San Francisco’s Magic Theater Finds a New Prophetic Voice
I’ve often written, sometimes here in this column, that modern theater is like a church. Better, it’s what a church today can be: a physical space where you can be alone with your thoughts in the company of others and thrill to the sheer physicality of the experience, in a room peopled by those whose job it is to make you laugh, cry, and bitch if you want to.
San Francisco’s Magic Theatre has been such a place for new theater voices for close to seven decades. And it’s done so – when it is serving its mission – by making room for those new voices and nurturing them for primetime.
Now comes Ashley Smiley, a long-time member of the Magic’s resident company/actors’ repertory Camp Santo. Smiley, who moonlights as a graduate student in theology, is enjoying the world premiere of Dirty White Teslas Make Me Sad, directed by Raelle Myrick-Hodges, and the laity at the Magic has responded well.
It’s a tragicomic morality tale told by Smiley — who writes like an angel in urban gear — about the latest wave of gentrification in San Francisco. Naima (Anna Marie Sharpe) is a young African American woman who spends her days behind the wheel for ride-share companies, too smart to be happy about it, too aimless to do anything. She takes refuge in the comfort of her car, popping pills to turn the streets of San Francisco into a colorful video game-like arcade. We learn that she and her mother need to vacate their home because they can no longer afford it. But while her mother Delcina (Tanika Baptiste) hustles to prepare for the move, Naima can’t get her stuff together.
In the meantime, Naima’s car keeps getting vandalized. Just so happens her uncle Pappadeuax (Juan Manuel Amador) has an auto shop and offers to replace the glass. The bad news is that Pappadeaux – “Godfather” in Creole – is both angel and demon. While looking out for Naima, he manipulates her into leading a car heist of apocalyptic proportions – hijacking a fleet of Teslas and having them plunge into the Bay like lemmings.
It’s funny yet terrifying. While society worries about how machines might conspire against us, Smiley smiles knowing it is we the humans we must worry about.
But the bigger message is that humans still have agency, and that we will do whatever needs to be done to protect ourselves and our loved ones. Not everything works in Dirty Teslas Make Me Sad; the story and the stagecraft are still evolving, at the right pace. But where it does work, it’s transcendent. Smiley’s words soar in the speeches, Shakespearean in depth and detail, as when Naima prays to God to give her purpose, and when her mother rages eloquently about what many urban blacks have had to do to get by.
Do you know how much talking I do? Nima try this? Are you looking for that? I try to sit down with her and explain where I’m coming from, where we came from. Did we or did we not have to pick pockets and pull purses in order to eat? Catholic school uniforms and backpacks hiding the most recently alchemized get-rich-quick scheme. And if we wanted to see those people called our parents, we had to go to the club… (beat) I am so worried that I will leave this Earth and she won’t be ready.
Earlier, Pappadeaux, the Godfather, leans to the audience for a soliloquy on ethics.
See how 5-0 oversees open-air drug deals without pause, watch the city bleed out with a handful of gauze and use it to wipe the sweat of useless satisfaction from their brow. Just a couple more blocks either way, and the scent of dried piss stains and mammalian feces mutates into a guarded fragrance of Burberry perfume and the power-washed facade of care and concern for the tourists’ sake. 27 Bodies dropping like shell casings on Newcomb and lines are redrawn where the money resides. But who am I to judge? Another app-based struggler stuck between the City’s economic stratospheres and lost at that. Five different map apps and I still get turned around, ask for my steps to be ordered and God’s playing hold music with promises that my call will be answered in due time.
It’s quite a moment, and Amador with both grace and physical swagger — a younger version of a Bobby Cannavale — is just the man for the moment. You could hear a pin drop in the theater — in the church — whose stage is a deconstructed dirty white Tesla (a sly sleight of hand by set designer Tanya Orellana). You may be well into the play before you realize you are sitting in that car for the fatal ride.
But the ride, I expect, will continue. Yes, Dirty White Teslas Make Me Sad is about San Francisco, a city once seen as the fountain of youth, liberation, Summer of Love and all that. But as in all things specific, therein lie universals, for “God is in the details.” Here’s to seeing that dirty white Tesla roll into Detroit, Chicago, and, yes, New York. The people there will get it. Ask Brooklyn.
Dirty White Teslas Make Me Sad runs through March 17 at the Magic Theatre. For tickets, go here.
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