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From S.F. Opera to the Rickshaw Stop, presenters struggle to take their patrons’ emotional temperature about reentry Lily Janiak and Joshua Kosman April 14, 2021Updated: April 15, 2021, 7:21 am
Krystyna Finlayson shows off the theater tickets she has kept on March 31, 2020, in Walnut Creek. Photo: Santiago Mejia, The Chronicle
In normal times, Walnut Creek theater patron Krystyna Finlayson sees 10 to 15 plays a month. So when playhouses reopen after being dark for more than a year, she vows to be there.
“I want to go back today,” she says. “I want to go back
yesterday.”
Vivien Sin of San Francisco is more cautious. Before the pandemic, she saw approximately one play per month. If a theater opened its doors to her right now, she says, “I would ask a bunch of questions: How big is the crowd? Would we be seated in a socially distanced way?
Wandaâs Picks April 2021
Wandaâs Picks April 2021
April 7, 2021
Alabama artist Michelle Browder, pictured, is in town working at San Franciscoâs Box Shop in Hunters Point to build a 15-foot public monument, âMothers of Gynecology.â The sculpture will honor Anarcha, Betsey and Lucy, enslaved women from plantations in and around Montgomery, Ala., who were experimented on in the 1840s by the so-called âfather of gynecology,â Dr. J Marion Sims. They had no power to decide. A statue of Sims remains standing prominently in Montgomery. â Photo: Yalonda M. James, SF Chronicle
by Wanda Sabir, Arts and Culture Editor
Wishing everyone a blessed Resurrection Day and, to those participating, a blessed Ramadan fast this 2021 season.
San Francisco Playhouse s Hieroglyph might offer a preview of production methods for a hybrid time.
Lily Janiak March 17, 2021Updated: March 17, 2021, 3:48 pm
San Francisco Playhouse General Manager Danika Ingraham (left) takes the temperature of Jamella Cross, an actor, before rehearsal and filming of “Hieroglyph.” Photo: Jessica Palopoli, San Francisco Playhouse
If you were an actor, a stagehand or, like me, an observer at a rehearsal for San Francisco Playhouse and Lorraine Hansberry Theatre’s “Hieroglyph,” you had to get three negative COVID tests on three separate days before even being allowed into the theater.
Then, once inside, you had to undergo another COVID test and get your temperature taken. You’d be told which zones of San Francisco Playhouse’s Union Square venue you were allowed inside one zone for actors, stage manager and backstage crew; another for everyone else.
Jamella Cross and Khary Moye in
[hieroglyph] Jessica Palopoli
A new play
[hieroglyph] by Erika Dickerson-Despenza makes its streaming debut with performances beginning March 13. The San Francisco Playhouse and Lorraine Hansberry Theatre co-production is directed by the latterâs artistic director Margo Hall.
[hieroglyph] features Jamella Cross, Safiya Fredericks, Khary L. Moye, and Anna Marie Sharpe and was filmed at SFP. It follows 13-year-old Davis, involuntarily displaced in Chicago two months postâHurricane Katrina, where she wrestles with the cultural landscape of a new city and school community while secretly coping with the PTSD of an assault at the Superdome. With her mother still in New Orleans committed to the fight for Black land ownership and her father committed to starting a new life in the Midwest, divorce threatens to further separate a family already torn apart.