This week on Open Air, KALW’s radio magazine for the Bay Area Performing Arts in Times of Corona, host David Latulippe talks with actor and playwright Julia Brothers about her solo show I Was Right Here, currently available for streaming from SF Playhouse; we talk about Three Girls Theatre’s Year of Yes!, their tenth anniversary; and about the current season of Pocket Opera. Plus, Peter Robinson talks with Rush Rehm from Stanford Repertory Theater about Voices of the Earth, a project for Earth Day, April 22.
I Was Right Here, a new play written and performed by Julia Brothers, was filmed on stage at San Francisco Playhouse and is currently available as on-demand video stream. In her debut work, Brothers takes the audience on a train ride along moments in her life, from watching RFK’s funeral train pass by as a child with her father, to riding a commuter train to visit her aging mother.
On last week’s installment of Open Air’s Corona Radio Theater, we featured the first episode of The Sins & Secrets of Tabard Lake, the first ever radio play by San Francisco’s Three Girls Theater. We follow up with 3GT’s executive artistic director & founding playwright AJ Baker, and with play director Pamela Hollings about this project, and about the company’s tenth anniversary celebration this year, which they have named their Year of Yes!
From San Francisco’s Pocket Opera, we talk with soprano Marcelle Dronkers, pianist and music director Jefferson Packer, and with general manager Chung-Wai Soong about their current season, which continues this Sunday, April 18 (3pm) with Handel, with Care!, in which Dronkers revisits some of Handel’s evil sorceresses she has performed on the Pocket Opera stage; among them Agrippina, Alcina, and Armida.
Plus, Open Air’s regular contributor and critic at large, Peter Robinson, talks with artistic director Rush Rehm of the Stanford Repertory Theater about Voices of the Earth, a script compiled for the celebration of Earth Day (April 22) by Rehm and Charles Junkerman, about the troubled relationship between humans and the natural world.
The text features voices of environmental pioneers (Muir, Carson, Stegner, Leopold), great nature writers (Thoreau, Snyder, Abbey), playwrights who turn to the environment for inspiration (Sophocles, Chekhov, O’Neill), native American leaders (Crowfoot, Chief Luther Standing Bear, Walking Buffalo), natural philosophers (Aristotle, Galileo, Rousseau, Emerson), poets who honor the earth (Li Po, Rumi, Neruda, Levertov, Lorde), international environmental activists (Mendes, Saro-wiwa, Maathai, Goodall, McKibben), climate change deniers who insist we face no crisis, and scientists who know better.
Open Air, with host David Latulippe, can be heard live on Thursday, April 15 at 1pm, to be archived at this location afterwards. Listen now or anytime…