Boxcar Theatre's "Sam Shepard in Repertory" by / Guest Author

by Jessica Holt

Recently, the national theatre blog HowlRound has unveiled a new series called “City Series” that explores the theatre scene in cities from around the country. This week, the blog focused its lens on San Francisco. Artists and administrators from across our city contributed essays extolling the merits of a theatre town characterized by innovation, experimentation and collaboration. Many of the essays focused on the extraordinary work that small and midsize companies are currently producing, reminding us how the legacy of San Francisco’s rich and vital theatrical history has created an environment where creative risk is pursued and rewarded. Nowhere is this kind of work more evident than in Boxcar Theatre’s current Sam Shepard festival, a festival that exemplifies this spirit of contemporary experimentation fostered by the city’s legacy of theatrical innovation.

Boxcar Theatre is dedicating three months to exploring the works of Sam Shepard, a playwright San Francisco is very proud to claim as an adopted native son. Three of the four Shepard plays Boxcar is fully producing –“True West,” “Buried Child” and “Fool for Love”– each had their original productions here in San Francisco at Magic Theatre, where Shepard was a resident playwright in the 1970s. With Boxcar’s festival running these shows in repertory (along with “A Lie of the Mind”), contemporary San Francisco audiences and artists are afforded an opportunity to experience these groundbreaking plays all together, roaming from one mythical realist landscape of broken dreams to the next, sometimes in the space of a day.

This is the second time Boxcar has tackled an American master in repertory format. Two years ago, Boxcar presented Tennessee Williams’s three mid-20th century modern masterpieces: “A Streetcar Named Desire,” “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” and “The Glass Menagerie.” Like that festival, the current Shepard festival features a combined cast of actors performing in multiple productions and bold, conceptually fearless directors helming each production with a shared design team.

In the last two years, Boxcar has expanded, and the festival takes advantage of new spaces. “Buried Child” and “A Lie of the Mind” will both play at the main stage Boxcar Playhouse (505 Natoma Street). To see toast flying, patrons will truck on over to take in “True West” in the new 49-seater black box theatre at the Boxcar Studios (125A Hyde Street). This production also boasts collaborative direction by the artists of the repertory series and artistic director/actor Nick Olivero, and actor Brian Trybom will rotate the roles of Austin and Lee nightly.  Carrying on its long-standing interest in staging work in site-specific locations, Boxcar will produce “Fool for Love,” the gothic, unsettling story of two half-siblings bound in love, in an actual motel room (actual location as yet undisclosed).

And, if audiences want to see all of these shows in one manic Shep-a-thon day, they can. On Sundays March 25 and April 1, Boxcar offers all four plays in the same day. Tickets are $120 and include the plays, lunch, private transportation by a cast member from venue to venue and a shot of whiskey. How often do you have the chance to see all of these incredible plays in one fell swoop? It’s an “only-in-San Francisco” kind of theatre experience, born of the city’s rich theatrical history that gives artists permission to try.

“Sam Shepard in Repertory” runs at the Boxcar Theatre from January 17–April 26. Venues and times vary. See website for full schedule and ticket information: www.boxcartheatre.org.

Jessica Holt is a Bay Area director, teaching artist and the artistic director of the annual Bay One Acts Festival. She sees theatre everywhere she goes, literally. Contact her at jessicadirect@gmail.com.