco, Yee has pointedly refused to support or even take a position on the effort.

In 2013, Yee sided with the Republican Party nine times on key votes, earning the scorn of many of his Democratic Party colleagues. Yee even voted for SCR 59, which would have created highway signs honored former Sen. Pete Knight, the late conservative Republican who authored Prop. 22 in 2000, strengthening California’s stand against same-sex marriage at the time.

Since we ran our “The real Leland Yee” article on Aug. 30, 2011, Yee has voted on 88 “key” pieces of legislation, according to the non-partisan, non-profit educational organization Project Vote Smart, and his final recorded vote has been “Yea” 80 times. He has abstained from voting six times, and has voted “Nay” just twice.

One of those votes came in response to a bill that was deemed “unnecessary” by Gov. Jerry Brown, but the other bill, SB 376, would have prohibited the harvesting and sale of shark fins in California.

In 2013, his voting record more closely aligns with Sen. Mark Wyland, a Republican from Carlsbad, than it does with any other Democrat on the Senate, finishing just ahead of Sen. Ron Calderon, the Southern California Democrat who was also indicted by the federal government on corruption charges last month after allegedly accepting bribes from an undercover FBI agent.

Throughout his legislative career, Yee has regularly supported Pacific Gas & Electric’s stranglehold on San Francisco’s energy market and benefitted from the company’s corrupting largesse. None of this may have crossed the line into actual criminal conduct — but for those familiar with Yee and his transactional approach to politics and governance, today’s indictment isn’t a huge surprise. 

State of possession

Michael Redmond
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0
State of possession

arts@sfbg.com

THEATER In one of the more arresting moments in Aaron Davidman’s new solo play, Wrestling Jerusalem, the Bay Area actor-playwright and former Jewish Theatre artistic director recounts being in a West Bank café with his Palestinian host when four young Israeli IDF soldiers enter in full battle gear. It’s an estranging moment for Davidman, a liberal American Jew on a hunt for answers to his quandary over Israel and its relation to occupied Palestine. But the estrangement he feels is complex, slippery: His first response is to feel estrangement from the soldiers; then a look of recognition from one of the soldiers opens up the difference between Davidman and his new Arab friends; but then Davidman also feels himself very much an American, not an Israeli — just where does he belong?

A self divided among multiple, conflicting affiliations and ideals is a general condition in this complex and stressful world, but it achieves a concentrated poignancy here for the artist son of progressive parents who rooted their liberal values in Judaic tradition. As a young man visiting Israel for the first time in 1992, Davidman had finally to face the contradictions that this would entail in the context of Israel as a Jewish homeland but also as a nation state and, especially, as a colonial power occupying Palestinian land. At the same time, criticism of Israel on the left alienates him when he sees it slipping into a broader pit of anti-Semitism — as he did during an antiracism rally at UC Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.

Many return trips to Israel only made matters worse, more complicated, as his excursions became more purposeful — geared to interviewing people on both sides of the conflict — and his vantage extended into the occupied territories themselves. Grim details of that occupation come out in the course of this sure 85-minute solo performance, but so do voices justifying or qualifying the excesses of the Israeli state in the name of security and historical or political circumstance. While cleaving to core values of equity and justice throughout, Davidman respectfully represents views that range to extreme points on either side of the messy debate.

At the same time, the act of doing so becomes its own trauma. As if in a state of possession, Davidman manifests the inner and outer turmoil in a physical performance marked by often-anguished gestural passages, stirring liturgical verses, unexpected humor, and a series of neatly etched characters. These come all the more forcefully across for being set in an intimate thrust stage arrangement, carved into the central space at Intersection for the Arts. There the play unfolds against scenic designer Nephelie Andonyadis’s beautiful cloth backdrop, dyed in muted desert tones that come atmospherically alive in Allen Willner’s blood-and-earth–hued lighting design.

On one hand, Wrestling Jerusalem‘s airing of opposing views is as timely as ever. News of human rights abuses and more violence in and around the occupied territories comes almost daily, while the US State Department once again meanders down its long and winding road to nowhere with respect to jump-starting “peace talks.” Meanwhile the growing BDS (Boycott Divestment Sanctions) movement across US campuses and around the world is meeting with increasing right-wing pushback (most recently at Northeastern University). And new books by prominent American Jews and gentiles — most recently the New Republic’s John B. Judis — dissent from the usual narratives around Israel-Palestine, stirring charges of apostasy (and anti-Semitism).

On the other hand, for these very reasons Davidman’s measured search for understanding and balance can seem slightly behind these urgent, increasingly polarized times. Directed by Michael John Garcés of Los Angeles’s Cornerstone Theater, the play rehearses mostly familiar, albeit still charged and important, arguments. Its most persuasive aspects instead lie in Davidman’s representation of his personal journey, the expansion of conscience and understanding it spurs. While its mingled voices intentionally unsettle the mind and emotions, they achieve a tentative truce in the play’s final affirmation.

That affirmation — a recommitment to core values that are both traditional and universal — in turn opens common ground in which all might enter. Far from over at this point, the conversation is just getting under way. Pairing performances with something he calls the Peace Café, an opportunity for direct dialogue among audiences members, as well as other post-show discussions moderated by professional mediator Rachel Eryn Kalish, Wrestling Jerusalem is less a political argument (though it contains several) than an invitation to dialogue. Maybe more importantly still, it’s an invitation to listen. *

WRESTLING JERUSALEM

Through April 6

Thu-Sat, 7:30pm; Sun, 2pm, $20-$30

Intersection for the Arts

925 Mission, SF

www.theintersection.org

 

“These stories are ours, too” — South Asian women’s collective celebrates a decade of ‘Yoni Ki Baat’

Steven T. Jones
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20

Growing up in San Francisco, I was never sheltered from sexuality. Whether it was the naked runners at Bay to Breakers or the same-sex lovebirds kissing on street corners, there has always been an honest dialogue about love, sex, and gender in my hometown. But that makes it easy to take for granted.

For over a decade, the South Asian Sisters, a Bay Area arts collective, has been cultivating a community of diverse and progressive women of South Asian origin who want to talk openly about sex. While to many outsiders India is the land of Kama Sutra and tantric sex, to those who grew up in South Asian communities, the openness just isn’t there. Talk of sexuality comes in the form of rumors, whispers, and shameful glances, explains Vandana Makker, a member of the South Asian Sisters.

In a grassroots effort to build a candid conversation about these taboo issues, South Asian Sisters has grown into a national movement inviting an open discussion of gender and sexuality — empowering women of South Asian descent across the country. Their efforts come to a head with the yearly rendition of Yoni Ki Baat, a live performance of Vagina Monologues-inspired sketches. The show is comprised of a dozen or so performances by South Asian Sisters, all aimed at bringing light to the silent oppression that’s been going on in South Asian culture for centuries.

This weekend’s shows, on March 22 and 23, will mark Yoni Ki Baat’s 10th Anniversary with three special performances at the iconic and historic Women’s Building in the Mission. Whether painful, funny, disturbing, or powerful, each performance furthers the honesty so vital to these women. I reached out to the diverse women from the South Asian Sisters collective to better understand what this project means to them. 

SF Bay Guardian Why is Yoni Ki Baat important to you?
 

Creatrix Tiara: Born and raised in Malaysia, I found it difficult to find a community of people who were willing to talk about issues like gender, sexuality, and race openly and freely — especially as a Bangladeshi, a much-maligned racial minority in Malaysia. Joining YKB was really refreshing and helpful in finding people who could relate to feeling liminal in those areas — having to navigate cultural norms versus wider societal taboos and stereotypes, never quite fitting in one world or another. People don’t tend to associate South Asians with a lot of issues around gender and sexuality. How can South Asians be kinky? Queer? Into masturbation in strange places? Unthinkable. YKB shows that hey, these stories are ours too, no matter what anyone says.

Micropixie: Growing up in London at the time that I did, and then later moving to Paris, and then back to the UK, I did not have a community of progressive, feminist, radical South Asian women around me. In fact I did not know such a type of woman even existed until I moved to San Francisco 10 years ago. It was wonderful to see my first Yoni Ki Baat 7 years ago and then later join the team of organizers. I love the stories and relate to all of them even those that do not pertain to my personal experience. But I especially love the women in the show, both the performers and the writers…talking about sex, sexuality, and actually so much more. It’s a brave thing we are doing, and for some of the girls it’s the first time they are on stage; personally, my own family was horrified!

ykb

Indira Chakrabarti: The show is especially important to me since I wrote for the first show a decade ago! Then, I wrote and performed for the second one. It is so meaningful to me to be back. I fell out of touch for a variety of reasons but have always believed in the importance of providing this space for women, especially South Asian Women, to have their true voices heard.

Anjali Verma Ruvalcaba: When I first auditioned for YKB I was a 20-year-old college student at UC Berkeley with a newly shaved head. I was already facing stigma and criticisms from both family and friends for wanting to experiment and “discover myself,” so to say that I was nervous going in to it is definitely putting it mildly. Once I got there I was welcomed by such open, kind, genuine, friendly, and loving faces that I knew I had found a very sacred place to call my own, finally, and I haven’t looked back since as this will be my 9th year performing. YKB gave me my first and only set of older sisters to look up to, who understood me, accepted me, inspired me, and kept challenging me to strive for my goals, and whether near or far now, they have all helped mold me into the stronger more honest and more grounded version of my self that I am today, for which I’ll be eternally grateful.

Amruta: There are not many spaces where we, as women, are free to speak within and from our cultural context—where we are best understood, especially if this context involves one or more terribly different cultures. Within this rich diversity, each of us represents an intersection of colors, cultures, places and languages. To have this opportunity, to be yourself amidst this diversity, and at the same time to once a year slip into another’s skin and extend our empathy, is rare. YKB is an invaluable space where we have this opportunity to present, from a woman’s perspective, the multiplicity of the South Asian diaspora.

Barnali Ghosh: The pieces in YKB challenged my assumptions of who South Asian women are as well as assumptions I had about myself and what I was capable of when it came to speaking about these taboo issues. I have met and become friends with so many brave women through being part of the production. Performers are both amateurs and professionals and often women for whom it is the first time doing any kind of performance. There is no director and the cast provides the feedback, support and guidance that allow all of us to find our voice. This kind of non-hierarchical process is not something most of us are used to. But if we trust in it, it works out most of the time and in the case of YKB, in mind-blowing ways.

Neha Shah: I was thrilled to discover YKB about five years ago. I was in Washington, D.C. then, brought my mom to the show where I performed someone else’s piece. Her attending the show was a turning point in our evolving relationship and her realization that I am being an independent young woman. I think it broke the awkward barriers that are typical of Indian parent-child relationships where you just don’t discuss dating and sex.

ykb

SFBG What are you most excited about for the 10th anniversary performance of Yoni Ki Baat?

Creatrix Tiara: The piece I’m performing [The Word of Violence] is one of the earliest pieces in YKB’s history, but the writer has never been able to see it performed live. She’ll be attending this show and will see it performed for the first time. It’s nerve-racking but I hope I am able to give her piece the love and justice it deserves!

Anjali Verma Ruvalcaba: I am excited to simply be celebrating this with everyone who’s written, performed, and witnessed the show. There’s a lot of heart, blood, sweat, and tears that goes into this year after year. It’s all 110 percent volunteer-driven and based, which I can’t even begin to express how thankful I am because without that drive, or passion, we cannot build the emotional space needed to support one another through this process and then convince folks of our stories, be they ours or someone else’s, on stage for the world to see.

Bernali Ghosh: For me personally, I am excited about reprising a funny piece I did 2 years ago. Before I performed it for YKB I didn’t know that I could do humor as a performer. Humor can be really important to healing and way to balance some of our more serious topics, so I am looking forward to sharing laughs with the audience again!

Vandana Makker: Each piece holds a special memory for me, and it’s like looking through an old family photo album and reminiscing about all the things we’ve been through. I’m so proud of the show and what it’s grown to become and can’t wait to give it a proper birthday party.

Amruta: Yoni Ki Baat is the simple message emerging from this dizzying diversity. I am excited to be part of this established tradition that has repeatedly brought to the fore an array of experiences with which we can all empathize

Indira Chakrabarti: I’m anxious and nervous to perform my piece after a decade-long hiatus but am so cozy in a warm hug of support and encouragement from my sisters.

Neha Shah: This an amazing milestone for the movement. Social change via the arts is a necessary and effective way to bridge disparate ideologies—the diversity of voices that YKB has brought together is not a small feat. It reminds me of my favorite quote: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

Yoni Ki Baat 10th anniversary shows

Sat/22, 6:30pm; Sun/23, 12:30pm (this show open to those who self-identify as female) and 5pm
$15 advance, $20 at the door
Women’s Building
3543 18th St, SF
Yoni Ki Baat online

 

Bicycling and equity: Heed the call, expand the movement

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Bicycling and equity: Heed the call, expand the movement

STREET FIGHT In the face of increased gasoline prices and congestion, more public awareness of the relationship between greenhouse gas emissions and driving, and interest in physical activity, bicycling has experienced a mini-boom throughout the US. Chicago, Minneapolis, New York, Pittsburgh, Portland, Seattle, Washington, DC, and many smaller university cities, such as Boulder and Madison, have seen impressive increases in utilitarian bicycling.

In San Francisco, 3.5 to 6 percent of all trips are made by bicycle, amounting to roughly 150,000 bicycle trips in the city each day, a jump from around 1 percent of trips in the 1990s. The majority of these trips are for utilitarian purposes such as shopping and commuting, not recreation. Stand on Market and 10th streets on any weekday and you’ll see that bicycling has surged in San Francisco. In parts of Hayes Valley, the Mission, and Upper Market, over 10 percent of commuting is by bicycle. The city’s official goal — 9 percent of all citywide trips by 2018 and 20 percent in the next decade — is important for making San Francisco more livable.

But it’s also fundamental for making San Francisco more equitable. That’s right, equitable.

In many respects, bicycling is among the most equitable forms of urban transportation because it is affordable and accessible to almost everyone. Bicycling is far cheaper, safer, healthier, and cleaner than driving, and when considering global equity, far saner for a national climate policy. And for many low income workers, bicycling is also an affordable conveyance that enables not just physical mobility but also financial stability.

Indeed, US Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx points out that nationally, a third of all bike trips are made by adults making under $30,000 and that the bicycle can have a substantial role in reducing the overall cost of living for the working class. But unfortunately lower class, non-white cyclists are also more likely to be in fatal collisions.

Speaking at the annual National Bicycle Summit in Washington, DC, earlier this month, Foxx, an African American former mayor of Charlotte, N.C., said that the federal government needs to devote more attention to making bicycling part of everyday life for the working class. Emphasizing the need for safety and convenience, Foxx was especially enthused about cycletracks — bikeways that are fully separated from automobiles and offer space for women, children, and older Americans to safely navigate cities by bike.

Foxx’s address followed a day of equity-themed panels and plenaries attended by more than 700 people. The League of American Bicyclists, focused on lobbying Congress and the White House, announced a new equity agenda to reach out to women, people of color, and to focus on reinvigorating a more progressive and egalitarian tone for bicycle advocacy.

Social justice advocates and community organizers had a strong presence at the summit, which has historically reflected a whiter, upper-middle-class male constituency. One presenter discussed bicycling and women’s prison rehabilitation, sharing how women who suffered from abuse, drug addiction, and imprisonment found bicycle riding to be normalizing and helpful for personal growth and for managing depression and anxiety.

A panel session titled “Learning from Los Angeles” showed how advocacy for bicycling can also come from community-based organizations, not just bicycle groups. Social justice issues are fundamental to LA’s inner city bicycle movement; over a third of South Central Los Angeles households are car free, and community organizers there have made a clearer connection between economic inequity and environmental problems.

Advocates from New York City chimed in that it was time for a “minority bicycle coalition” to advocate for women, minorities, and immigrant bicycle delivery workers. They pointed out that New York’s new and much-vaunted bike infrastructure has mainly spread in more affluent, white parts of Manhattan and Brooklyn, while Queens is overlooked. A speaker from the NAACP put obesity and public health at the center of the civil rights agenda and remarked on how the bike lifestyle should be brought to African American neighborhoods.

A discussion of emerging bike share systems asked how to expand to minority populations, and provided examples of how Boston subsidizes bike share membership for low income members. Boston also relaxes the charges for exceeding 30-minute rides and is figuring out ways to enable those without credit cards to participate.

Once a cynic about bike share, I experienced firsthand the benefits of a truly extensive, practical bike share system in Washington, DC (note to San Francisco — it was NOT covered in Wells Fargo or Google corporate logos). If bike share is extended to the Excelsior, Bayview, Balboa Park, Daly City, and SF State, it will work for the working class and students.

One of the most inspiring personas at the Bike Summit was Terry O’Neill, director of the National Organization for Women, who asked that bicycle advocates get beyond simply advocating for bikes. O’Neill prodded cyclists to ask: What do we need to do to make bicycling useful to women? And then she laid it out eloquently. Build affordable housing — lots of it — in areas where it is most needed, such as affluent Montgomery County, a suburb of DC, or in places like Hayes Valley and Silicon Valley. By creating the spatial proximity that makes cycling practical, women (and men) can incorporate cycling while balancing jobs, household chores, and children. This would do more to increase bicycling (and equity) than simply striping new bike lanes.

Her point is that for cycling to be logical for women, especially in complex metropolitan areas like DC or the Bay Area, well-planned and centrally located affordable housing is key. Perhaps it is time for the San Francisco Bike Coalition and Silicon Valley Bike Coalition, with their wealth of talent and donors, to create staff positions focusing on the bicycle-housing nexus and build strong partnerships with those who are fighting to build and preserve affordable housing in job- and amenity-rich areas.

Dovetailing from that, the newly elected mayor of Pittsburgh, Bill Peduto, himself a convert to bicycling, urged bicycle advocates to be an active partner in local progressive political coalitions and to work with non-bike groups such as labor unions and housing advocates. Peduto was among a handful of prominent politicians, mostly mayors and members of Congress, espousing the wisdom of linking bicycling and equity as part of the urban agenda.

The overall message is clear. Cities need to move beyond the neoliberal creative class storyline about bicycling, which says that a successful city is one that has a youthful, fit, but affluent stratum for bicycles. We need to be careful about praising the bicycle as a profitable economic development strategy for Realtors who up the rent as part of a commodified package of livability.

Sure, it’s great to see a bike lane on mid-Market, and there should definitely be more. But a successful city is not one where developers and Realtors see bike lanes and gentrify the neighborhood. A successful city is one where working class women feel safe to bike, where teachers, construction workers, and nurses can use the bicycle for many local trips, where African Americans and Latinos feel included in the bicycling movement, and where service workers and immigrants can safely maneuver the city and region by bicycle without fear of being hit by a car or truck. And the true mark of success is when all of these people can afford to live in the city and travel by bicycle.

Theater Listings: March 19 – 25, 2014

Michael Redmond
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Stage listings are compiled by Guardian staff. Performance times may change; call venues to confirm. Reviewers are Robert Avila, Rita Felciano, and Nicole Gluckstern. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com.

THEATER

OPENING

Lottie’s Ghosts Brava Theater Center, 2781 24th St, SF; www.brava.org. $20. Previews Thu/20, 8pm. Opens Fri/21, 8pm. Runs Thu-Sat, 8pm (no show March 28); Sun, 3pm. Through April 6. Dancer, storyteller, and Brava artist-in-residence Shakiri presents a new work based on her novel of the same name.

Pearls Over Shanghai Hypnodrome Theatre, 575 10th St, SF; www.thrillpeddlers.com. $30-35. Opens Thu/20, 8pm. Runs Thu-Sat, 8pm. Through May 31. Thrillpeddlers present the fifth anniversary revival production of its enormously popular take on the 1971 Cockettes musical.

She Rode Horses Like the Stock Exchange Thick House, 1695 18th St, SF; www.crowdedfire.org. $15-35. Previews Thu/20-Sat/22, 8pm. Opens Mon/24, 8pm. Runs Wed-Sat, 8pm. Through April 12. Crowded Fire kicks off its 2014 season with the world premiere of Amelia Roper’s dry comedy about financial disaster.

The Two Chairs Bindlestiff Studios, 185 Sixth St, SF; www.performersunderstress.com. $10-30. Previews Thu/20-Fri/21, 8pm. Opens Sat/22, 8pm. Runs Thu-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2pm. Through April 13. Performers Under Stress performs Charles Pike’s new play, described as “No Exit as a love story set in Napa on the Silverado Trail.”

Venus in Fur Geary Theater, 415 Geary, SF; www.act-sf.org. $20-120. Previews Wed/19-Sat/22 and Tue/25, 8pm (also Sat/22, 2pm); Sun/23, 7pm. Opens March 26, 8pm. Runs Wed-Sat and Tue, 8pm (also Sat, 2pm; April 1, show at 7pm); Sun, 7pm. Through April 13. American Conservatory Theater performs a new production of David Ives’ 2012 Tony-nominated play.

BAY AREA

The Coast of Utopia Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby, Berk; www.shotgunplayers.org. $20-35 (three-show marathon days, $100-125). Previews March 20-28. Opens March 29. Part Three: Salvage runs March 20-April 27; Part One: Voyage runs March 26-April 17; Part Two: Shipwreck runs March 27-April 19. Three-play marathon, April 5 and 26. Through April 27. Check website for showtime info. Shotgun Players performs Tom Stoppard’s epic The Coast of Utopia trilogy, with all three plays performed in repertory.

ONGOING

Bauer San Francisco Playhouse, 450 Post, SF; www.sfplayhouse.org. Previews Wed/19-Fri/21, 8pm. Opens Sat/22, 8pm. Runs Tue-Thu, 7pm; Fri-Sat, 8pm (also Sat, 3pm); Sun/23 and April 13, 2pm. Through April 19. San Francisco Playhouse presents the world premiere of Lauren Gunderson’s drama about artist Rudolf Bauer.

Children Are Forever (All Sales are Final!) Stage Werx Theatre, 446 Valencia, SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. $15. Fri/21-Sat/22, 8pm. Writer-performer and comedian Julia Jackson’s well acted and consistently funny autobiographical solo show details her and her female partner’s attempt to adopt a newborn girl from a young African American mother in Florida. Along the way, Jackson’s smart script details the trials, red tape, and unexpected market incentives in the field of adoption for a same-sex, interracial couple. If the generally involving story nevertheless attenuates a little across its two-act structure, Coke Nakamoto’s precise direction (which builds on original direction by W. Kamau Bell) offers a lively framework for Jackson’s excellent characterizations as well as her frank and interesting commentary on the social, political messiness of certain natural urges. (Avila)

Crystal Springs Eureka Theatre, 215 Jackson, SF; www.crystalspringstheplay.com. $20-65. Fri/21-Sat/22, 8pm; Sun/23, 2pm. Eureka Theatre presents Kathy Rucker’s world-premiere drama about parenting in the digital age.

Feisty Old Jew Marsh San Francisco Main Stage, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $25-100. Sat, 8pm; Sun, 7pm (March 30 show at 2pm). Extended through May 4. Charlie Varon performs his latest solo show, a fictional comedy about “a 20th century man living in a 21st century city.”

Foodies! The Musical Shelton Theater, 533 Sutter, SF; www.foodiesthemusical.com. $32-34. Fri-Sat, 8pm. Open-ended. AWAT Productions presents Morris Bobrow’s musical comedy revue all about food.

Hundred Days Z Space, 450 Florida, SF; www.zspace.org. $10-100. Wed and Sun, 7pm; Thu-Sat, 8pm. Through April 6. Married musical duo the Bengsons (Abigail and Shaun) provide the real-life inspiration and guiding rock ‘n’ roll heart for this uneven but at times genuinely rousing indie musical drama, a self-referential meta-theater piece relating the story of a young couple in 1940s America who fall madly in love only to discover one of them is terminally ill. As an exploration of love, mortality, and the nature of time, the story of Sarah and Will (doubled by the Bengsons and, in movement sequences and more dramatically detailed scenes, by chorus members Amy Lizardo and Reggie D. White) draws force from the potent musical performances and songwriting of composer-creators Abigail and Shaun Bengson (augmented here by the appealing acting-singing chorus and backup band that also feature El Beh, Melissa Kaitlyn Carter, Geneva Harrison, Kate Kilbane, Jo Lampert, Delane Mason, Joshua Pollock). Playwright Kate E. Ryan’s book, however, proves too straightforward, implausible, and sentimental to feel like an adequate vessel for the music’s exuberant, urgent emotion and lilting, longing introspection. Other trappings of director Anne Kauffman’s elaborate production (including an inspired set design by Kris Stone that echoes the raw industrial shell of the theater; and less-than-inspired choreography by the otherwise endlessly inventive Joe Goode) can add texture at times but also prove either neutral figures or distracting minuses in conveying what truth and heft there is in the material. Ultimately, this still evolving world premiere has a strong musical beat at its core, which has a palpable force of its own, even if it’s yet to settle into the right combination of story and staging. (Avila)

Lovebirds Marsh San Francisco Studio, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Thu-Fri, 8pm; Sat, 8:30pm. Extended through April 12. Theater artist and comedian Marga Gomez presents the world premiere of her 10th solo show, described as “a rollicking tale of incurable romantics.”

Mommy Queerest Exit Studio, 156 Eddy, SF; www.divafest.info. $15-25. Fri-Sat, 8pm. Through March 29. Sex scenes in solo shows might sound a little onanistic, but in the right circumstances a door jam or a love seat can serve as a fine co-star. Stand-up comic and actor Kat Evasco demonstrates as much in this raunchy and high-spirited story of her sexual awakening as a lesbian-identifying bisexual, coming out in a household dominated by her closeted mother, a Filipina American drama queen with a long-term female companion she insists is the “gay” one. Presented by Guerrilla Rep and the Exit Theatre’s DIVAfest, and directed by Guerrilla Rep’s John Caldon (who co-wrote the play with Evasco), the story follows a familiar and predictable arc in some ways — familial hypocrisy giving way to inspirational cross-generational understanding — and the characterizations and set-ups (including a family feud on Jerry Springer) come with not always inspired choices. Moreover not all the jokes land where they should in a performance that starts as stand-up but immediately shifts into the style of a solo-play confessional. (A more thoroughgoing subversion of the stand-up format might have produced more complex, less foreseeable results.) At the same time, there’s no denying Evasco’s charm and energy, or her buoyant comedic talent, which makes it easier to forgive the play’s structural shortcomings. (Avila)

“Risk Is This … The Cutting Ball New Experimental Plays Festival” Exit on Taylor, 277 Taylor, SF; www.cuttingball.com. Free ($20 donation for reserved seating). Fri-Sat, 8pm. Through March 29. Five new works in staged readings, including two from Cutting Ball resident playwright Andrew Saito.

The Scion Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $15-60. Thu-Fri, 8pm; Sat, 5pm. Through April 18. In his latest solo show, Brian Copeland (Not a Genuine Black Man; The Waiting Period) explores an infamous crime in his hometown of San Leandro: the 2000 murder of three government meat inspectors by Stuart Alexander, owner of the Santos Linguisa Factory. The story is personal history for Copeland, at least indirectly, as the successful comedian and TV host recounts growing up nearby under the common stricture that “rules are rules,” despite evidence all around that equity, fairness, and justice are in fact deeply skewed by privilege. Developed with director David Ford, the multiple-character monologue (delivered with fitful humor on a bare-bones stage with supportive sound design by David Hines) contrasts Copeland’s own youthful experiences as a target of racial profiling with the way wealthy and white neighbor Stuart Alexander, a serial bully and thug, consistently evaded punishment and even police attention along his path to becoming the “Sausage King,” a mayoral candidate, and a multiple murderer (Alexander died in 2005 at San Quentin). The story takes some meandering turns in making its points, and not all of Copeland’s characterizations are equally compelling. The subject matter is timely enough, however, though ironically it is government that seems to set itself further than ever above the law as much as wealthy individuals or the bogus “legal persons” of the corporate world. The results of such concentrated power are indeed unhealthy, and literally so — Copeland’s grandmother (one of his more persuasive characterizations) harbors a deep distrust of processed food that is nothing if not prescient —but The Scion’s tale of two San Leandrans leaves one hungry for more complexity. (Avila)

Shit & Champagne Rebel, 1772 Market, SF; shitandchampagne.eventbrite.com. $25. Fri-Sat, 8pm. Open-ended. D’Arcy Drollinger is Champagne White, bodacious blond innocent with a wicked left hook in this cross-dressing ’70s-style white-sploitation flick, played out live on Rebel’s intimate but action-packed barroom stage. Written by Drollinger and co-directed with Laurie Bushman (with high-flying choreography by John Paolillo, Drollinger, and Matthew Martin), this high-octane camp send-up of a favored formula comes dependably stocked with stock characters and delightfully protracted by a convoluted plot (involving, among other things, a certain street drug that’s triggered an epidemic of poopy pants) — all of it played to the hilt by an excellent cast that includes Martin as Dixie Stampede, an evil corporate dominatrix at the head of some sinister front for world domination called Mal*Wart; Alex Brown as Detective Jack Hammer, rough-hewn cop on the case and ambivalent love interest; Rotimi Agbabiaka as Sergio, gay Puerto Rican impresario and confidante; Steven Lemay as Brandy, high-end calf model and Champagne’s (much) beloved roommate; and Nancy French as Rod, Champagne’s doomed fiancé. Sprawling often literally across two buxom acts, the show maintains admirable consistency: The energy never flags and the brow stays decidedly low. (Avila)

The Speakeasy Undisclosed location (ticket buyers receive a text with directions), SF; www.thespeakeasysf.com. $70 (gambling chips, $5-10 extra; after-hours admission, $10). Thu-Sat, 7:40, 7:50, and 8pm admittance times. Extended through May 24. Boxcar Theater’s most ambitious project to date is also one of the more involved and impressively orchestrated theatrical experiences on any Bay Area stage just now. An immersive time-tripping environmental work, The Speakeasy takes place in an “undisclosed location” (in fact, a wonderfully redesigned version of the company’s Hyde Street theater complex) amid a period-specific cocktail lounge, cabaret, and gambling den inhabited by dozens of Prohibition-era characters and scenarios that unfold around an audience ultimately invited to wander around at will. At one level, this is an invitation to pure dress-up social entertainment. But there are artistic aims here too. Intentionally designed (by co-director and creator Nick A. Olivero with co-director Peter Ruocco) as a fractured super-narrative — in which audiences perceive snatches of overheard stories rather than complete arcs, and can follow those of their own choosing — there’s a way the piece becomes specifically and ever more subtly about time itself. This is most pointedly demonstrated in the opening vignettes in the cocktail lounge, where even the ticking of Joe’s Clock Shop (the “cover” storefront for the illicit 1920s den inside) can be heard underscoring conversations (deeply ironic in historical hindsight) about war, loss, and regained hope for the future. For a San Francisco currently gripped by a kind of historical double-recurrence of the roaring Twenties and dire Thirties at once, The Speakeasy is not a bad place to sit and ponder the simulacra of our elusive moment. (Avila)

Tipped & Tipsy Marsh Studio Theater, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Sat, 5pm; Sun, 7pm. Through April 6. Last fall’s San Francisco Fringe Festival began on a high note with Jill Vice’s witty and deft solo, Tipped & Tipsy, and the Best of Fringe winner is now enjoying another round at solo theater outpost the Marsh. Without set or costume changes, Vice (who developed the piece with Dave Dennison and David Ford) brings the querulous regulars of a skid-row bar to life both vividly and with real quasi–Depression-Era charm. She’s a protean physical performer, seamlessly inhabiting the series of oddball outcasts lined up each day at Happy’s before bartender Candy — two names as loaded as the clientele. After some hilarious expert summarizing of the do’s and don’ts of bar culture, a story unfolds around a battered former boxer and his avuncular relationship with Candy, who tries to cut him off in light of his clearly deteriorating health. Her stance causes much consternation, and even fear, in his barfly associates, while provoking a dangerous showdown with the bar’s self-aggrandizing sleaze-ball owner, Rico. With a love of the underdog and strong writing and acting at its core, Tipsy breezes by, leaving a superlative buzz. (Avila)

Twisted Fairy Tales Shelton Theater, 533 Sutter, SF; www.leftcoasttheatreco.org. $15-25. Thu-Sat, 8pm. Through April 5. Left Coast Theatre Co. performs the world premiere of seven one-act LGBT-themed plays based on classic children’s stories.

The World of Paradox Garage, 715 Bryant, SF; www.paradoxmagic.com. $12-15. Mon, 8pm. Through April 7. Footloose presents David Facer in his solo show, a mix of magic and theater.

Wrestling Jerusalem Intersection for the Arts, 925 Mission, SF; www.theintersection.org. $20-30. Thu-Sat, 7:30pm; Sun, 2pm. Through April 6. Intersection for the Arts presents Aaron Davidman in his multicharacter solo performance piece about Israel and Palestine.

Yellow New Conservatory Theatre Center, 25 Van Ness, SF; www.nctcsf.org. $25-45. Wed/19-Sat/22, 8pm; Sun/23, 2pm. Playwright Del Shores (Sordid Lives, Southern Baptist Sissies) returns to his native South — while detouring from previous camp-comedy treatments — with this affirming family drama set in Vicksburg, Miss., about a progressive white couple whose marriage and family are rocked in the wake of their son’s illness. Kate (Dana Zook) and Bobby (Andrew Nance) are celebrating 19 years together. Their oldest son, Dayne (Damion Matthews), is a handsome high school senior and football star; their daughter, Gracie (Ali Haas), is his high-strung younger sister, a drama devotee in more ways than one with plans to be the next Meryl Streep. Gracie’s best friend, Kendall (Maurice André San-Chez), is an effeminate young man with a golden singing voice but a strict fundamentalist mother (Linsay Rousseau) from whom he must hide his plan to join Gracie in the school’s production of Oklahoma! Kendall’s fractured family encourages his tight orbit around Gracie’s — including Dayne, on whom Kendall has an impossible-to-disguise crush — all of whom accept the closeted, innocent youth unequivocally. But when Dayne comes down with a rare liver disease (the title has nothing to do with race, which is not explored here, but references, at a literal level, the sickly color that overcomes Dayne at one point), the seemingly ideal family itself fractures along lines of a deeply buried secret regarding his paternity. Amid their worry for Dayne’s future, and the painful dynamic opened between Kate and Bobby, Kendall’s mother moves in with proselyting zeal, alienating her son to the point of total rejection, but also adding to an already volatile tension between his adoptive parents. Helmed by New Conservatory Theatre Center’s founding artistic director, Ed Decker, the production achieves (after some initial warming up) decent performances across the cast, which, along with Shores’ careful plotting and consistent humor, helps keep this sentimental, somewhat too neat story involving until the end. (Avila)

BAY AREA

Accidental Death of an Anarchist Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Roda Theatre, 2015 Addison, Berk; www.berkeleyrep.org. $29-99. Tue and Thu-Sat, 8pm (no show April 18; additional 2pm shows Thu/20 and April 17; also Sat, 2pm, but no matinee Sat/22); Sun, 2 and 7pm. Through April 20. Berkeley Rep presents comic actor Steven Epp in Dario Fo’s explosive political farce, directed by Christopher Bayes,

Arms and the Man Barn Theatre, 30 Sir Francis Drake, Ross; www.rossvalleyplayers.com. $13-26. Thu, 7:30pm; Fri-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2pm. Through April 13. Ross Valley Players perform George Bernard Shaw’s romantic comedy.

Bread and Circuses La Val’s Subterranean, 1834 Euclid, Berk; www.impacttheatre.com. $20-25. Thu-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 7pm. Through April 6. Impact Theatre performs “a cavalcade of brutal and bloody new short plays” by various contemporary playwrights.

Fool For Love Pear Avenue Theatre, 1220 Pear, Mtn View; www.thepear.org. $10-35. Thu-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2pm. Through April 6. Pear Avenue Theatre performs Sam Shepard’s iconic play, about a pair of former lovers who reunite at a lonely desert motel.

Geezer Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston, Berk; www.themarsh.org. $25-50. Thu, 8pm; Sat, 5pm. Through April 26. Geoff Hoyle moves his hit comedy about aging to the East Bay.

The Lion and the Fox Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant, Berk; www.centralworks.org. $15-28. Thu-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 5pm. Through March 30. Central Works performs a prequel to its 2009 hit, Machiavelli’s The Prince, which depicts a face-off between Niccolo Machiavelli and Cesare Borgia.

The Music Man Julia Morgan Theater, 2640 College, Berk; www.berkeleyplayhouse.org. $17-60. Thu/20-Fri/21, 7pm; Sat/22, 1 and 6pm; Sun/23, noon and 5pm. There’s trouble in River City! See it unfold amid all those trombones at Berkeley Playhouse.

Once On This Island Lucie Stern Theatre, 1305 Middlefield, Palo Alto; www.theatreworks.org. $19-73. Tue-Wed, 7:30pm; Thu-Sat, 8pm (also Sat, 2pm); Sun, 2 and 7pm. Through March 30. TheatreWorks performs the Tony-nominated musical about a star-crossed love affair in the tropics, inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid.

PERFORMANCE/DANCE

“Attractive Camp” Lost Weekend Video, 1034 Valencia, SF; www.eventbrite.com. Sun/23, 8pm. $10. Stand-up comedy, sketch comedy, and short films with Greg Edwards, Sean Keane, Lydia Popovich, and others.

“Awaiting Dawn” Dennis Gallagher Arts Pavilion, 66 Page, SF; internationalsf.org/awaiting_dawn. Thu/20-Sat/22 and March 27-28, 7pm; March 29, 2pm. $10-30. The French-American International School presents this series of performances exploring the intersections of art, education, and democracy.

Caroline Lugo and Carolé Acuña’s Ballet Flamenco Peña Pachamama, 1630 Powell, SF; www.carolinalugo.com. Sat/22, March 30, April 6, 12, 19, and 30, 6:15pm. $15-19. Flamenco performance by the mother-daughter dance company, featuring live musicians.

“Comedy Returns to El Rio” El Rio, 3158 Mission, SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. Thu/20, 8pm. $7-20. Stand-up with Steve Lee, Bob McIntyre, Johan Miranda, Kat Evasco, and Lisa Geduldig.

Feinstein’s at the Nikko Hotel Nikko, 222 Mason, SF; www.feinsteinssf.com. This week: Jason Grae’s “49 1/2 Shades of Grae,” Thu/20, 8pm, $25-35; Vonda Shepard, Fri/21, 8pm, $40-55.

Flamenco Del Oro Emerald Tablet, 80 Fresno, SF; www.emtab.org. Fri/21, 8pm. $15 suggested donation. Flamenco dance and music.

“Izzies Dance Awards” Brava Theater Center, 2781 24th St, SF; www.brava.org. Mon/24, 6-8pm. Free. The 28th annual Isadora Duncan Dance Awards honors achievements by members of the Bay Area dance community, with awards for choreography, performance, visual design, and other categories.

Richard Lewis Cobb’s Comedy Club, 915 Columbus, SF; www.cobbscomedyclub.com. Fri/21, 8pm; Sat/22-Sun/23, 7pm (also Sat/22, 9:15pm). $25. The comedian performs.

“Luster: An American Songbook” Davies Symphony Hall, 201 Van Ness, SF; www.sfgmc.org. March 25-26, 8pm. $25-75. San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus performs works by Gershwin, Porter, Ellington, and Berlin, as well as the world premiere of a tribute to Tyler Clementi.

“Magic at the Rex” Hotel Rex, 562 Sutter, SF; www.magicattherex.com. Sat, 8pm. Ongoing. $25. Magic and mystery with Adam Sachs and mentalist Sebastian Boswell III.

Mona Khan Company Garage, 715 Bryant, SF; ticketfly.com/event/475517. Sun/23 and March 30, 7:30pm (also March 30, 5:30pm). $20. The Indian contemporary dance company presents Soch, a night of vignettes.

“The Naked Stage” Bayfront Theater, B350 Fort Mason Center, SF; www.improv.org. Sat, 8pm. Through March 29. $20. BATS Improv performs a completely improvised play.

“ODC/Dance Downtown” Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater, 700 Howard, SF; www.ybca.org. Thu/20-Sat/22 and March 28-29, 8pm; Sun/23 and March 30, 4pm; March 26-27, 7:30pm. $20-75. The acclaimed contemporary dance company marks its 43rd season with world premiere boulders and bones, inspired by the work of artist Andy Goldsworthy, among other works.

“Paper Wing” NOHspace, 2840 Mariposa, SF; www.theatreofyugen.org. Fri/21-Sat/22, 8pm. $15-35. Sculptural costume artist Sha Sha Higby presents a new solo performance.

“Point Break Live!” DNA Lounge, 373 11th St, SF; www.dnalounge.com. April 4, 7:30 and 11pm. $25-50. Dude, Point Break Live! is like dropping into a monster wave, or holding up a bank, like, just a pure adrenaline rush, man. Ahem. Sorry, but I really can’t help but channel Keanu Reeves and his Johnny Utah character when thinking about the awesomely bad 1991 movie Point Break or its equally yummily cheesy stage adaptation. And if you do an even better Keanu impression than me — the trick is in the vacant stare and stoner drawl — then you can play his starring role amid a cast of solid actors, reading from cue cards from a hilarious production assistant in order to more closely approximate Keanu’s acting ability. This play is just so much fun, even better now at DNA Lounge than it was a couple years ago at CELLspace. But definitely buy the poncho pack and wear it, because the blood, spit, and surf spray really do make this a fully immersive experience. (Steven T. Jones)

“Sausage Fest Comedy Show” Club OMG, 43 Sixth St, SF; www.clubomgsf.com. Tue/25, 8pm. $10. Charlie Ballard hosts this night of shirtless comedy, with Mark Smalls, Hayden Greif-Neill, Mark Burg, Noah Gain, and others.

Sidra Bell Dance New York Dance Mission Theater, 3316 24th St, SF; www.dancemission.com. Fri/21-Sun/23, 8pm. $12-20. The NYC-based movement arts company performs garment and STELLA as part of its San Francisco season.

“Silenced” and “The CONTACT Project” CounterPULSE, 1310 Mission, SF; www.counterpulse.org. Thu/20-Sat/22, 8pm; Sun/23, 2pm. Counterpulse’s Artist Residency Commissioning Program presents a double bill by its winter residents. Dancer-choreographer Charya Burt’s Silenced blends traditional and modern dance as well as live music in a pointed homage to Cambodian pop star Ros Sereysothea, an iconic face and voice of the swinging Cambodian Sixties who ended up among the two million Cambodians murdered during the genocide under Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge (1975–1979). Backed by dancers Sandra Ruano and Ravy Mey and guitarist Nahuel Bronzini, Burt creates charming moments within a limited narrative arc, embodying in dance and song the artistry and resilience of her subject, who brought Cambodian sensibilities to Western popular musical forms. An enveloping montage of archival images by video designer Olivia Ting and a period score of Sereysothea’s hits supplemented by composer Alexis Alrich add further context and atmosphere. Choreographer Krista DeNio’s The CONTACT project reconfigures the theater space in an intimate exploration of the experiences and perspectives of male and female American military veterans. Created in collaboration with the performers (Daniel Bear Davis, Sonia Decker, Katarina Eriksson, Remi Frazier, Stephen Funk, Hope Hutman, Daniel Lippel, William McQueen, Utam Moses, Susan Pfeffer, Misty Rose Snyder, and Tina Taylor), some of whom are actual veterans, the piece is perhaps necessarily jagged in shape and execution, but DeNio offers connective tissue in the form of group movement and staging. Some of this brings audience members into the fold and even literally following in the steps of the vets, here the subjects and agents of an artificial and unraveling conformity. The emphasis on validating the personal experience of veterans is a political act in itself, and can make for some emotionally potent moments, although the rough balance strived for here can also inhibit a more rigorous political understanding and critique of ever-expanding American militarism. (Avila)

“Sister Spit 2014” Elbo Room, 647 Valencia, SF; www.radarproductions.org. Wed/19, 8pm. $10. Also Thu/20, 8pm, free, Mills College, Student Union, 5000 MacArthur, Oakl. Also Fri/21, 8pm, $10, Rock Paper Scissors Collective, 2278 Telegraph, Oakl. Michelle Tea hosts the 2014 “spring fling” performances by the groundbreaking queer and feminist literature series. Performers include Rhiannon Argo, Dia Felix, Chinaka Hodge, Beth Lisick, Jerry Lee Abram, and Virgie Tovar, plus special guests.

“Sorya! 2014: We Are Still At It” NOHspace, 2840 Mariposa, SF: www.brownpapertickets.com. Sat/22-Sun/23, 2pm; Mon/24, 7pm. Theatre of Yugen presents its 35th anniversary season with a performance by founder Yuriko Doi in the kyogen play Kawakami.

BAY AREA

“Fleetwood Mask: The Ultimate Tribute to Fleetwood Mac” Live Oak Theatre, 1301 Shattuck, Berk; www.theatrefirst.com. Sat/22, 8pm; Sun/23, 2pm. $30. Theatrical tribute to the iconic rock band.

“MarshJam Improv Comedy Show” Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston, Berk; www.themarsh.org. Fri, 8pm. Ongoing. $10. Improv comedy with local legends and drop-in guests.

Pilobolus Marin Veterans’ Memorial Auditorium, 10 Avenue of the Flags, San Rafael; www.marincenter.org. Sat/22, 8pm. $20-75. The dance company performs an eclectic program of past work and three Bay Area premieres.

“Poetry Express” Himalayan Flavors, 1585 University, Berk; poetryexpressberkeley.blogspot.com. Mon, 7pm. Free. Ongoing. This week: Ambrose Mohler, plus open mic. *

 

On the Rise: Rocky Rivera

Steven T. Jones
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On the Rise: Rocky Rivera

Take it from this one: Most music journalists are not secretly very talented musicians, toiling away in writers’ clothes. Most emcees, of course, are not Rocky Rivera — a San Francisco-born rapper whose love of hip-hop first took the form of a journalism career, including covering the Bay Area’s hip-hop scene for this very publication, Rolling Stone, and others.

In 2008, “trading her Moleskines for microphones,” as she puts it, she became Rocky Rivera, cribbing her stage name from a fellow Filipina-American heroine in the 1996 novel Gangster of Love, by SF author Jessica Hagedorn. The book now also shares a title with Rivera’s second full-length album, which dropped in October 2013.

It’s an album that commands hip-hop fans to sit up and take notice — sharp but not overproduced, lyrical and gutteral, with beats that both pay homage to the ’80s and ’90s (when Rivera was a teenager going to Balboa High School, then SFSU, listening to Queen Latifah, Salt n’ Pepa, and MC Lyte) and showcase the emcee’s lightning-quick tongue and take-no-BS feminist message. Her devotees range from hardcore rap fans across the country to the East Oakland kids who are part of the after-school programs she helps coordinate in, yes, her other other life as a teacher. Suffice it to say, she’s a busy woman.

What were your inspirations for this record?

The new album was inspired by all the happenings in the world since my first album in 2010. So much had transpired politically across the globe, from the Arab Spring, to Oscar Grant, Pussy Riot — all of that affected my need to write something as a soundtrack to an uprising. I also got a ton of inspiration from reading the Hunger Games trilogy, which made me want to create something that would be a drumbeat to political and social change and have the perfect amount of agitation and aggression.

I also have the fun songs in there. “Jockin’ Me” was one where I just told my best friends and bandmates, DJ Roza, and Irie Eyez, to drink a bunch of whiskey and hop in the booth and talk shit.

What are you most proud of so far as a musician?

Providing people an alternative to the kind of hip-hop music that is damaging to the human psyche. There is no more introspection or social analysis in music anymore, and every song I write is a personal way to connect to my fans. I found myself complaining about the lack of this and that and saw it was more constructive to create what I found missing in hip-hop, not just as a woman, but as a progressive person of color who is proud of her history and of growing up in San Francisco.

Weirdest thing that’s happened at a show?

Someone heckled me about Breaking Bad not being progressive or something. They obviously have no idea what the hell they’re talking about. I almost kicked her out for not respecting the legacy of Walter White.

Bay Area food item you couldn’t (metaphorically) live without?

Roxie’s sandwiches!

www.rockyrivera.com

Uber adjusts insurance policy in wake of fatal collision

Michael Redmond
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Uber adjusts insurance policy in wake of fatal collision

Transportation Network Companies, more commonly known as “rideshares,” have operated in legal limbo regarding their insurance since their creation. This came to a head on New Year’s Eve with the death of six-year-old Sofia Liu, who was killed in a collision with an Uber car driven by a man named Syed Muzzafar. Uber claimed in a blog post that because Muzzafar was not ferrying a passenger at the time, and only using the app to search for fares, that he was not officially covered by their insurance.

That insurance gap left Muzzafar on the hook for the little girl’s death and the injuries of her family, the subject of a lawsuit that could end up seeking some $20 million in damages.

So far, Uber has not provided any compensation to Liu’s family. But it has revised its insurance policy, suggesting future collisions may be covered.

In a blog post, Uber announced that “in order to fully address any ambiguity or uncertainty around insurance coverage for ridesharing services,” it would expand drivers’ insurance “to cover any potential ‘insurance gap’ for accidents that occur while drivers are not providing transportation service for hire but are logged onto the Uber network and available to accept a ride.”

Uber’s new policy will cover up to $100,000 per incident for bodily injuries and $25,000 per incident for property damage. But the blog specifies that the money will not kick in if a driver’s personal insurance covers a collision, as appears to be the case with the New Year’s Eve incident.

In an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, Uber CEO and co-founder Travis Kalanick said that the Syed Muzzafar’s personal insurance policy had offered to pay the claim, but had not yet followed through.

Uber’s spokesperson Andrew Noyes declined to comment when we asked him about this.

Notably, a coalition of rideshares including Lyft and Sidecar and a handful of insurance companies banded together to develop new insurance policies. The group’s work is ongoing, though the intent looks positive — new insurance policies specific to Transportation Network Companies developed by a coalition of industries would be a great step for driver, passenger and pedestrians alike.

But for now, commercial and personal insurance policies rarely, if ever, cover TNC drivers. And Uber’s new insurance? It’s great, as long as Uber follows through. (Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez)

Indecisive Democrats let real-estate developers win

By a slim margin, the governing body of the San Francisco Democratic Party voted Wed/12 to oppose a controversial June ballot measure, Proposition B, concerning waterfront height limits.

The initiative would require city officials to get voter approval before approving new building projects that are taller than what’s legally sanctioned under a comprehensive waterfront land-use plan. Prop. B stems from an effort last November, authored by the same proponents, to reverse approval for a luxury waterfront development project called 8 Washington, which exceeded building height limits. In the run-up to that election, the DCCC sided against the 8 Washington developers, and aligned itself with those seeking to strike down the 8 Washington height-limit increase in order to kill the project.

But this time, under the leadership of chair Mary Jung — who is employed as a lobbyist for the San Francisco Association of Realtors — the DCCC came down on the side of powerful real-estate developers.

The vote was surprising to some longtime political observers, given that until recently the DCCC was known as a progressive stronghold in San Francisco politics. Its slate cards are distributed to Democrats throughout San Francisco, and Democrats make up the vast majority of city voters.

In a politically significant outcome, the DCCC’s opposition to Prop. B was decided by a slim 13 to 12 vote. The threshold for it to pass or fail was much lower than usual, because so many DCCC members simply refused to take a stand.

San Francisco Board of Supervisors President David Chiu — who not only opposed 8 Washington but helped gather signatures for the referendum to challenge it — was among those who abstained. Chiu’s decision to abstain sets him apart from Campos, his opponent in the upcoming Assembly race, who voted to endorse Prop. B. Had Chiu voted, Prop. B’s opponents would not have had the votes to get the upper hand.

When reached for comment, Chiu told the Bay Guardian he still hasn’t formed an opinion on the measure, and that he’s waiting on a pending city analysis and the outcome of a lawsuit challenging it.

“There’s been very little analysis and I could take money away from affordable housing and cost the city money fighting a lawsuit,” he said, citing the money that developers would be spending on political campaigns as the potential source of affordable housing money.

“I am open to supporting the measure, as someone who passionate about waterfront development,” he added, citing the lead role he took in opposing the 8 Washington project. (Rebecca Bowe)

 

Local support for national LGBT housing rights

At the Tue/11 Board of Supervisors meeting, Sup. David Campos introduced legislation to encourage large-scale developers to protect the housing rights of the LGBT community.

Same-sex couples nationwide are more likely to experience discrimination in their search for senior housing, a study by the Washington, D.C. based Equal Rights Center found.

To investigate, testers posed as gay or straight couples with otherwise nearly identical credentials, then submitted inquiries on senior housing in 10 different states. They discovered that in 96 out of 200 tests, those posing as lesbian, gay or bisexual residents experienced at least one type of adverse, differential treatment.

Meanwhile, according to the National Center for Transgender Equality, one in five transgender U.S. residents has been refused a home or apartment, and more than one in ten has been evicted, because of their gender identity.

Federal law does not expressly prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. California law does, as do laws in 19 other states. Given these gaps in legal protection, real-estate providers can adopt their own policies to prohibit LGBT discrimination.

Campos’ proposal would require large-scale developers who wish to build in San Francisco to prove their commitment to equal housing opportunities.

“We want to know whether a developer hoping to build in San Francisco is protecting LGBT housing rights when they own or manage housing in states where legal protections don’t exist,” Campos explained. “By collecting this information, we can highlight best practices and urge those who do not have these policies to do the right thing.”

Last chance for Marcus Books, part of SF’s black history

Michael Redmond
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OPINION

It’s taken decades, but the Mahattanization of San Francisco is nearly complete: The immigrants, artists, and natives who built the City and gave it its unique flavor can no longer afford to live here.

With San Francisco’s African American population largely banished to across the bay, along with the working and artists classes, the freethinking lifestyle that attracted so many people to the Bay Area in the first place has largely been and gone.

“What is crucial, is whether or not the country, the people of the country, the citizenry, is able to recognize that there is no moral distance between the facts of life in San Francisco, and the facts of life in Birmingham,” James Baldwin said on a fact-finding trip to San Francisco in 1963, at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, a time at which he would have also visited Marcus Books.

If buildings could talk, the Marcus Books property on Fillmore Street, the onetime “Harlem of the West,” would tell a tale of two cities for over 50 years. Once the jazz club Bop City (where John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, and Billie Holiday performed), the purple Victorian is central to a neighborhood that survived the internment and return of its Japanese American residents, a botched “redevelopment” project that resulted in the permanent displacement of African Americans, and a blueprint for a “Jazz District” that failed to launch.

Now the neighborhood faces a final act as the oldest seller of books “by and about black people” attempts to uphold a part of the history and culture it had a hand in creating, while the City looks away and toward tech as its future.

Every black writer and intellectual in the US knows the store; celebrities, activists, athletes, and literary giants — including Malcolm X, Rosa Parks, Muhammad Ali, Walter Mosely, Alice Walker, Oprah Winfrey, and Toni Morrison — have all passed through the doors of the San Francisco or Oakland stores.

Founded by Julian and Raye Richardson in 1960, their store served as a sanctuary for thinkers, authors, and community members during watershed moments, from the Voting Rights Act through the Black Power Movement and historic SFSU student strike in 1968 (resulting in the establishment of multicultural study programs which flourish at universities today).

Many of San Francisco’s African American faith, civic, arts, and culture leaders were educated through the program at State, either by the Richardsons or the books they stocked at Marcus. The Richardson family continues that tradition today at the bookstore, engaging visitors in discussions on the journey from Jim Crow to the first black president .

Yet for the past year, Marcus Books has struggled to survive. Community activists, elected supervisors, and appointed commissioners helped attain landmark status for the historic building, while attorneys brokered a buyback after the property was sold at auction and a fundraising effort was launched in December (see “Marcus Books can stay if it can raise $1 million,” SFBG Politics blog, Dec. 5). To contribute, visit www.gofundme.com/6bvqlk.

Marcus is not the only community-serving bookseller forced into crowdfunding and community organizing, diverted from its core mission to enlighten and educate. If a city’s bookstores are any indication of its cultural diversity and intellectual health, San Francisco is on the critical list.

The City’s last gay bookstore, A Different Light, was laid to rest three years ago; while our most progressive political book outlet in the Mission District, Modern Times, is on the brink (see “A Modern tragedy,” Jan. 7). A similar fate for Marcus Books would mean the end to a longstanding black-owned business in the Fillmore.

It seems “The City That Knows How” has forgotten where it came from. Baldwin’s 1963 quote may’ve been specifically about racist ways and laws, but a blow to Marcus Books could mean his message remains the same: San Francisco’s reputation as a kindly city of love, tolerance, and diversity will be forever tarnished; in fact, it may have been false advertising all along.

Denise Sullivan is the author of Keep on Pushing: Black Power Music From Blues to Hip Hop.

Democracy for none

Michael Redmond
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Democracy for none

Democracy is dead at City College of San Francisco. At least, that’s what student protesters allege.

At a rally on March 13, over 200 student and faculty protesters marched at City College’s main campus to call for the resignation of state-appointed Special Trustee Robert Agrella. When City College was told it would soon close, the city-elected Board of Trustees was removed from power, and the state gave Agrella the power to make decisions unilaterally.

Agrella is not beholden to board rules, and now makes policy decisions behind closed doors: No public meetings are held and no public comments are solicited.

His decisions have proved controversial. Students are concerned that fast-tracked decision-making and new billing policies will create new barriers for students with few other educational options. But with no public forum to express their outrage, students took to the pavement.

The protesting students were met by police aggression, and in the aftermath of the clash two students were arrested — one was pepper sprayed, and the other suffered a concussion, allegedly at the hands of a San Francisco Police Department officer.

Both SFPD and CCSF police were on hand for the protest.

Controversy is now swirling around Agrella, school administrators, and the students involved. But lost among questions about police violence are larger policy concerns. When will democracy, that critical right to have a say in significant decision-making on campus, return to City College?

Critics say City College is compromising its core mission in its fight to remain open and accredited, slashing access for students and curtailing democracy in the name of reform.

“To be excluded and ignored and disenfranchised is simply unacceptable,” said faculty union president Alisa Messer.

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PEPPER SPRAYED AND INJURED

The protest began as students marched across City College’s main campus in an open space designated by college officials as a “free speech zone.” They headed toward an administrative office building, Conlan Hall, where students freely conduct business every day. However, the administration locked the doors on the protesters.

In response, the students inside unlocked them. When the protesters tried to enter this public building, they were met with resistance from campus police and the SFPD.

Otto Pippenger, 20, who was at the front of the protest, was dragged to the ground by multiple officers and allegedly punched in the head by an SFPD officer, an incident caught on video and recalled in eyewitness accounts.

His mother, Heidi Alletzhauser, told the Bay Guardian that Pippenger had since received medical attention. She said he’d suffered a concussion, contusions from where his head hit the concrete, injuries to both wrists, and broken blood vessels in his right eye.

Dimitrios Philliou, 21, was tackled to the ground and pepper sprayed in the face. In a video interview shortly after the incident, he recalled what happened.

“I asked [officers] what law I broke and neither could give me an explanation. They proceeded to tackle me to the ground,” he said.

In the end, Philliou was charged with misdemeanor “returning to school,” described as trespassing by the Sheriff’s Department. Pippenger was charged with two misdemeanors: resisting arrest and battery on emergency personnel.

The students were released the following morning (March 14), before sunrise. Philliou was issued a citation and released, and Pippenger made bail and was released, according to the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department.

The City College faculty union raised over $1,000 towards Pippenger’s $23,000 bail. He will face arraignment March 19, two days after the Bay Guardian goes to press.

In an emailed statement, City College Chancellor Arthur Q. Tyler described the clash between protesters and police as the fault of the protesters who tried to enter the building.

“I am saddened to see students engaging in violent outbursts,” he wrote.

City College spokesperson Peter Anning said the school regretted the actions of the most violent officers. “There was one police officer with the SFPD, not [City College Police], whose behavior was more forceful than need be,” he said.

Philliou said he just wanted to be heard.

“We just want to have a conversation with Bob Agrella,” he said in a video interview with the college’s newspaper, The Guardsman. “It’d be nice if he would talk to us, like a real human.”

But so far, the students have been met with silence.

 

DEMOCRACY NOW

Agrella does not hold public meetings or take public comment on his decisions, but he posts public agendas in accordance with the California Brown Act. In the past, he’s called these posted agendas “meetings,” and dubbed email feedback as “public comment.”

Messer was critical of the practice. “Apparently these meetings are happening in the special trustee’s head,” she said, “and an email counts as public comment. No one agrees that [email] comment is public.”

In the past, public comment has meant speaking aloud at a meeting in a room where not only could everyone hear you, but every word was broadcast on television and on the web.

City College Board of Trustee public meetings used to be archived online for the world to see. Now only Agrella’s eyes see the concerns of the college community.

Pressed on whether these agendas and emails could count as public meetings, City College spokesperson Larry Kamer said, “I can’t answer that question because you’re getting into matters of legal interpretation. I’m not a lawyer.”

The Board of Trustee’s meetings were not always the most shining examples of democracy, he said.

“When Dr. Agrella was appointed as special trustee with extraordinary powers, it was precisely for the purpose of expediting decision making,” Kamer said. “The idea of expedited decision making and board meetings that go until one or two in the morning are usually incompatible.”

But City College Trustee Rafael Mandelman said some of the tension around the changes at City College could be diffused by letting the public vent, well, in public.

“I’d much rather have people jumping up and down in public comment than having an assault at Conlan Hall,” he said.

At a City Hall hearing held by Sup. David Campos the day after the protest, many students decried a loss of democracy at the school. Campos will soon introduce a resolution to the Board of Supervisors calling for the reinstatement of the City College Board of Trustees.

Students’ concerns about the college, voiced at rallies instead of public forums, have proven as diverse as the students themselves.

 

THE COLLEGE TRANSFORMS

The same day protesters clashed with police at the main campus, Chinese Progressive Association lead activist Emily Ja Ming Lee led a student protest at the college’s Chinatown Campus.

The population there is traditionally older, with fewer English speakers than the general student body.

“We’re worried about the impact on the immigrant communities, the free English as Second Language classes, and vocational training,” Lee told the Guardian. “We partner with City College to run a hospitality training program so immigrant workers can get good jobs. We’re concerned about how City College will serve its immigrant workers.”

That concern has been intensified by a new restrictive billing policy that’s impacting lower income students.

The school has started to require up-front payment for classes, rather than billing students later. The change may shore up the college’s bank account in the short term, but many financially strapped students dropped their classes due to an inability to pay.

Itzel Calvo, a student who is an undocumented citizen, said at the City Hall hearing, “I was not able to enroll in classes this semester unless I paid thousands of dollars in tuition up front, even before the classes started. I can’t afford that.”

The Chinese Progressive Association has also raised concerns about changes to the college’s educational plan.

Over the course of four months, City College will formulate an educational plan to determine which classes deserve funding, and which don’t. This process usually takes a year. But with the accelerated process and lack of outreach, Lee’s worried that English language learners and vocational students will be sidelined.

“Our students don’t fit into a traditional model of what community colleges look like,” she said. “They’re not looking to transfer to a four-year university, necessarily.”

Focusing on transfer students moving from community colleges to four-year universities is part of a state policy known as the Student Success Initiative. In a lawsuit against the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges, City Attorney Dennis Herrera alleges that the ACCJC’s agenda of pushing this initiative was the driving force behind trying to close City College.

The college’s students rallied against those changes for years. Yet Agrella is enforcing the Student Success Initiative. “My job is to play within the rules and regulations of the ACCJC,” he told the Guardian in an interview a few months back.

On campus, concern is growing that changes made to appease the ACCJC may disenfranchise City College students in greater numbers. But worst of all, without public meetings or public comment, the college’s students may not get a chance to advocate against those changes before it’s too late.

The unanswered question: How do we bridge SF’s affordable housing gap?

Sasha Cuttler
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The unanswered question: How do we bridge SF’s affordable housing gap?

Nobody has a good answer to San Francisco’s most basic housing problem: How do we build the housing that existing city residents need? It was a question the Guardian has been posing for many years, and one that I again asked a panel of journalists and housing advocates on Friday, again getting no good answers.

The question is an important one given Mayor Ed Lee’s so-called “affordability agenda” and pledge to build 30,000 new housing units, a third of them somehow affordable, by 2020. And it’s a question that led to the founding 30 years ago of Bridge Housing, the builder of affordable and supportive housing that assembled Friday’s media roundtable.

“There really isn’t one thing, there needs to be a lot of changes in a lot of areas to make it happen,” was the closest that Bridge CEO Cynthia Parker came to answering the question.

One of those things is a general obligation bond measure this fall to fund affordable housing and transportation projects around the Bay Area, which Bridge and a large coalition of other partners are pushing. That would help channel some of the booming Bay Area’s wealth into its severely underfunded affordable housing and transit needs.

When I brought up other ideas from last week’s Guardian editorial for capturing more of the city’s wealth — such as new taxes on tech companies, a congestion pricing charge, and downtown transit assessment districts — Parker replied, “We’d be in favor of a lot of that.”

Yet it’s going to take far more proactive, aggressive, and creative actions to really bridge the gap between the San Francisco Housing Element’s analysis that 60 percent of new housing should be below-market-rate and affordable to those earning 120 percent or less of the area median income, and the less than 20 percent that San Francisco is actually building and promoting through its policies.

Stated another way, about 80 percent of housing we’re building is for a small minority of city residents, or the wealthy people that these developers hope to attract to the city. And we’re not building housing for the vast majority of city residents. That is a recipe for gentrification, displacement, and destruction of San Francisco as a progressive-minded city.

Parker parroted Lee and other pro-development boosters, including SPUR, in arguing that city needs to make it easier and faster for developers to build new housing of all types. “In San Francisco, we do need to expedite the [housing] entitlement process,” Parker said.

But when asked whether meeting or exceeded Lee’s housing production goals would ever bring the price of market-rate housing down to the level where someone more 120 percent of AMI — which HUD recently set at $81,550 for single San Franciscans, or $116,500 for a family of four — Parker conceded that it wouldn’t.

The bottom line for San Francisco and its overheated real estate market is we can never built our way to affordability. The only way to build housing that most people can afford is with public subsidies, and San Francisco just isn’t asking enough from its wealthy individuals, corporations, and developers to create an Affordable Housign Trust Fund that is anywhere near big enough to meet the real demand.

That kind of assertion seems radical by the standards of today’s skewed political (and online) discourse. But when I raised it to a panel that included Bridge Housing officials, members of SPUR and HOPE SF, and a panel of journalists from such pro-development outlets as San Francisco Business Times, San Francisco Magazine, SocketSite, The Registry SF, KQED, and TechCrunch (as well as the more Guardian-aligned Mother Jones), nobody had any good answers or remedies to that basic question that we’ve raised again and again.

Instead, some of the business journalists offered a more sober assessment of what’s to come than most of this city’s pro-development boosters, noting a few signs of irrational exhuberance in the local economy.

The Registry’s Vladimir Bosanac said he’s observed a recent trend of developers buying up unentitled land, indicating more optimism in the sustainability of this development boom than market conditions might warrant. Adam Koval of SocketSite, an early predicter of the last dom-com crash, also voiced sketicism in the pervasive “this time is different” faith in the tech sector, noting how realms such as gaming and online coupons are losing steam and predicting that commercial rents are plateauing.

“I think there are some real gut checks coming up,” Koval said of the tech sector and the sustainability of its growth and valuations.

Perhaps it’s also time for a gut check by Mayor Lee and others who argue that we can build our way to housing affordability without any major new efforts to capture more of the wealth now being generated in San Francisco, wealth that might not be here later if we continue avoiding the question of how to provide the housing that San Francisco needs. 

Democratic party rejects bid to make waterfront development more democratic (UPDATED)

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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Democratic party rejects bid to make waterfront development more democratic (UPDATED)

Note: This story has been updated (see below).

The governing body of the San Francisco Democratic Party voted Wed/12 to oppose a controversial June ballot measure concerning waterfront height limits, despite voting last year to support a strikingly similar measure on the November ballot.

By a slim 13-to-12 vote, the Democratic County Central Committee voted to oppose Proposition B, which would require city officials to get voter approval before approving new building projects that are taller than what’s legally sanctioned under a comprehensive waterfront plan.

The vote breakdown was surprising to some because until recently, the DCCC was known as a progressive stronghold in San Francisco politics. Its slate cards are distributed to Democrats throughout San Francisco, and Democrats make up the vast majority of city voters.

Now, under the leadership of a chair who is employed as a lobbyist for the San Francisco Association of Realtors, the DCCC has aligned itself with powerful real-estate developers hoping to build along the city’s waterfront. 

District 8 Sup. Scott Wiener came under scrutiny recently because he called for a formal evaluation on the impact of Prop. B after developers who oppose the measure sent emails urging him to do so. Wiener, who emphasized at the time that he merely sought an “impartial analysis” of the measure, voted against Prop. B.

Also opposing Prop. B were Assmeblymember Phil Ting, Attorney General Kamala Harris, and Bevan Dufty, a former District 8 supervisor who now leads the mayor’s initiatives on homelessness. 

Twelve members voted to endorse the measure, including Sups. John Avalos, David Campos, Eric Mar, and Malia Cohen, as well as California Sen. Mark Leno and Assemblymember Tom Ammiano. 

But the threshold for this vote to pass or fail was much lower than usual, because so many DCCC members simply refused to take a stand one way or the other.

Prop. B comes on the heels of voters’ rejection last November of Props. B and C, dueling initiatives which concerned the fate of a controversial luxury high-rise tower, the 8 Washington project. 

Although that project won Board of Supervisors approval, opponents brought a referendum to the ballot to ask voters to decide whether to uphold or reject a building height increase that went above the established limit.

The rejection of 8 Washington at the ballot was interpreted as a politically significant turning point, because voters flushed a luxury condo tower down the tubes at a time when the housing affordability crisis was getting into full swing. Soon after that victory, 8 Washington opponents returned to file paperwork for a new referendum on the ballot, to require voter approval for all waterfront height-limit increases.

San Francisco Board of Supervisors President David Chiu – who not only opposed 8 Washington but helped gather signatures for the referendum to challenge it – did not take a position on the waterfront height limit measure. Chiu’s decision to abstain sets him apart from Campos, his opponent in the upcoming Assembly race. Had Chiu voted to endorse Prop. B, its opponents would not have had the votes to get the upper hand.

UPDATE: Chiu said he still hasn’t formed an opinion on the measure, and that he’s waiting on a pending city analysis and the outcome of a lawsuit challenging it. 

“There’s been very little analysis and it could take money away from affordable housing and cost the city money fighting a lawsuit,” he said, citing the money that developers would be spending on political campaigns as the potential source of affordable housing money. 

“I am open to supporting the measure, as someone who passionate about waterfront development,” he added, citing the lead role he took in opposing the 8 Washington project. (End of update.)

Others who abstained (or did so by proxy) included Alix Rosenthal (who is working as a consultant on the waterfront Warriors arena project), Sen. Dianne Feinstein, Rep. Jackie Speier, and Rep. Nancy Pelosi. California Sen. Leland Yee – whose representative at the meeting, John Rizzo, reportedly did not show up to cast Yee’s vote – was reportedly also planning to abstain.

Jon Golinger, who is leading the Prop. B campaign to require voter approval for waterfront height-limit increases, said he wasn’t terribly concerned about the DCCC vote, since early polling was favorable to his campaign. But he found it telling that the same cast of characters who had opposed 8 Washington were now voting to oppose a measure that would have extended voters’ will on 8 Washington to all waterfront development proposals.

“The key difference,” between Prop. B and last November’s 8 Washington vote, he told the Bay Guardian, “is that there are more big money interests that have something to lose here.”

Clean Up The Plaza run by political consultant with ties to developers

Sasha Cuttler
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168
Clean Up The Plaza run by political consultant with ties to developers

Neighborhood and progressive political activists have long been suspicious of the shadowy Clean Up The Plaza campaign and its possible connections to a massive housing development proposed for 16th and Mission streets — and the Guardian has now confirmed that developer-connected political consultant Jack Davis is playing a key role in that campaign.

Asked by the Guardian whether he is being paid by the developers — Maximus Real Estate Partners, which has submitted plans to build a 10-story, 351-unit housing complex overlooking the 16th Street BART plaza — Davis told the Guardian, “That’s between me and the IRS.”

Our exchange with Davis and Gil Chavez, a Davis roommate who runs the Clean Up The Plaza campaign, occurred yesterday outside the LGBT Center where they and three other campaign workers (who refused to speak to us) were promoting their cause and collecting signatures on petitions calling for crackdowns on the plaza before the debate inside between Assembly District 17 candidates David Chiu and David Campos.

Clean Up The Plaza has been refusing to return calls from the Guardian or other local journalists for months, and the group hasn’t filed any paperwork with the San Francisco Ethics Commission in association with its political fundraising or lobbying efforts.

Asked about the group’s relationship with the project developers, Chavez told us, “They’re in communication with us and we’re in communication with them, but they haven’t funded us.” Asked who paid for the group’s website, mailers, window signs, and other expenses, Chavez said it was him and other donors that he wouldn’t identify.

Davis has been the go-to political consultant on big campaigns backed by real estate interests in San Francisco, working on the successful mayoral campaigns of Frank Jordan, Willie Brown, and Gavin Newsom, as well as a number of high-profile development projects, including the 1996 ballot measure approving construction of AT&T Park.

He and Chavez say they live together in the neighborhood and their only motivation in running the group is improving public safety. “I’m happy to to talk about what Clean Up The Plaza is,” Davis told us. “I live at 17th and Mission and I’ve been mugged.”

But housing activist Sara Shortt of the Housing Rights Committee isn’t buying it, calling the group “a fake grassroots campaign that is misleading this community.”

“If you didn’t know Jack Davis’ history in politics in San Francisco, you might be able to take that at face value,” Shortt said of Davis’ claims to be simply a concerned citizen. “Given his ties to big developers, it’s not very believable.”

Willie Brown even heralded Davis’ return to political work two years ago in his San Francisco Chronicle column, entitled “Political consultant Jack Davis back on S.F. scene,” writing that he has returned to local political circles following a hiatus in Wales the previous few years.

“You political types, be warned. Jack Davis is back in town,” the column began, ending with, “I think that after watching from the sidelines for a while, he’s ready to return. Can’t wait to see whom he decides to work for. Stay tuned.”

Is Davis working on fake grassroots campaign designed to smooth the way for a massive gentrifying housing projects in one of the city’s last remaining neighborhoods that still welcomes poor people? Stay tuned.

San Francisco Ethics Commission Director John St. Croix told the Guardian that the group should be registered if it has raised more than $1,000 or if it is lobbying at City Hall — indeed, the group has boasted on its website of efforts to influence Campos and other city officials to increase police patrols and cleansing of the plaza — particularly if it is being paid by a third party to do so.

“If they’re lobbying, obviously we want to know,” St. Croix told us, saying that he planned to personally follow-up with the group on its activities.

Davis denies that the group is in violation of any disclosure laws, claiming it is simply a small neighborhood group, and he referred our inquiries to the group’s attorney, James Perrinello, a partner at the high-powered and politically connected law firm of Nielson Merksamer Parrinello Gross & Leoni, who hasn’t yet returned our calls.

For more on Clean Up The Plaza and other campaigns to “clean up” poor neighborhoods as a precursor to gentrification and market rate housing development — including the ongoing efforts to do so in the Tenderloin and Mid-Market areas — read next week’s Bay Guardian. 

[UPDATE 3/18: Former Guardian Editor/Publisher Tim Redmond’s 48 Hills site just posted a long report by reporter Julia Carrie Wong that includes an admission by Davis that he is indeed a paid consultant for Maximus, as well as interesting conflicting statements from Maximus and Chavez about a meeting they held. Check it out.] 

The miraculous and mysterious, disappearing, reappearing Clean Power SF data

Erica Hanna
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The miraculous and mysterious, disappearing, reappearing Clean Power SF data

The fight for clean power in San Francisco just got a whole lot dirtier.

In an update to the City’s Climate Action Strategy report, a prominent section discussing goals to use renewable energy featured CleanPowerSF — and then suddenly it didn’t.

For those not in the know, CleanPowerSF is a renewable energy initiative meant to give San Franciscans 100 percent renewable energy, while making us a hell of a lot less reliant on the local monopoly: PG&E. The initiative, pushed by Supervisors John Avalos, David Campos and other progressive allies, faced long-time blowback from Mayor Ed Lee.

As the Guardian has reported before, it’s a central city policy to reduce emissions by 25 percent below 1990 levels by 2017, and 80 percent below those levels by 2050.

To reach those goals many feel we need CleanPowerSF, but the mayor seems to have scrubbed it out of his environmental report without so much as a how-you-do.

The change was made apparent by a prominent blank white space on page 17 of the Climate Action Strategy report, and was discovered by Supervisor John Avalos’ office. When you highlight the blank space with your cursor, copy the section, then paste it into a document, you can see the goals of CleanPowerSF laid out plain as day.

CleanPowerSF by the Residential

and Commercial Sectors

Sector               2012   2017   2020   2025   2030

Commercial   0%       5%       10%     45%     80%

Residential     0%       16%     19%     60%     100%

The scrubbed information shows CleanPowerSF helping the city reach its renewable energy goals. The numbers are hidden in the Climate Action Strategy report, like a message in a bottle, or a painted egg hidden under a bush on Easter. 

It’s as if someone didn’t want to delete the CleanPowerSF entry entirely, and instead turned the text white in order to signal that the text used to be there. Perhaps the preparer of this report was foiled by the technological wonder known as cut-and-paste. Or more intriguingly, perhaps this was the first-ever case of activist report writing (in which case: Dear subversive report writer, please send us documents through BayLeaks).

Whether the information was left in accidentally or on purpose, it’s now clear that the mayor is dead set on scrubbing CleanPowerSF from city records, even at the expense of the city’s environmental goals. 

Above is the report. Check it out for yourself, page 17 (in the report’s numbering, not the digital numbering).

At the mayor’s Question Time today, where supervisors ask pre-planned and pre-announced questions of the mayor, Supervisor Avalos pinned Mayor Lee down on the document scrub-out.

“In your letter of introduction to the 2013 CAS you wrote the need for action has never been more evident,” Avalos said. “The Climate Action Strategy goes on to state that moving onto 100 percent renewable energy is the biggest single step the city can take to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. And yet there was an attempt to scrub CleanPowerSF… from the Climate Action Strategy.”

The version of the Climate Action Strategy included a whited out table on CleanPower SF… that table was unceremoniously removed in a new version posted two days later,” he said.

The mayor’s answer was filled with some equivocations and some fabrications. 

“We should not move forward with a program that contracts with a fossil fuel company in Texas, it doesn’t produce enough local jobs or environmental benefits,” he said. “Supervisor, I’m glad you mentioned the Climate Action Strategy.” 

Retired San Francisco Public Utilities Commission Executive Director Ed Harrington told  Guardian Editor Steven T. Jones exactly why CleanPowerSF was needed, in a story of his back in 2012: “This program before you has the only chance of reaching those goals. There’s nothing else.” 

Asking Mayor Ed Lee to explain the disappearance of the information from the report.

After question time, this reporter and a few others questioned the mayor as he walked back to his office.

What was behind the scrubbing of the CleanPowerSF data? Why did it suddenly vanish from the report?

“I don’t think I have a real answer for that,” the mayor said.

Theater Listings: March 12 – 18, 2014

Michael Redmond
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Stage listings are compiled by Guardian staff. Performance times may change; call venues to confirm. Reviewers are Robert Avila, Rita Felciano, and Nicole Gluckstern. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com.

THEATER

OPENING

Bauer San Francisco Playhouse, 450 Post, SF; www.sfplayhouse.org. Previews March 18-21, 8pm. Opens March 22, 8pm. Runs Tue-Thu, 7pm; Fri-Sat, 8pm (also Sat, 3pm); March 23 and April 13, 2pm. Through April 19. San Francisco Playhouse presents the world premiere of Lauren Gunderson’s drama about artist Rudolf Bauer.

Twisted Fairy Tales Shelton Theater, 533 Sutter, SF; www.leftcoasttheatreco.org. $15-25. Opens Fri/14, 8pm. Runs Thu-Sat, 8pm. Through April 5. Left Coast Theatre Co. performs the world premiere of seven one-act LGBT-themed plays based on classic children’s stories.

Wrestling Jerusalem Intersection for the Arts, 925 Mission, SF; www.theintersection.org. $20-30. Previews Wed/12-Fri/14, 7:30pm. Opens Sat/15, 7:30pm. Runs Thu-Sat, 7:30pm; Sun, 2pm. Intersection for the Arts presents Aaron Davidman in his multicharacter solo performance piece about Israel and Palestine.

BAY AREA

Arms and the Man Barn Theatre, 30 Sir Francis Drake, Ross; www.rossvalleyplayers.com. $13-26. Previews Thu/13, 7:30pm. Opens Fri/14, 8pm. Runs Thu, 7:30pm; Fri-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2pm (no show Sun/16). Through April 13. Ross Valley Players perform George Bernard Shaw’s romantic comedy.

ONGOING

Children Are Forever (All Sales are Final!) Stage Werx Theatre, 446 Valencia, SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. $15. Fri-Sat, 8pm. Through March 22. Writer-performer and comedian Julia Jackson’s well acted and consistently funny autobiographical solo show details her and her female partner’s attempt to adopt a newborn girl from a young African American mother in Florida. Along the way, Jackson’s smart script details the trials, red tape, and unexpected market incentives in the field of adoption for a same-sex, interracial couple. If the generally involving story nevertheless attenuates a little across its two-act structure, Coke Nakamoto’s precise direction (which builds on original direction by W. Kamau Bell) offers a lively framework for Jackson’s excellent characterizations as well as her frank and interesting commentary on the social, political messiness of certain natural urges. (Avila)

Crystal Springs Eureka Theatre, 215 Jackson, SF; www.crystalspringstheplay.com. $20-65. Fri-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2pm. Through March 23. Eureka Theatre presents Kathy Rucker’s world-premiere drama about parenting in the digital age.

Feisty Old Jew Marsh San Francisco Main Stage, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $25-100. Sat/15, 8pm; Sun/16, 7pm. Charlie Varon performs his latest solo show, a fictional comedy about “a 20th century man living in a 21st century city.”

Foodies! The Musical Shelton Theater, 533 Sutter, SF; www.foodiesthemusical.com. $32-34. Fri-Sat, 8pm. Open-ended. AWAT Productions presents Morris Bobrow’s musical comedy revue all about food.

Hundred Days Z Space, 450 Florida, SF; www.zspace.org. $10-100. Wed and Sun, 7pm; Thu-Sat, 8pm. Through April 6. Married musical duo the Bengsons (Abigail and Shaun) provide the real-life inspiration and guiding rock ‘n’ roll heart for this uneven but at times genuinely rousing indie musical drama, a self-referential meta-theater piece relating the story of a young couple in 1940s America who fall madly in love only to discover one of them is terminally ill. As an exploration of love, mortality, and the nature of time, the story of Sarah and Will (doubled by the Bengsons and, in movement sequences and more dramatically detailed scenes, by chorus members Amy Lizardo and Reggie D. White) draws force from the potent musical performances and songwriting of composer-creators Abigail and Shaun Bengson (augmented here by the appealing acting-singing chorus and backup band that also feature El Beh, Melissa Kaitlyn Carter, Geneva Harrison, Kate Kilbane, Jo Lampert, Delane Mason, Joshua Pollock). Playwright Kate E. Ryan’s book, however, proves too straightforward, implausible, and sentimental to feel like an adequate vessel for the music’s exuberant, urgent emotion and lilting, longing introspection. Other trappings of director Anne Kauffman’s elaborate production (including an inspired set design by Kris Stone that echoes the raw industrial shell of the theater; and less-than-inspired choreography by the otherwise endlessly inventive Joe Goode) can add texture at times but also prove either neutral figures or distracting minuses in conveying what truth and heft there is in the material. Ultimately, this still evolving world premiere has a strong musical beat at its core, which has a palpable force of its own, even if it’s yet to settle into the right combination of story and staging. (Avila)

Lovebirds Marsh San Francisco Studio, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Thu/13-Fri/14, 8pm; Sat/15, 8:30pm. Theater artist and comedian Marga Gomez presents the world premiere of her 10th solo show, described as “a rollicking tale of incurable romantics.”

Mommy Queerest Exit Studio, 156 Eddy, SF; www.divafest.info. $15-25. Fri-Sat, 8pm. Through March 29. Sex scenes in solo shows might sound a little onanistic, but in the right circumstances a door jam or a love seat can serve as a fine co-star. Stand-up comic and actor Kat Evasco demonstrates as much in this raunchy and high-spirited story of her sexual awakening as a lesbian-identifying bisexual, coming out in a household dominated by her closeted mother, a Filipina American drama queen with a long-term female companion she insists is the “gay” one. Presented by Guerrilla Rep and the Exit Theatre’s DIVAfest, and directed by Guerrilla Rep’s John Caldon (who co-wrote the play with Evasco), the story follows a familiar and predictable arc in some ways — familial hypocrisy giving way to inspirational cross-generational understanding — and the characterizations and set-ups (including a family feud on Jerry Springer) come with not always inspired choices. Moreover not all the jokes land where they should in a performance that starts as stand-up but immediately shifts into the style of a solo-play confessional. (A more thoroughgoing subversion of the stand-up format might have produced more complex, less foreseeable results.) At the same time, there’s no denying Evasco’s charm and energy, or her buoyant comedic talent, which makes it easier to forgive the play’s structural shortcomings. (Avila)

“Risk Is This … The Cutting Ball New Experimental Plays Festival” Exit on Taylor, 277 Taylor, SF; www.cuttingball.com. Free ($20 donation for reserved seating). Fri-Sat, 8pm. Through March 29. Five new works in staged readings, including two from Cutting Ball resident playwright Andrew Saito.

The Scion Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $15-60. Thu-Fri, 8pm; Sat, 5pm. Through April 18. In his latest solo show, Brian Copeland (Not a Genuine Black Man; The Waiting Period) explores an infamous crime in his hometown of San Leandro: the 2000 murder of three government meat inspectors by Stuart Alexander, owner of the Santos Linguisa Factory. The story is personal history for Copeland, at least indirectly, as the successful comedian and TV host recounts growing up nearby under the common stricture that “rules are rules,” despite evidence all around that equity, fairness, and justice are in fact deeply skewed by privilege. Developed with director David Ford, the multiple-character monologue (delivered with fitful humor on a bare-bones stage with supportive sound design by David Hines) contrasts Copeland’s own youthful experiences as a target of racial profiling with the way wealthy and white neighbor Stuart Alexander, a serial bully and thug, consistently evaded punishment and even police attention along his path to becoming the “Sausage King,” a mayoral candidate, and a multiple murderer (Alexander died in 2005 at San Quentin). The story takes some meandering turns in making its points, and not all of Copeland’s characterizations are equally compelling. The subject matter is timely enough, however, though ironically it is government that seems to set itself further than ever above the law as much as wealthy individuals or the bogus “legal persons” of the corporate world. The results of such concentrated power are indeed unhealthy, and literally so — Copeland’s grandmother (one of his more persuasive characterizations) harbors a deep distrust of processed food that is nothing if not prescient —but The Scion’s tale of two San Leandrans leaves one hungry for more complexity. (Avila)

Shit & Champagne Rebel, 1772 Market, SF; shitandchampagne.eventbrite.com. $25. Fri-Sat, 8pm. Open-ended. D’Arcy Drollinger is Champagne White, bodacious blond innocent with a wicked left hook in this cross-dressing ’70s-style white-sploitation flick, played out live on Rebel’s intimate but action-packed barroom stage. Written by Drollinger and co-directed with Laurie Bushman (with high-flying choreography by John Paolillo, Drollinger, and Matthew Martin), this high-octane camp send-up of a favored formula comes dependably stocked with stock characters and delightfully protracted by a convoluted plot (involving, among other things, a certain street drug that’s triggered an epidemic of poopy pants) — all of it played to the hilt by an excellent cast that includes Martin as Dixie Stampede, an evil corporate dominatrix at the head of some sinister front for world domination called Mal*Wart; Alex Brown as Detective Jack Hammer, rough-hewn cop on the case and ambivalent love interest; Rotimi Agbabiaka as Sergio, gay Puerto Rican impresario and confidante; Steven Lemay as Brandy, high-end calf model and Champagne’s (much) beloved roommate; and Nancy French as Rod, Champagne’s doomed fiancé. Sprawling often literally across two buxom acts, the show maintains admirable consistency: The energy never flags and the brow stays decidedly low. (Avila)

The Speakeasy Undisclosed location (ticket buyers receive a text with directions), SF; www.thespeakeasysf.com. $70 (gambling chips, $5-10 extra; after-hours admission, $10). Thu-Sat, 7:40, 7:50, and 8pm admittance times. Extended through May 24. Boxcar Theater’s most ambitious project to date is also one of the more involved and impressively orchestrated theatrical experiences on any Bay Area stage just now. An immersive time-tripping environmental work, The Speakeasy takes place in an “undisclosed location” (in fact, a wonderfully redesigned version of the company’s Hyde Street theater complex) amid a period-specific cocktail lounge, cabaret, and gambling den inhabited by dozens of Prohibition-era characters and scenarios that unfold around an audience ultimately invited to wander around at will. At one level, this is an invitation to pure dress-up social entertainment. But there are artistic aims here too. Intentionally designed (by co-director and creator Nick A. Olivero with co-director Peter Ruocco) as a fractured super-narrative — in which audiences perceive snatches of overheard stories rather than complete arcs, and can follow those of their own choosing — there’s a way the piece becomes specifically and ever more subtly about time itself. This is most pointedly demonstrated in the opening vignettes in the cocktail lounge, where even the ticking of Joe’s Clock Shop (the “cover” storefront for the illicit 1920s den inside) can be heard underscoring conversations (deeply ironic in historical hindsight) about war, loss, and regained hope for the future. For a San Francisco currently gripped by a kind of historical double-recurrence of the roaring Twenties and dire Thirties at once, The Speakeasy is not a bad place to sit and ponder the simulacra of our elusive moment. (Avila)

Tipped & Tipsy Marsh Studio Theater, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Sat, 5pm; Sun, 7pm. Through April 6. Solo performer Jill Vice performs her Fringe Festival hit.

The World of Paradox Garage, 715 Bryant, SF; www.paradoxmagic.com. $12-15. Mon, 8pm. Through April 7. Footloose presents David Facer in his solo show, a mix of magic and theater.

Yellow New Conservatory Theatre Center, 25 Van Ness, SF; www.nctcsf.org. $25-45. Wed-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2pm. Through March 23. Playwright Del Shores (Sordid Lives, Southern Baptist Sissies) returns to his native South — while detouring from previous camp-comedy treatments — with this affirming family drama set in Vicksburg, Miss., about a progressive white couple whose marriage and family are rocked in the wake of their son’s illness. Kate (Dana Zook) and Bobby (Andrew Nance) are celebrating 19 years together. Their oldest son, Dayne (Damion Matthews), is a handsome high school senior and football star; their daughter, Gracie (Ali Haas), is his high-strung younger sister, a drama devotee in more ways than one with plans to be the next Meryl Streep. Gracie’s best friend, Kendall (Maurice André San-Chez), is an effeminate young man with a golden singing voice but a strict fundamentalist mother (Linsay Rousseau) from whom he must hide his plan to join Gracie in the school’s production of Oklahoma. Kendall’s fractured family encourages his tight orbit around Gracie’s — including Dayne, on whom Kendall has an impossible-to-disguise crush — all of whom accept the closeted, innocent youth unequivocally. But when Dayne comes down with a rare liver disease (the title has nothing to do with race, which is not explored here, but references, at a literal level, the sickly color that overcomes Dayne at one point), the seemingly ideal family itself fractures along lines of a deeply buried secret regarding his paternity. Amid their worry for Dayne’s future, and the painful dynamic opened between Kate and Bobby, Kendall’s mother moves in with proselyting zeal, alienating her son to the point of total rejection, but also adding to an already volatile tension between his adoptive parents. Helmed by New Conservatory Theatre Center’s founding artistic director, Ed Decker, the production achieves (after some initial warming up) decent performances across the cast, which, along with Shores’ careful plotting and consistent humor, helps keep this sentimental, somewhat too neat story involving until the end. (Avila)

BAY AREA

Accidental Death of an Anarchist Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Roda Theatre, 2015 Addison, Berk; www.berkeleyrep.org. $29-99. Opens Wed/12, 8pm. Runs Tue and Thu-Sat, 8pm (no show April 18; additional 2pm shows March 20 and April 17; also Sat, 2pm, but no matinee March 22); Sun, 2 and 7pm. Through April 20. Berkeley Rep presents comic actor Steven Epp in Dario Fo’s explosive political farce, directed by Christopher Bayes,

Bread and Circuses La Val’s Subterranean, 1834 Euclid, Berk; www.impacttheatre.com. $20-25. Thu-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 7pm. Through April 6. Impact Theatre performs “a cavalcade of brutal and bloody new short plays” by various contemporary playwrights.

Geezer Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston, Berk; www.themarsh.org. $25-50. Thu, 8pm; Sat, 5pm. Through April 26. Geoff Hoyle moves his hit comedy about aging to the East Bay.

The House That Will Not Stand Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Thrust Stage, 2025 Addison, Berk; www.berkeleyrep.org. $29-59. Wed/12, 7pm; Thu/13-Sat/15, 8pm (also Thu/13 and Sat/15, 2pm); Sun/16, 2 and 7pm. July 4, 1836: As a white New Orleans patriarch (Ray Reinhardt) passes from the scene, under somewhat mysterious circumstances, his longtime mistress, Beartrice (an imposing, memorable Lizan Mitchell), and their daughters (the charmingly varied trio of Joniece Abbott-Pratt, Flor De Liz Perez, and Tiffany Rachelle Stewart) — all free women of color — vie for dominance while trying to secure their respective futures in Berkeley Rep’s sumptuous and beautifully acted world premiere. Nationally acclaimed playwright and Oakland native Marcus Gardley (And Jesus Moonwalked the Mississippi; This World in a Woman’s Hands) brews up a historically rich and revealing, as well as witty and fiery tale here, based on the practice of plaçage (common-law marriages between white men and black Creole women), grounding it in the large personalities of his predominately female characters — who include a nosy and angling intruder (played with subtlety by Petronia Paley) — and lacing it all with a delirious dose of magical realism via the voodoo charms of Beartrice’s slave, Makeda (Harriett D. Foy, who with Keith Townsend Obadike also contributes lush, atmospheric compositions to the proceedings). Gardley delves productively into the history overall, although he sometimes indulges it too much in awkward and ultimately unnecessary expository dialogue. When he allows his characters full scope for expression of their personalities and relationships, however, the dialogue sails by with brio and punch —something the powerhouse cast, shrewdly directed by Patricia McGregor, makes the most of throughout. (Avila)

Lasso of Truth Marin Theatre Company, 397 Miller, Mill Valley; www.marintheatre.org. $37-58. Wed/12, 7:30pm;Thu/13-Sat/15, 8pm (also Sat/15, 2pm); Sun/16, 2 and 7pm. Marin Theatre Company performs Carson Kreitzer’s new play about the history of Wonder Woman.

The Lion and the Fox Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant, Berk; www.centralworks.org. $15-28. Thu-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 5pm. Through March 30. Central Works performs a prequel to its 2009 hit, Machiavelli’s The Prince, which depicts a face-off between Niccolo Machiavelli and Cesare Borgia.

The Music Man Julia Morgan Theater, 2640 College, Berk; www.berkeleyplayhouse.org. $17-60. Fri and March 20, 7pm; Sat, 1 and 6pm; Sun, noon and 5pm. Through March 23. There’s trouble in River City! See it unfold amid all those trombones at Berkeley Playhouse.

Once On This Island Lucie Stern Theatre, 1305 Middlefield, Palo Alto; www.theatreworks.org. $19-73. Tue-Wed, 7:30pm; Thu-Sat, 8pm (also Sat, 2pm); Sun, 2 and 7pm. Through March 30. TheatreWorks performs the Tony-nominated musical about a star-crossed love affair in the tropics, inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid.

PERFORMANCE/DANCE

Caroline Lugo and Carolé Acuña’s Ballet Flamenco Peña Pachamama, 1630 Powell, SF; www.carolinalugo.com. Sun/16, March 22, 30, April 6, 12, 19, and 30, 6:15pm. $15-19. Flamenco performance by the mother-daughter dance company, featuring live musicians.

Companhia Urbana de Dança Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF; www.ybca.org. Thu/13-Sat/15, 8pm. $25-35. Brazilian dance troupe under the direction of Sonia Destri Lie.

“Dream Queens Revue” Aunt Charlie’s Lounge, 133 Turk, SF; www.dreamqueensrevue.com. Wed/12, 9:30pm. Free. Drag with Collette LeGrande, Ruby Slippers, Sophilya Leggz, Bobby Ashton, and more.

Feinstein’s at the Nikko Hotel Nikko, 222 Mason, SF; www.feinsteinssf.com. This week: Cheyenne Jackson with musical director Ben Toth, Fri/14, 8pm; Sat/15-Sun/16, 7pm, $60-75.

Greg Fitzsimmons Punch Line Comedy Club, 444 Battery, SF; www.punchlinecomedyclub.com. Thu/13, 8pm; Fri/14, 8 and 10pm; Sat/15, 7:30 and 9:30pm. $23.50. The comedian performs.

“The Garden Party” Phoenix Theatre, 414 Mason, SF; www.overcasttheatre.com. Fri/14-Sat/15 and March 19-22, 8pm; Sun/16, 5pm. $11-13. Overcast Theatre performs Václav Havel’s 1963 comedy.

“LEVYdance Presents: The Salon” LEVYstudio, 19 Heron, SF; www.levydance.org. Sat/15, 8:30pm. $10. Performing arts showcase featuring 10 local artists of various disciplines.

“LOL Mondays at OMG” OMG, 43 Sixth St, SF; www.clubomgsf.com. Mon/17, 7pm. Free. Comedy show hosted by Valerie Branch, with featured performers Imran G., Samantha Gilweit, and Barry Fischer, plus an open mic.

“Magic at the Rex” Hotel Rex, 562 Sutter, SF; www.magicattherex.com. Sat, 8pm. Ongoing. $25. Magic and mystery with Adam Sachs and mentalist Sebastian Boswell III.

“The Naked Stage” Bayfront Theater, B350 Fort Mason Center, SF; www.improv.org. Sat, 8pm. Through March 29. $20. BATS Improv performs a completely improvised play.

“New Winter: Winter Choreographers Showcase” Dance Mission Theater, 3316 24th St, SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. Fri/14-Sat/15, 8pm. $14. Works by Tika Morgan’s Reggaeton Fusion Performance Workshop, Allan Frias’ Hip-Hop Performance Workshop, Maurice Stokes, Natasha Carlitz Dance Ensemble, and more.

“Paper Wing” NOHspace, 2840 Mariposa, SF; www.theatreofyugen.org. Fri-Sat, 8pm. Through March 22. $15-35. Sculptural costume artist Sha Sha Higby presents a new solo performance.

“Point Break Live!” DNA Lounge, 373 11th St, SF; www.dnalounge.com. April 4, 7:30 and 11pm. $25-50. Dude, Point Break Live! is like dropping into a monster wave, or holding up a bank, like, just a pure adrenaline rush, man. Ahem. Sorry, but I really can’t help but channel Keanu Reeves and his Johnny Utah character when thinking about the awesomely bad 1991 movie Point Break or its equally yummily cheesy stage adaptation. And if you do an even better Keanu impression than me — the trick is in the vacant stare and stoner drawl — then you can play his starring role amid a cast of solid actors, reading from cue cards from a hilarious production assistant in order to more closely approximate Keanu’s acting ability. This play is just so much fun, even better now at DNA Lounge than it was a couple years ago at CELLspace. But definitely buy the poncho pack and wear it, because the blood, spit, and surf spray really do make this a fully immersive experience. (Steven T. Jones)

“Shotz: Featuring a Strong Female Lead” Tides Theatre, 533 Sutter, SF; www.amiosnyc.com. Tue/18, 8pm. $10. Seven plays, five minutes each, created in less than a month, and united under the theme “Featuring a Strong Female Lead.”

“Silenced” and “The CONTACT Project” CounterPULSE, 1310 Mission, SF; www.counterpulse.org. Fri-Sat and March 20, 8pm; Sun, 2pm. Through March 23. Performance works by Charya Burt and Krista DeNio.

“Sorya! 2014: We Are Still At It” NOHspace, 2840 Mariposa, SF: www.brownpapertickets.com. Sat-Sun, 2pm; Mon, 7pm. Through March 24. Theatre of Yugen presents its 35th anniversary season with a performance by founder Yuriko Doi in the kyogen play Kawakami.

SOULSKIN Dance Joe Goode Annex, 401 Alabama, SF; soulskindance.brownpapertickets.com. Fri/14-Sat/15, 8pm. $20. A multimedia pop culture journey directed by Adrianna Thompson.

“Speechless” Public Works SF, 161 Erie, SF; www.speechlesslive.com. Wed/12, 7:30pm. $20. One-year anniversary special of the PowerPoint-based comedy show.

Stephen Petronio Company Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater, 700 Howard, SF; www.sfperformances.org. Fri/14-Sat/15, 7:30pm. $35-50. The company performs the West Coast premiere of Like Lazarus Did.

BAY AREA

“An Evening of Relentless Humor in Multiple Formats from SOB” 142 Throckmorton Theatre, 142 Throckmorton, Mill Valley; www.142throckmorton.com. Sat/15, 8pm. $25-35. Sketch and improv comedy.

Savion Glover Marin Veterans’ Memorial Auditorium, 10 Avenue of the Flags, San Rafael; www.marincenter.org. Fri/14, 8pm. $20-60. The tap dancer performs his new work, StePz.

“The Ironbound” Marin Theatre Company, 397 Miller, Mill Valley; www.marintheatre.org. Mon/17, 7pm. Free. Staged reading of a new play by Martyna Majok.

“MarshJam Improv Comedy Show” Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston, Berk; www.themarsh.org. Fri, 8pm. Ongoing. $10. Improv comedy with local legends and drop-in guests.

“Mortified: March Madness” Uptown, 1928 Telegraph, Oakl; www.getmortified.com. Thu/13, 7:30pm. $20. Also Fri/14, 7:30pm, $21. DNA Lounge, 375 11th St, SF. Fearless storytellers share their most adorably embarrassing childhood writings.

Oakland Interfaith Gospel Choir’s Annual Spring Musical First Congregational Church of Oakland, 2501 Harrison, Oakl; www.oigc.org. Sat/15, 7:30pm. Free. OIGC performs spiritual and gospel music under the direction of Terrance Kelly, with special guest Calvin B. Rhone.

“Poetry Express” Himalayan Flavors, 1585 University, Berk; poetryexpressberkeley.blogspot.com. Mon, 7pm. Free. Ongoing. This week: Richard Silberg, plus open mic. Next week: Ambrose Mohler, plus open mic.

“Some Girl(s)” Dragon Theatre, 2120 Broadway, Redwood City; www.dragonproductions.net. Fri/14-Sat/15, 8pm (also Sat/15, 2pm); Sun/16, 2pm. $15. Dragon Theater’s 2nd Stages Program kicks off with this production of Neil LaBute’s dark comedy. *

 

Jason “Shake” Anderson is Oakland’s ‘Candidate X’

Erica Hanna
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Jason “Shake” Anderson is Oakland’s ‘Candidate X’

In our Jan. 1 issue, the Bay Guardian spun the tale of Candidate X, a fictional progressive mayoral candidate aiming to save San Francisco’s wonderfully weird soul using people power. The hope? To inspire a candidate to run in the City’s election in 2015 with strong progressive bona fides, and the values that inspired a nation during the rise of the populist Occupy movement.

Now a real life Candidate X has surfaced, but not in San Francisco — this X is challenging Jean Quan for her seat as Oakland’s mayor, using our Candidate X story to define, elevate, and amplify his candidacy. 

Meet Jason “Shake” Anderson, 38, a former Occupy Oakland spokesperson, veteran, and now Green party candidate for the Oakland mayor’s race. He hopes to take the lessons from Occupy to help reinvigorate the city he calls home. 

“It doesn’t get much news, but Occupy Oakland dropped crime in the city in that moment. It’s because people had places to sleep and places to eat. Those things drop crime,” he told the Guardian. “I’m not saying we camp again, but we need to find ways to do things like that. We have empty buildings, how about we give organizations who feed people on a daily basis a building that wasn’t being used to begin with?”

Anderson is an African American man, and although he feels black Oakland needs representation, he’s about bridging divides: “My attitude is we take care of our people first; not just black or brown people, but people.”

Thinking with people power is Anderson’s modus operandi. He noted that the Port of Oakland was severely disrupted by an Occupy takeover, showing the people have teeth. He doesn’t want to just fight people in power, but work hand in hand with them.

“I believe we can work with and not be separate from the power structure, and even the playing field,” he said. “A lot of people are mad at rich people, but I’m angry at disparate wealth. People are poorer and poorer, and they feel likes there’s no change in their course.”

Jason “Shake” Anderson talks music with “The Black Hour.”

That focus on building bridges and novel ideas to tackle everyday problems is what drew Anderson to our Candidate X feature back in January. He co-opted the imagery and message, distributing “Who is Candidate X?” flyers around San Francisco and Oakland. The front side features art from our Candidate X story, by the talented Sean Morgan, and the back features a brief description of Anderson’s candidacy as well as a QR code that links to a donation using Bitcoin. 

 

You see, Anderson is a bit of a tech head, with a belief that eventually Bitcoin will be one way to free people’s money from banks that don’t look out for the interest of people. And much like our fictional Candidate X, he thinks the tech movement and activist movements have much in common.

“Candidate X comes from the concept of the 99 percent, the leaderless movement of Occupy,” Anderson said. “This is not about me, I’m just a guy. But I’m supposed to represent you.”

candidatex4

Sturm und drang

Michael Redmond
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1
Sturm und drang

arts@sfbg.com

FILM It is awkward, no doubt, living in a land whose 20th-century legacy was becoming synonymous with evil — “Nazi,” “Hitler,” and “Holocaust” are still terms we use in describing or comparing the absolute worst human behaviors. Toward the end of Generation War, a three-part TV miniseries being shown here as a two-part movie, one character anticipates the cultural amnesia of peacetime by saying “Soon there will only be Germans and not a single Nazi.” That’s a canny statement in a nearly five-hour soap opera that doesn’t have quite enough of them.

Postwar Germany willed itself not only into economic rehabilitation, but into becoming one of the world’s more politically progressive and socially tolerant societies. (With exceptions, of course.) No doubt part of this was a function of guilt, and younger generations’ determination not to repeat the past. But it must also have been driven by a desire to bury that past as discreetly as possible without actually seeming to do so. Neo-Nazi freaks aside, you won’t likely now meet anyone in Germany who pledged allegiance to Hitler. Nor would you have 30 or 50 years ago. Even (or especially) guards at Auschwitz shared in the selective national amnesia that followed capitulation and the subsequent revelations of war atrocities. It’s understandable, if not entirely to be sympathized with: How do you live publicly with being on the side of the exterminators? You don’t, that’s how. You gradually build up personal distance until it’s a wall scarcely more abstract than the one that came down to reunite Germany in 1989.

Generation War was originally called Our Mothers, Our Fathers, to underline the relevancy of the discussion it’s presumably trying to stir at home — even if for many viewers the war generation would have been their grandparents’. Directed by Philipp Kadelbach and written by Stefan Kolditz, it starts out in dismayingly hackneyed fashion as we’re introduced to our youthful protagonists. Celebrating a birthday in 1941 near the war’s start, when Axis victory seems assured, they pose for a photo you know damn well is going to be the heart-tugging emblem of innocence horribly lost for the next 270 minutes.

There’s true-blue Wilhelm (Volker Bruch), who’s already served one tour of duty to the west, and is now heading to the Eastern front with younger brother Friedhelm (Tom Schilling), a dreamy pacifist. In love with Wilhelm but annoyingly reluctant — for years on end — to say so is sugary Charlotte (Miriam Stein), herself headed to the front as a nurse. Staying behind are Greta (Katharina Schüttler), who fancies herself the next Marlene Dietrich, and her boyfriend Viktor (Ludwig Trepte), who can’t convince his willfully oblivious parents that German Jews like themselves are in mortal danger.

Needless to say, all illusions are eventually dashed. Amid the grueling, endless, disastrous campaign against the Soviet Union, Wilhelm is embarrassed by his “cowardly” brother until the latter adapts to pervasive inhumanity by becoming a cold killing machine himself. Charlotte overcomes her squeamishness at the daily hospital carnage while retaining her compassion. Greta does become famous, thanks to the high-ranking Gestapo patron (Mark Waschke) she sleeps with. But the prima donna arrogance she develops proves perilous, and her attempts to get Viktor smuggled out to safety go awry — escaping a train headed to a concentration camp, he joins a group of Polish partisans scarcely less anti-Semitic than the Nazis.

Fast-paced yet never achieving the psychological depth of similarly scaled historical epics, Generation War grows most interesting in its late going, when for all practical purposes the Allies have already won the war (at least in Europe), but Germany continues to self-destruct. Imminent peace provides no relief for protagonists who’ve survived only to find themselves fucked no matter what side they stay on, or surrender to.

That moral and situational complexity is too often missing in a narrative that aims for sympathy via simplicity. None of the protagonists are “really” Nazis — they’re mysteriously free of racial prejudice and other drummed-in ideological points, even if (for a while) they dutifully speak about serving der Fatherland. (Only bad, subsidiary people seem to buy into those concepts; Wilhelm is never shown killing women or children, and the death camps remain off-screen.) The underrated recent film version of The Book Thief (2013) was criticized for soft-pedaling the era, but it was about (and from the viewpoint of) somewhat sheltered Aryan children living in a civilian wartime. Generation War‘s characters are of exactly the age to be fully indoctrinated young zealots, yet none of them seems touched by National Socialist dogma. Even though it’s mid-1941 when we meet them, they act like official anti-Semitism is still a some minor, misguided inconvenience.

Of course such naiveté is designed to maximize their later disillusionment. But War doesn’t even try to approach the serious analysis of national character in something like Ursula Hegi’s great novel Stones from the River, in which we come to understand how time, propaganda, and preyed-upon weaknesses can turn a town of perfectly nice Germans into fascists capable of turning a blind eye toward the Final Solution. Embarrassingly, this shallower fiction tries in the end to pass itself off as truth: Before the closing credits we’re given birth and death dates of principal characters as if they were inspired by real people. (One purportedly lives still.) It’s one thing when some dumb horror movie opens with “Based on a true story” — wanna buy a bridge too? — but in this context, the fib is worse than disingenuous, it’s slimy.

In addition to being hugely popular at home, Generation War stirred considerable controversy (not least among insulted Poles), which is good. “Never forget,” indeed — but for such a big populist cultural event, it’s an awfully soft reminder. If it were one of the 1970s miniseries it recalls, it wouldn’t be relatively hard-hitting Roots, but Rich Man, Poor Man, in which tough sociopolitical issues of postwar America were whipped into sudsy melodrama cloaked in somber self-seriousness. *

 

GENERATION WAR opens March 14 in San Francisco.

Evolution of yoga

Michael Redmond
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4

steve@sfbg.com

YOGA Being suspended upside down in an aerial yoga swing in Peaceful Warrior position, transitioning into Happy Buddha as I reached for the Quantum Playground to deepen my stretch, I gained a new perspective on the world — and the ongoing evolution of yoga in the Bay Area.

Innovation and the cross-pollination of various ideas and practices are as quintessential to the Bay Area as yoga and other mindful approaches to self-improvement and secular spirituality. So it makes sense that local yoga teachers and entrepreneurs are developing new twists on a timeless art.

My yoga practice began in 2001, and I was fortunate to have an instructor who emphasized that yoga is about breathing more than stretching or exercise. It’s about being present and maintaining that presence through the pain of life and its contortions. Inhale to lengthen, exhale to deepen; breathe in, breathe out, repeat indefinitely.

When aerial yoga instructor Jen Healy first hung me upside down in her San Rafael home and “Healyng Sanctuary” while we were dating in 2012, that focus on breathing was essential just to keep my lunch down (or up, in this case). Yoga can have that disorienting quality, particuarly in the inverted postures.

And then I worked through it, finding a new world opened up on the other side where previous limits yielded to new openness and flexibility. It can be playful, as in Healy’s Aerial Yoga Play swings and teacher trainings; or the partner-based AcroYoga that emerged here about 10 years ago.

“You get to play your way to a healthier and happier state of being,” Healy says, calling her swings and jungle-gym-like Quantum Playground she built tools for “awakening the courageous inner child.”

Or the new approaches to yoga can cultivate a deeper sense of self-awareness, purpose, and integration of our mental, emotional, and physical bodies, as instructor Dina Amsterdam strives for with her InnerYoga approach.

“Yoga is about finding balance. We are walking around so out of balance as a culture,” Amsterdam says, describing her teachings as helping people better understand their inner landscape “so they can discover what is out of balance within them…InnerYoga is not a style, it’s an approach to life.”

San Francisco’s progressive, humanist values have also helped project yogic teachings onto the sociopolitical scene through groups such as Off the Mat, Into the World (OTM), with the mission “to use the power of yoga to inspire conscious, sustainable activism and ignite grassroots social change.”

A new local company called YOL is trying to marry that sense of activism with the yoga retreats to exotic locales that have become so popular, creating trips that combine yoga and meditation with volunteer work on service projects.

“I do think it’s part of yoga’s evolution,” says YOL co-founder David Cherner. “It’s taking that good feeling you get from yoga and channeling it into giving to someone else.”

 

A DAY TO BREATHE

In this hustle-bustle world of ours, it feels grounding and luxurious to take a full day to breathe, to meditate, and to practice yoga. Retreats of a day to a week have become big in the yoga world, but my first one was Feb. 23 at Amsterdam’s home near Mt. Tamalpais.

“Yoga in the United States, particularly in the Bay Area, became very focused on the physical component,” says Amsterdam, who instead strives “to really make self-awareness and connection to essence the primary purpose of yoga.”

She developed her InnerYoga approach in 2008 during the economic crash — since then graduating 36 teachers who now employ her approach — using the mindful evolution of her own practice to meet the growing anxiety and imbalance she saw in the community.

“What I was most effective at teaching is what people were really needing,” Amsterdam said. “My classes slowed way down.”

I met Amsterdam through the YinYoga classes that she teaches at Yoga Tree, classes that involve holding postures for extended periods of time — from a few minutes up to a half-hour — which can open up both joints and deep emotions as practioners breathe through their resistance.

But Amsterdam says that YinYoga is just part of InnerYoga, which involves active and passive poses, meditation, and teachings and exercises designed to connect yoga with a mindful approach to life. Its four foundations are “awareness, kindness, breath, and ease.”

“I’m teaching people self-care practices both on the mat and off the mat,” Amsterdam said.

That idea was the basis for OTM, which is “in the business of creating leaders and helping leaders connect to their passions,” says Rebecca Rogers, who splits her professional time between teaching yoga and working for OTM on its seva fundraising campaigns.

“When you slow things down, you have more time to make choices,” Rogers said, describing the notion of mindfulness that yoga helps create. “A big part of mindfulness is the ability to tune into the world.”

That bridge between the yoga and political worlds will be tested this year as yogini and renowned author Marianne Williamson runs for Congress in Southern California, promoting mindfulness, a campaign that OTM’s Yoga Votes project is supporting.

Between the connections to self and to the world, AcroYoga is a hybrid of yoga, acrobatics, and Thai massage, a fluid practice where partners use one another for pressure or as a plaform for poses.

“I don’t think there’s enough safe touch in the world, so AcroYoga allows that,” says Tyler Blank, who discovered the practice in 2004 and became one of its first certified teachers.

Later, in Hawaii, Blank discovered the concept of ecstatic dance — with its “contact improv” techniques that are similar to AcroYoga — and brought it to the Bay Area, where its twice-weekly events in Oakland have grown in popularity.

“I realized we could take partner yoga and start to dance with it very slowly,” Blank said. “I think yoga is evolving into dance.”

However yoga evolves, the Bay Area is likely to be at the center of that process.

Climate fight is a street fight

Michael Redmond
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41
Climate fight is a street fight

STREET FIGHT

Prolonged warm-weather droughts seem a normal part of California life, but the intensity of drought impacts — shrinking snowpack, intense wildfires, crop failures, and the devastation of wildlife habitat and fisheries — is likely accentuated by global warming.

So it’s not enough to simply save water. In this drought, our sense of urgency about global warming should be ramped up. The science from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, respected scientists like James Hansen, and even the World Bank (historically no friend to radical ecologists) all stress that droughts will get worse unless greenhouse gas emissions peak in the next decade.

The science is clear. If we are to avoid a disastrous future of ecological upheaval, violence, and forced mass migrations of hundreds of millions of people (many of whom produce the least amount of carbon emissions) then we must dramatically reduce emissions now, and we must do it in a globally fair and equitable way. And to be fair and equitable, we must reduce driving. Here’s why.

Globally, transportation is the fastest growing sector of greenhouse emissions, owing in large measure to the expansion of global automobility. Presently 500 million passenger cars are in use (approximately one-third of them in the United States), but by 2030, this figure is expected to reach 1 billion worldwide.

This increase in automobility will contribute substantially to the “trillionth ton” of cumulative carbon emissions, which is an emissions threshold signaling global climate catastrophe. Today we are more than halfway there (556 billion tons). At current rates of consumption, including America’s ownership of 800 cars and trucks per 1,000 persons, we hit the trillionth ton in 28 years.

To avoid this, we must keep as much fossil fuel as possible in the ground. Because the United States is disproportionately responsible for at least 27 percent of the cumulative carbon emissions since industrialization, and has a disproportionate number of cars compared to the rest of the world, we in the United States have a particular responsibility to keep carbon in the ground.

If China, which has produced 10 percent of global emissions so far, had the same per capita car ownership rate as the United States, there would be over 500 million more cars, doubling the current worldwide rate. This would be madness. It would be worse than building the Keystone pipeline, which is what Hansen called “game over” for the global climate because it’s a spigot into the sticky, tarlike oils in Alberta which, if fully tapped, would be a carbon time bomb.

Ask yourself this: If China (and possibly India) successfully copy American-style driving, how much tar sands would that require? What kind of world would that look like? And if Americans (and especially environmentalists) expect the global middle class in China and India to stand aside while we keep on driving, that is stark, crass, and inequitable.

Many well-meaning environmentalists and progressives think that driving a Prius or buying an electric car will be adequate in mitigating this conundrum. They must reconsider. There is no “green” car when a global middle class replicates American driving patterns.

If the world’s fleet of gasoline-powered automobiles magically shifts to electric, hydrogen fuel cells, or biofuels, the change will draw resources away from industrial, residential, and food systems, or it will have to involve an entirely new layer of energy production (more tar sands). Massive quantities of coal and petroleum will be needed to scale-up to wind turbines, solar panels, nuclear, and other arrays of energy, as well as for all the new “clean cars.”

Are environmentalists still planning to drive around the Bay Area while waiting for this magic? I sure hope not.

In these global warming days, with drought on everyone’s mind, we must avoid wasting precious water washing cars, and we must reallocate street space with fewer cars in mind. A critical piece of the puzzle is to prioritize public transit and bicycles over automobiles by building exclusive transit and bicycle lanes, remove the lanes and curbside parking available to cars, install signal prioritization for transit and bicycles at intersections, queue-jumping so that transit can bypasses traffic stalled at intersections, restrictions on turns for automobiles, and transit stop improvements including bus stop bulb-outs and amenities.

Reconfigured streets must furthermore exclude car-oriented land uses like more off-street parking in the 92,000 new housing units projected for San Francisco by Plan Bay Area. These units, whatever size or income, should be completely car-free. And this must include removal of existing parking beneath homes, replacing garages with housing and returning the privatized curb cut to the public.

 

VISIONS FOR HAIGHT

In many respects, the Haight Street corridor is a model for the kind of global warming mitigation strategy the rest of America should follow. The corridor has high density, transit dependent, and car-free households (over 30 percent in the Upper Haight and almost 50 percent in the Lower Haight/Hayes Valley) It has several walkable neighborhood commercial districts, as well as several hundred units of new housing (some of which are below market rate) under construction in Hayes Valley. Almost 25,000 passengers take the Haight buses (6-Parnassus and 71-Haight Noriega) daily, making it one of the busiest combined transit corridors in the city.

But the buses are crowded and often stuck in traffic, so the SFMTA has plans to improve service by increasing frequency, converting more of the existing route into faster “limited” service whereby some buses stop only at key points and removing the “jog” at Laguna and Page which adds delay to the inbound buses.

As I’ve written before, the Muni staff has a good plan known as the Transit Effectiveness Project, with a modest reallocation of street space for higher transit reliability, attracting more ridership, and potentially enabling San Franciscans to conveniently reduce driving to half of all trips by 2018 (it was at 62 percent in 2012). But on both ends of Haight Street, the city has fumbled. While not a disaster, hopefully Muni can learn some lessons and tweak the plans.

On the eastern end, Muni will shift buses off Page Street, converting a short segment of Haight back to two-way. The new two-way Haight includes a transit-only lane between Laguna and Gough/Market streets, which will dramatically improve travel times and reliability. Part of it will enable buses to bypass queues of cars making the right turn from Haight onto Octavia.

Where this scheme falls short is in the plans to simply give former bus stops on Page to private cars for parking. A more progressive plan would instead use the space to help make room for needed bicycle improvements on Page between Laguna and Market. Nearby are multiple housing construction sites where curbside parking has been temporarily removed — such as at the 55 Laguna site. The city has a great opportunity to innovate with transit-first policies at all of these construction sites.

Instead of turning space over to private cars when construction concludes, the city could instead build more bus lanes, pedestrian space, curbside car sharing, and bicycle space. The city could also return some of the space to parking, but only in exchange for parking removal upstream, such as at Haight and Fillmore, where bus stop improvements are sorely needed.

Throughout the city, there are block-by-block opportunities like these, where the city can help the climate instead of giving away parking. As the city discontinues bus stops and sees more housing construction, the policy should be to use curbside space for bicycles, pedestrians, or curbside car share — not simply giving it away to private car parking.

Meanwhile, at the other end of Haight, the city has also fumbled in proposing to reroute the 6-Parnassus, an important electric trolley bus line, off the Frederick-Cole-Parnassus segment. Bus riders in the Upper Haight are incensed. At a recent public meeting, a crowd of 90 people balked at the cut. Muni planners defended the proposal, arguing that ridership is low in the hilly segment above, and that a less productive segment would be shifted to the more crowded Haight Street.

This might seem logical but it may also be shortsighted, especially since the existing segment has overhead trolley wires. Drought notwithstanding, the electric trolley buses are the greenest motorized mobility in San Francisco, propelled by hydroelectricity from Hetch Hetchy.

Taking a longer and more progressive view, it might be useful to think of the debate over the 6-Parnassus this way: If the city is hoping to wean motorists from their cars by achieving the laudable goal of having 30 percent of all trips in the city by transit (up from 17 percent today), cutting service, even in relatively low ridership routes, is counterproductive. It raises the question: Is the ridership level low because the service was poor to begin with, including such irritating factors as less frequency, less reliability, or fewer hours of service? What would ridership levels look like if these less-crowded routes had high frequency, all-day and late-night service with high reliability?

Moreover, what would demand for these routes look like if parking were substantially reduced throughout the city while car-travel lanes were removed, creating space for bicycle lanes and transit lanes? Or what if there were a regional gasoline tax, a congestion charge, or other measures that priced automobility closer to its real social cost, thus producing higher demand for transit?

Surely, reducing the footprint of transit service, however inefficient that service might seem now, is not creating a template necessary for carrying 1.4 million daily passengers in the future, which is what it would take to reach significant emissions reduction goals and 30 percent mode share. Removing segments like the 6-Parnassus on Frederick will only make it harder to rebuild and accomplish that goal. And for political expediency it will also make it harder for Mayor Ed Lee to sell his transportation funding ballot proposals to progressive voters in November.

Muni planners ought to ditch the proposal to reroute the 6-Parnassus, and instead focus on maximizing improved reliability and transit efficiency on the other end of Haight Street by removing parking and prioritizing transit and bicycling on Haight and Page respectively.

Thinking globally about climate change means acting locally, on the streets of San Francisco.

Street Fight is a monthly column by Jason Henderson, a professor at San Francisco State University’s Department of Geography and Environment.

 

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