September 11, 2002

By Robert Avila

LOOKING OVER THE attractions for fall 2002, I'd hesitate to point to anything as substantial as a trend in the season's theater offerings. But the fact that most lineups tilt toward work with a social bite is apparent enough. At least that describes the following highlights from the coming weeks.

Starting off in the East Bay, look for a less than flattering but humorous and ultimately compassionate take on human relations in Berkeley Repertory Theatre's season opener, John Guare's House of Blue Leaves. Guare's semiautobiographical family farce of Vietnam-era America, which premiered in 1971, offers an outrageous and timely "sicksties" flashback in its unflinching look at the roots of moral corruption. And not far away, a dysfunctional family also takes center stage at UC Berkeley's Zellerbach Playhouse with the October opening of Canadian playwright George F. Walker's Escape from Happiness, a ferociously dark comedy that's part of his Dawson clan-centered "East End Trilogy."

Aurora Theatre opens its season with the Bay Area premiere of Neil LaBute's The Shape of Things, another wicked and highly touted morality tale from the maker of the film In the Company of Men. This time LaBute's protagonist-victim is the tractable boyfriend of a domineering female art student bent on remaking him after her own aesthetic inclinations. Aurora follows this with Michael Frayn's Alarms and Excursions, a purely comical foray. Sounding alarms of its own, Michelle Carter's excursion into the psyche of the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski Killed People with Bombs, debuts next month at the Magic Theatre, which commissioned the part-musical, part-fictional, part-documentary piece by the creator of Hillary and Soon-Yi Shop for Ties. Eastenders Repertory Company opens its season at the Eureka Theatre with "Eight x Tenn," a unique program of lesser-known Tennessee Williams one-acts, including some candidly autobiographical pieces ruminating on periods of early failure and late decline.

Not all biographical roads lead back to dysfunction or depression. Healthier roots surface in the reflective Lackawanna Blues, Ruben Santiago-Hudson's one-man reminiscence about growing up in "Nanny" Rachel Crosby's rooming house in Lackawanna, N.Y. This tribute to a beloved surrogate mother and role model grounds itself in a tradition of African American storytelling and features the accompaniment of accomplished blues guitarist Bill Sims Jr. The show premiered at New York's Public Theater in 2001 and will be making its San Francisco debut at American Conservatory Theater in October. With roots of its own, the new musical review Hairstory takes the main stage at Theatre Rhinoceros, leading off its 25th anniversary season with a gospel-, jazz-, and blues-loaded exploration of the reality and metaphor of hair in the construction of personal identity.

Latino roots are big in the mix too (September is Latino Heritage Month). Thick Description has already inaugurated its season with Octavio Solis's border-town drama Dreamlandia, based on Calderón de la Barca's La vida es sueno (running through Sept. 15). Solis, a San Francisco resident, enjoys an international reputation but has a special relationship with Bay Area theater. Shadowlight Productions will launch the world premiere of his new play, The Seven Visions of Encarnacion, at Brava Theater Center in late October. Herbert Siguenza, of local heroes Culture Clash, stages his one-man show Cantinflas!, paying tribute to the famous Mexican comedian, at Yerba Buena Center Forum this month. And Naomi Iizuka has created 17 Reasons (Why) – an archaeology of San Francisco's Mission District – specifically for the Mission's own Campo Santo. It will premiere at Intersection for the Arts in October.

Other highlights this season include Mart Crowley's long-awaited sequel to 1968's The Boys in the Band, The Men from the Boys, which will have its world premiere at New Conservatory Theatre Center next month; ACT's masters program production of Caryl Churchill's Serious Money, a sharp and scathing treatment of the money-grabbing '80s that will no doubt need little in the way of updating; and Last Planet's season opener Henrik Ibsen's Brand, an early and less-produced play that also carries a timely theme of religious fanaticism (read Christian). Shotgun Players' will stage the Dario Fo favorite, We Won't Pay! We Won't Pay!, a Rabelaisian comedy by the Italian Nobel laureate that champions the exploited classes over and against their masters. And ACT tackles the fourth estate when it opens its season Sept. 19 with a revival of Tom Stoppard's Night and Day, a major early success for the British playwright (written in 1978) that treats with his renowned wit and perspicacity the issues of journalistic ethics and a free press in a war-torn African country.