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A Strong Game

Curtains up for the third annual Festival of American playwrights of Color

Mixed Players: Members of the cast from different plays make a group effort for the camera at the third annual Festival of American Playwrights of Color. Photo by Karen Vibert-Kennedy.

By Yi Hai Lai

The Diego Rivera Theater nestles amongst City College of San Francisco’s squat utility buildings. An impressive mural by the theater’s namesake colors the foyer. The depictions of Inca jewelry makers and Spanish laborers are reminiscent of the long-destroyed masterpiece Rivera painted in the Rockerfeller Building in New York. It is in this surprisingly sophisticated theater that the third annual Festival of Playwrights of Color holds a captive, albeit modest, audience. Without ceremony the lights dim and six plays are presented almost back to back. Stage changes are quick; props are sparse and effective.

The program opens with Reunion, a monologue by Leo Rodriguez set in a gay bar. Our nameless, whining protagonist has this bad habit of going to such places and offering up his services to old horn dogs for money. He hides his urgent sense of internal confusion with a bitchy, holier-than-thou attitude. As he waits for his drink and his prospective sugar daddy for “one last time,” he takes us through character-forming snippets of his life. We find in his bag-o-tricks an estranged father, a true love and a strange hatred for drag queens. When he finally squares his shoulders, ready to get down to business, he comes face to face with…

Next up is another monologue, with a stand out performance by Tammy Nishimura. She plays a Hawaiian Obachan (Grandma) receiving a granddaughter from the “mainland.” In pidgin English, Obachan inquires after her estranged daughter who lives on the same island. She serves her granddaughter tea and biscuits with a bit of irony on infancy and old age. “You start eating soggy. You end eating soggy, eh.” Excited, world-weary and shy, Obachan is embodies a lifetime of obstinance and humor. Nishimura cleverly frames emotion with the ramblings of a mother/grandmother . In sips and nibbles, Obachan feeds us her story of three generations of strong, independent women. Snuggled in the poignant pauses are the shelved regret, vulnerability and love. Nishimura wrote But She’s Strong with much sensitivity to the cyclical human experience. Though she never met her own grandmother, she draws from her Japanese-Hawaiian up bringing which emphasizes a respect for elders. “”But She ‘s Strong is Nishimura’s first original play, however her involvement in the theater spans all three Festival of Playwrights of Color and several productions at City College. She has also rewritten and directed Beauty and the Beast, appeared as Pinocchio with the Performing Artists Group and performed with the Media Project. Her television appearances include Nash Bridges, Disney’s Golden Dreams and Flubber.

The Fame Game by Edgar Poma is a more elaborate production with a cast of five. A wide screen descends and we are shown a clip from the 1997 Oscar Awards where Matt Damon and Ben Afleck accept their best screenplay award for Good Will Hunting. The screen rises and we are backstage at the premiere of Thaw, a play within the play. The Hawaiian actors pass around a piece of tasty gossip. Rumor has it the Asian American author of Thaw, known only as Jason, ghostwrote Good Will Hunting. The question on everyone’s mind: “Did he really do it?” Individual levels of intelligence and ambition surface as the four bit players take stabs the truth. Jason arrives in the rain in time for the opening scene of Thaw…

Girl from family with murky “storage” business loves boy. They get together. Boy gets bored. Maybe a little spooked too. He leaves her and builds a life with another girl. They have a child. They are happy. Several years pass. They go on family vacation. The house they stay in comes from a mysterious benefactor. They wake up in the middle of the night. Their child is gone. He has been “refrigerated.” Smells like revenge…

Cast and playwright go for post-show drinks. As loose tongues get looser, one of the actors finally works up the guts to ask Jason about Good Will Hunting. Oh, the rewards in store for the audience as Jason wildy improvises the hula and reveals his sexual trade-off with Matt and Ben for the oscar-winning screenplay. “But they never really got what they wanted — they could never get close enough to the words.” To the audience, Poma poses this question: “Who’s using who?”

Poma is a Sacramento–born Filipino-American writer whose plays include A Summoning (New Conservatory Theater), Little Train and Studly Guy Baptized in the River (Teatro ng Tanaan), Tim the Puritan (HBO New Writers Workshop) and Hypnotista and Warm Embrace (Festival of American Playwrights of Color I and II). Poma received his B.A. from the U.C. Berkeley, and is the recipient of a California Arts Council Grant for playwriting.

After the five minute intermission, the energy flowed into a more somber place. The second half of the program began with One Word for Pain by Rachel Rajput: Two simultaneous monologues about a date rape pivot into a choreographed expression of pain.

Differences was written by the Ensemble and directed by Gloria Weinstock in a valiant effort to point out the subverted injustices that society thrusts upon its people. The idealism and severity of the prosecutor and defense attorney play off the comic portrayals of some of the witnesses. I almost want to call it Propaganda for Social Equality.

Last but not least is Soldados, adapted by Carlos Reyes from La Casa Grande, a novel by Alvaro Cepeda Samudio. Translated and directed by Jose Luis Leiva, Soldados feels like a Waiting for Godot on strike. Two soldiers greet the day with hazy military orders that don’t seem necessary to follow. They spend much time walking rather aimlessly, and trying to figure out specifics. Do they go to the station? Will they be fed? When are they meeting? How will they control the strike once they get to the banana fields? What time is it? They don’t know, they don’t know, they don’t know. Toward the evening, one of them ventures off to find a prostitute, the other finds himself confronting the workers on strike. He kills one of them by accident and flees the scene. Into the night, he meets up with the other soldier, who had forced himself on a girl who did not struggle, did not respond. What happened? Was it rape? Was the murder okay because he didn’t mean it? What will happen tomorrow? What time is it? They don’t know, they don’t know, they don’t know.

Much of the night’s energy radiated from Ann Fajilan, director of the first three plays of the evening. She is a tour de force behind talents of Carlo Del Conte, Tammy Nishimura, Joy Rivera-Olson, Jared Asato, Jaime Roca, Day Valdez, Apurua Narechania, and the members of the Ensemble, which consists of Tiffani Sierra, Steven G. Jackson, Gerardo Morales, Laura Meek, Farah Syach Ranie, Richard Alvarez, Niya Allen, and Amanda Livesey. Fajilan pointed out the unique importance of the Festival as the only one that exclusively premieres plays written by playwrights of color. In previous years, they have collected and produced international as well as local theater pieces. This year they chose to focus on authors from around the Bay Area.