Frog-kisser.

22 January 2002—Warning: this is a love note of some difficulty. I love theater. Mostly small theater. It’s often the only place you can see raw new works for the stage. Sometimes large theaters take chances on risky new plays, but their audiences don’t always reward them for their bravery, and such opportunities begin to dry up.

Larger nonprofit theaters do often produce new(ish) plays by new(ish) playwrights, but often they are ones that come with a certain buzz, ones that other larger nonprofits have already produced, to at least some success. The only other way a new play can (more or less) find a willing producer is if it’s by a proven author, such as Tom Stoppard, Eve Ensler, or David Mamet. But will any of those theaters produce the latest work by George McKibbens?

George who? you say.

Exactly. For the latest work by George McKibben, you’re going to have to go far out of your way, even in a little town like San Francisco. You’ll have to make your way into the side streets off the Embarcadero, to the Eureka Theatre. There you’ll find (for only two more weekends, unlike how Phantom ran at the Curran for five years) the Bay One-Acts Festival.

The BOA Festival is presenting thirteen new plays by thirteen different playwrights, none of whom has had major productions of their work, so far as I know. It’s a different program each weekend, which is good and bad. Good, because it therefore provides a stage for thirteen plays as opposed to, say, only four or five. Bad, because if you miss them, they’re gone.

That’s actually ok with me for four of the first five plays I saw; the acting, direction, and production were good, and there were genuinely good moments in each of them, but they were all a bit (some more than a bit) overlong even at twenty minutes or so apiece. But one of them I truly enjoyed: it was clever, poignant, and incontrovertibly theatrical, exuding a definite and infectious love of language.

The other four I could probably take or leave, but I saw something that changed my perspective, gave me a different way of viewing the world. That wasn’t a perfect play, either, but even so, I’ll be back for more. George McKibbens’s play is this weekend, and I don’t want to miss it.

Postscript, 28 January 2002: I did see George’s play, and I’m glad I did. I didn’t need to nearly die on the Bay Bridge for it, but I’m glad I saw the play regardless. As far as I’m concerned, George knows better than Wes Anderson how to make unsympathetic characters oddly sympathetic, if far from completely so.