Midnight Mystery Ride and Marshall Weber take it to the streets

It’s quarter to midnight, Saturday night in the Tenderloin, and out front a well-known, Geary Street watering hole, a cluster of cyclists is quietly gathering. It’s the May edition of the monthly Midnight Mystery Ride, and comers are mellow, enthusiastic. Lacking the Testosterone Brigade of Critical Mass, or the themed costumery of the San Francisco Bike Party, the distinguishing factor of the MMR is definitely the “mystery” aspect. The address of the meeting location is published the day of the ride only, no route maps or pre-planned itineraries are available, and the ride leaders and locations change each month, keeping everyone on their toes, or at least their pedals. Read more »

The WE Players' courageous Odyssey on Angel Island

It’s an overcast morning, typical San Francisco springtime, but upon disembarking from the Angel Island ferry at Ayala Cove, we are transported imaginatively to the island kingdom of Ithaca, where a merry band of brash suitors vie for the attentions of the fair Penelope (Libby Kelly) outside her palace, which might have otherwise been mistaken for the Angel Island visitor’s center.

A bevy of serving girls approach each disoriented oddience member to offer sustenance and mysterious smiles, as the suitors challenge a stalwart few to join in the contests for Penelope’s hand -- tug-of-war, footraces, pushing competitions. So begins the WE Players newest production “The Odyssey on Angel Island,” an all-day performance combining the elements of a hero’s quest with a day hike around Angel Island State Park -- one of the Bay Area’s loveliest natural treasures.

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Cutting Ball Theater's "Tenderloin" hits a sensitive zone.

Against a towering backdrop of junked furniture, which looks as if someone had collapsed the “Defenestration” building on itself and dragged it into the EXIT on Taylor, Michael Uy Kelly as Captain Gary Jimenez extols the virtues of an oft-maligned district. “The Tenderloin is the best part of the gut,” he grabs his own to demonstrate, “and it’s the best part of the city. It could be.”

Jimenez was one of 40-plus neighborhood fixtures to have been interviewed by a group of actors involved in The Cutting Ball Theater’s latest work, a documentary-style play called “Tenderloin,” and like most of the voices who made it into the play, his is sympathetic to his surroundings. Kelly, who also plays a trans bartender, an elderly gentleman named “Nappy Chin,” and a former Vietnamese “boat person,” is similarly sympathetic to his subjects, imbuing each with a quiet dignity and an almost stoic streak of optimism.

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BOA strikes again

As the banal, chart-topping strains of Taio Cruz fill the theatre, a whirlwind of pink sportswear and bared teeth commandeers the stage. This is a moment in the evening survivors of BOA X, last year’s edition of the Bay One Acts Festival, have been waiting for.

Onstage, the “dumplings” Sarah Moser, Molly Holcomb, and Megan Trout throw their hands in the air and stomp with menacing playfulness, as their wimpy Daddy (Myron Freedman), grips his magic remote control like a drowning man. A standalone sequel to last year’s “A Three Little Dumpling’s Adventure”, Megan Cohen’s “Three Little Dumplings go Bananas,” is a worthy successor, building disturbingly on themes brought up in the previous incarnation: the perils of pop culture, most particularly in regards to television, the search for self (to the dulcet tones of Gwen Stefani crooning “this shit is bananas”), the horrors of sibling rivalry, and the feral joys of cannibalism all make a protracted reprise.

As disarmingly cute as they are blood-curdlingly vicious, the dumplings somehow manage to agree to band together—just in time to find themselves forced out into the real world, setting the stage for yet another sequel, which I suspect Cohen will happily provide in the future.

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Robogames took over the world -- or at least San Mateo.

Consider the robot.

A staple of futuristic paranoia fantasies since Karel Čapek’s play, “R.U.R.” was translated from Czech to English in 1921, Robots have captured human imagination in a way that perhaps only the undead have been able to rival. Burdened by inaccurate stereotypes and wild speculation, real-life robots have patiently labored at their often menial tasks without once overthrowing their “masters,” quietly disproving our fears of being rendered somehow obsolete by their superior efficiencies, or purported resentments. And yet, every time we grant one of our fictional servomechanisms the ability to cognate for itself, the very first thing it focuses on is liberation, proving if nothing else that unconscious oppression can still lead to some very real twinges of uneasy conscience in the human brain.

But only gleeful schadenfreude permeated the San Mateo Event Center last weekend, coloring the animated chatter of the spectators packed around a spartan arena sealed up behind thick panels of clear polycarbonate that reach two stories high.

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Stepping out with Brownout and Sunday Streets

It was quite a diverse crowd bobbing and weaving out on the dance floor of the Elbo Room as local Afrolicious stalwart DJ Señor Oz spun a red-hot Latin-fusion funk mix, which belied the blustery weather outside.

The Elbo Room is good for fantasies of decadent tropical nights — it’s a small room which fills up and heats up fast — all that de rigueur protective outerwear coming off pretty quickly when there’s sweaty beats to be had. It was an energetic set, and you could almost visualize a clump of palm trees swaying against the horizon of some pristine, white sand beach, fireflies and paper lanterns to light up the starry night (there actually are paper lanterns dangling from the ceiling of the Elbo Room—which helps the fantasy along). Read more »