This week on Open Air, KALW’s radio magazine for the Bay Area Performing Arts in Times of Corona, host David Latulippe welcomes back to the virtual stage of our Corona Radio Theater, members of San Francisco performing arts company Word for Word, with the third and last part of Citizen by Greg Sarris. We talk with ODC director Chloë Zimberg and artist Monique Jenkinson about the first weekend of the ninth annual ODC Theater Festival; and with actor Stacy Ross and playwright Christopher Chen about the world premiere production of Communion, at A.C.T.
San Francisco performing arts company Word for Word tells great stories with elegant theatricality. This week, Open Air’s Corona Radio Theater presents the final installment of the podcast production of Citizen by Bay Area novelist and playwright Greg Sarris.
Citizen is the story is about Salvador, born in Santa Rosa of an American Indian mother and a Mexican father, and raised in Mexico. At 20, he travels to California to learn more about his mother's family, and to start a new life. His Aunt Eldine and her friend Marco show him the ropes, and he obtains his birth certificate, his driver license, a social security card--all the vestiges of U.S. citizenship. But Salvador is starting to discover that Eldine and Marco are trouble, and he begins to form a plan to break free.
Word for Word’s podcast production of Citizen is presented with original music by David R. Molina. Novelist and playwright Greg Sarris was born and raised in Santa Rosa. His best-known work, Grand Avenue, is a collection of short stories about contemporary Native American life, based on his own life. Sarris has been a professor in Writing and Native American Studies at Sonoma State University since 2005, and he is currently serving his fifteenth term as Chairman of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, his tribe, which was formerly known as the Federated Coast Miwok.
We talk with ODC Theater Creative Director Chloë Zimberg about the first weekend of the ninth annual ODC Theater Festival, formerly known as the Walking Distance Dance Festival, which runs from June 3 - 12. The festival features two weeks of Bay Area performance on film, including nine world premieres, and several more works adapted from the stage to the screen. Initially planned as the 2020 kick-off to a year of events in honor of ODC’s 50th anniversary, the 2021 festival features all the artists scheduled to appear last summer.
Artist Monique Jenkinson (aka Fauxnique) joins the conversation to talk about her video piece called C**** II: The Void, in which she uses video to reframe and magnify aspects of her provocative 2017 work C***, or, the Horror of Nothing to See. Departing from the earlier work’s undercurrent of feminist rage, this iteration proposes “a kind of ceremony to reckon with and shift the philosophical and literal ground on which we stand.”
Plus, from A.C.T., we talk with actor Stacy Ross and Obie Award–winning Bay Area playwright Christopher Chen about the world premiere production of the virtual play, Communion. This thrilling interactive theatrical event features Bay Area favorite Stacy Ross in her return to A.C.T.
Christopher, Stacy, and A.C.T. Artistic Director Pam MacKinnon have come together to create a live, world-premiere experience written just for A.C.T. - part docudrama, part mystery, part confessional, and totally theatrical. Communion runs live through June 27 to a limited number of attendees at each performance.
Open Air, with host David Latulippe, is broadcast live on Thursday, June 3, at 1pm, and will be archived at this very location thereafter - in eternity, or until the Internet dies.
Listen now or anytime….