Star Finch says she wants to put people in a dream state with her plays. But paradoxically, with her latest Crowded Fire Theater production Shipping & Handling (through September 7 at Magic Theatre), Finch’s most ambitious to date, she also wants to awaken them—to all the empty Waymo cars that she sees driving around, sometimes just outside the stage doors in the Fort Mason parking lot.
“Some of the themes and questions asked in the play, maybe those things ping in their mind as they’re encountering their everyday reality,” she tells 48hills.
“It’s really about considering how there’s not a lot of consent when it comes to AI, it just seems thrown at us and inserted everywhere, and we’re supposed to accept and catch up,” she continues. “I would love if we collectively could get to a place of, ‘We need to pause for a moment and maybe ask some questions.’”
In many ways, Shipping & Handling looks to impose its own rhythm. For example, its scenes themselves go backward in time. The audience starts out viewing its actors at an afterparty, then a talkback with the playwright, before taking in the actual performance.
“We’ve all sort of seen the same movies from childhood onward,” Crowded Fire and Campo Santo’s Mellon Foundation playwright-in-residence says. “Shipping & Handling is playing with the idea of you receiving a package, a shipment, but what happened in order for it to get to you, what was the process?”
“I’m hoping that the first and second act not only engage with the audience in a way that leaves them uncertain of what’s coming next, or curious about what’s coming next. Particularly in act two, the talk back section, I’m hoping that section really grounds the audience in the authentic energy of the magic of theater, of inhabiting space together with a random group of humans in real time,” Finch says. “What does it mean to be human right now? We’re just constantly being told that AI is here and taking over, and AI is the future, and you need to hop on or get left behind.”
The playwright finished a draft of the production in 2019 and did a reading of it for Crowded Fire Theater’s Matchbox series. Originally set to open in 2020, it had been endlessly postponed due to pandemic logistics chaos. She first started thinking about Shipping and Handling after going with some actor friends to see Young Jean Lee’s The Shipment, a play structured like a minstrel show in the first act, meant to address the stereotypes Black performers deal with, with the second half a response to asking the performers what roles they’d want to play. After the performance Finch and her friends went to a talkback.
“It was really cringe, and just going into racist places, and it was really uncomfortable,” Finch remembered. “Afterwards, the friends I was with and some of the actors in the play, we all started talking in the lobby about the play and the talkback. We were talking so long that the theater was closing down, and they kicked us out, and we ended up standing out in front for another hour. The actors were venting to me about the kind of roles they were auditioning for and their frustrations with the plays that were up that season. I was standing there, sort of in awe of how smart and funny and talented these people were, and their frustrations with the type of roles that were available.”
On the way home, the energy of the night and the conversations stayed with her. She got the chance to do something with it when she did Crowded Fire’s Resilience & Development (R&D) Lab with Lisa Marie Rollins (who is directing Shipping and Handling with Leigh Rondon-Davis) and Mina Morita.
Finch is the author of the plays H.O.M.E. [Hookers on Mars Eventually], Bondage, and Josephine’s Feast, as well as the collaboration with Campo Santo’s Ethos de Masquerade and Crowded Fire’s Death Becomes Life. With her latest script, she says wanted to scramble expectations, not write a play where Black people have to prove their humanity matters.
“I was tired of the same old conversations,’” she says. “I hate when I’m watching a movie or a play, and I get that feeling of, ‘Oh, I know where this is headed,’ when it has to do with race. I wanted to scrub that as much as possible and try to activate a space and energy where no one really knows what’s coming next and they’re excited.”
She studied at San Francisco State, and says her teacher Michelle Carter did all she could to help her to become a produced playwright. It finally happened when she became part of Campo Santo. Her friend and member of the ensemble Juan Amador told one of the group’s founders, Sean San José (now the artistic director at the Magic Theatre), about Finch’s work, which led to her joining its “Clika” writing lab.
Campo Santo means “sacred ground,” and that’s what the group is for Finch, who grew up in San Francisco and is glad to be around people who remember it from before pre-tech boom like she does. That camaraderie gave her the confidence she needed to trust her ideas.
“Getting plugged into Campo Santo, it was like I finally had a home. I finally had a landing place,” she says. “There was almost nothing I could say that Campo wouldn’t be like, ‘Yeah, let’s try it. Let’s do it.’ And that means everything.”
SHIPPING & HANDLING runs through September 7. Magic Theatre, SF. Tickets and more info here.
