Drama Masks: We just lost Jerry again

I love Jerry Garcia’s music as much as the next born-San Franciscan, but those “psychedelic” Muni buses just look dumb. I get what they were going for, but the design is so generic that it loses all meaning. It reeks of corporate appropriation. If you wanted a bus to acknowledge the Grateful Dead without using the Steal Your Face logo, you can just cover it with those stickers that put Jerry’s dire wolf onto Mickey Mouse’s body. Honestly, that would be less vomit-inducing when it drives down the street.

I bring this up because news recently broke of another Garcia tribute—one that promised a great deal more depth—being put in cold storage—right as the city gears up to celebrate one of its favorite offspring. Magic Theatre commissioned Richard Montoya’s Jerry Garcia in the Lower Mission for a world premiere this October. Unfortunately, a press release went out over the weekend stating that the premiere’s been indefinitely postponed.

In a story that’s become all too common, the release states that “The Company cites difficulty in completing fundraising for the premiere in the challenging nonprofit financial climate affecting many arts organizations.”

I wish I could say I was surprised. I’m definitely disappointed. Montoya (of the performance trio Culture Clash) is a helluva performer; Rotimi Agbabiaka was set to direct a cast that included Lisa Hori-Garcia, Dena Martinez, and Aidaa Peerzada; and there’d be a live band for each show. That’s before we even found out what the visual design of the show would be.

Although plans are still moving forward for the two-night special show at the end of August (which was meant to simply serve as an appetizer before the October premiere), this still sucks for music fans, SF theatre-lovers, and admirers of Magic Theatre. I’ve admired the company for a few decades and kept close track of them since Campo Santo’s Sean San José succeeded Loretta Greco as artistic director.

Greco–whose departure was amongst a series of high-profile resignations, including Tony Taccone (Berkeley Rep) and Carey Perloff (ACT)–left some rather big shoes to fill. It’s to San José’s credit that he hasn’t tried to top her, but rather to redirect the focus of Magic. Greco made the not-quite-black-box a go-to destination for Taylor Mac spectacles and Luis Alfaro tragedies; San José opened the theatre’s door to local companies (Crowded Fire, Lorraine Hansberry) so they could tell intimate stories on a wider canvas.

So, one can’t help but take a step back when the press release quotes Sean saying “I am crushed and confounded to have to make this painful and disappointing decision and announcement. As cultivators of community and producers of new works, this is as devastating as it gets.”

Fortunately, there are no signs that Magic is shutting its doors anytime soon. Still, this indefinite postponement makes them the latest company scrambling for sustainable funds because the White House (and the city) thinks public money should line the pockets of oligarchs, eugenicists, and everyone else on Jeffrey Epstein’s list of Contacts. It’s been a year since we lost the world-renowned Cal Shakes and local legends Cutting Ball; it was just last week that we were all blindsided by the news that Oasis will have to close down by year’s end; and companies like Aurora Theatre are still in an odd state of financial limbo as one of their world premieres—Jon Spector’s Eureka Day—continues to receive near-unanimous acclaim around the country.

But, as any boxer will tell you, it’s inevitable that you’ll be hit hard; it’s how you move next that counts. Incidentally, I’d recently been in contact with Mx. Antoine Hunter, founder and artistic director of the SF-based Urban Jazz Dance Company. Hunter, who is Black and Deaf, is pushing forward with the company’s 13^th annual Bay Area International Deaf Dance Festival in a couple weeks, despite the work having been made harder by DOGE cuts to arts, diversity, and disability programs. I asked him how he carries on, given the aforementioned cuts as well as the brazen racism and ableism from the White House. They way he sees it, that’s the very reason why he should continue creating.

“We thrive because we must,” he told me. “These attacks make our work even more urgent. This festival isn’t funded by pity; it’s fueled by power. Every ticket sold, every grant won, every story told is an act of defiance and survival. We’re not just surviving the system; we’re building our own.”

I know that’s little comfort to folks wondering how to pay for their next meal (a status with which I’m intimately acquainted), but they prove that a level of resilience is required in the fight for justice and equality. The Annoying Orange wants to believe he lives in a world where he can give a single order and disappear all the people he wants. Yet, every recent headline has been about his own base turning on him when they aren’t fighting amongst themselves.

That doesn’t mean the rest of us should do nothing—quite the contrary, we should do more of what we’ve been doing—but it does mean that a level of patience is required for certain results. This is a mess that continues to pile up, but our active pressure and unwavering patience mean we’ll be the ones still around when it’s time to clean the mess up. It’s the perfect opportunity to do something better.

But yes, it is a mess. I won’t tell you otherwise.

GRANDMA’S MILLION-DOLLAR SCHEME AT THE MARSH-SF

Speaking of “a mess”…

I honestly wish there were a better way to sum up Koorosh Ostowari’s new solo show, but I find myself at a loss without resorting to euphemisms so contrived they could be comic book dialogue. Having never seen any of his earlier work, it’s impossible to say how this one compares. On its own merits, Grandma’s Million-Dollar Scheme (through August 23 at The Marsh-SF) is a 15-min story stretched to 90 and told by a performer who lacks the appropriate commitment to truly personify his eclectic characters.

The supposedly semi-autobiographical tale finds Ostowari working as a prison counselor for incarcerated people whose level of contrition varies from person to person. During a group session, our host shares with them a story about his real estate days decades prior. He was one of those “We’ll Buy Your House!” schemers who tricked families into selling their homes cheap so he could flip them for big profits.

This is how he meets Miss Johnson, a Black woman who owns a $2m building he wants to take off her hands for only half-a-mil. She seems game, provided Ostowari spend the night with her at the Fairmont Hotel. What follows is a brief tale of a grifter getting grifted as he ponders the realities of socio-economic inequality.

There’s no reason for this show to be 90 minutes. Hell, it would be hard to justify this show at 60 minutes. When Ostowari first tells about Miss Johnson and one of the cons, a Black man, points out the hypocrisy of our host “legally stealing” while others are locked up for petty crimes, that should be the end of the show. Instead, the script is padded to the gills with a few out-of-prison follow-ups with cons, Ostowari reminiscing about his property-owning divorcee mother, and several tangents, wherein our host can’t seem to remember if he’s in-character talking to the convicts or out-of-character talking to we the audience.

None of which is helped by Ostowari’s flat performance: He never disappears into the characters, simply quotes them with a few gestures the way someone tells an anecdote at a cocktail party. Knowing the details of the plot, one is tempted to think the show itself is a way of overbidding on real estate that should go for much less. In any case, the show is a long walk around a small property that just leaves you wondering where the door is.

At opening night eight of us wore masks, one accompanied by a woman with a chronic cough. Given the intimate crowd, CO² levels on my Aranet4 peaked around 697ppm by the end of the show.

GRANDMA’S MILLION-DOLLAR SCHEME runs through August 23 at The Marsh-SF. Tickets and further info here.