Chad Jones’ Theater Dogs

San Francisco Chronicle theater writer Robert Hurwitt has an excellent story in today’s paper about the ongoing struggles of the Lorraine Hansberry Theatre, the Bay Area’s 27-year-old African-American theater company.(Read the story here.)

The short version is that Stanley Williams and Quentin Easter, who run the company, were ousted from their downtown theater space by a real estate-grubbing university with an artistic bent. They had to be out of the space by June 1.

I talked to Williams and Easter earlier this week, and they seem confident that they will eventually find a space — many irons in the fire, and they seem to have the ear of SF Mayor Gavin Newsom. In truth, it’s shameful that the city’s preeminent African-American theater finds itself without a permanent home.

Yehmanja Houff, Zeondrae RoShawn, Brian S. King, Stefon Williams, Linwood “Woody” Clark, and Luther Michael Spratt (left to right) huddle to do some tight harmonies in The Black Nativity, A Gospel Celebration of Christmas, a Lorraine Hansberry Theatre production. Photo by Stacie Batiste

But even in this tricky time, the Lorraine Hansberry will have a season. Williams and Easter have done some creative collaborating. Here’s how the season shakes out:

August Wilson’s Radio Golf, Oct. 8-Nov. 2, a TheatreWorks production in association with the Lorraine Hansberry Theatre, Oct. 8-Nov. 2

Langston Hughes’ The Black Nativity. Venue to be announced (likely the Marines Memorial Theatre, across the street from the old Hansberry venue), November-December.

William A. Parker’s Waitin’ 2 End Hell (a spoof of Terry McMillan’s Waiting to Exhale from the man’s perspective), February 2009, venue to be determined.

Tracy Scott Wilson’s The Story, March 21-April 25, 2009. A co-production with S.F. Playhouse.

Porgy and Bess by George Gershwin, Dubose and Dorothy Heyward and Ira Gershwin. San Francisco Opera production in association with the Lorraine Hansberry Theatre, June 9-27, 2009.

Another “in association” even is Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s production of August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone in November.

Call 415-345-3980 or visit www.lhtsf.org for information.

It’s worth reporting SF Playhouse’s 2008-09 season just for the name of the second show of the season. Check it out:

Shining City by Conor McPherson (Oct. 1-Nov. 22) - Wonderful Irish playwright’s modern-day ghost story.

Abraham Lincoln’s Big Gay Dance Party by Aaron Loeb (Dec. 3-Jan. 17) -This new comedy by local scribe Loeb tracks the happenings surrounding the outing of Abe Lincoln by a fourth grader at a Christmas pageant.

Landscape of the Body by John Guare (Jan. 28-March 7) - Long overdue Bay Area premiere of Guare’s part-play, part-musical.

The Story by Tracey Scott Wilson (March 18-April 25) - Drama based on the true story of a New York Times reporter fabricating a story. A co-production with the Lorraine Hansberry Theatre.

TBA (May 6-June 13)

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey and Dale Wasserman (June 24-Sept. 5) - Nurse Ratched, oil up your sneer. It’s time to head back to the asylum.

For information visit www.sfplayhouse.org.

At The SF Playhouse through June 14

Susi Damilano is Agnes and Gabriel Marin is Peter in Tracy Letts’ Bug at the SF Playhouse. Photos by Zabrina Tipton.

It sure is fun to watch an audience squirm. It’s even more fun to be part of that squirming audience.

Tracy Letts’ Bug, now at the SF Playhouse’s intimate, creepy-crawly theater space, has some juicy moments that make the audience cringe collectively. What else do you do when a probably crazy man attempts to extract one of his own molars with a pair of pliers? You squirm. You cringe. You have a good time – if horror-type thrills are your idea of a good time.

When it comes right down to it, Letts’ Bug, which has been a hit in London and off-Broadway, is a mix of paranoid sci-fi thriller from the 1950s and 1970s white-trash B movie. The fact that Letts is a skillful enough writer to make it all seem much more important means the work seems somehow more important than it actually is, and that’s a good trick. Bug is more fun than Letts’ trashy Killer Joe, which the Bay Area saw when Marin Theatre Company transferred its successful production to San Francisco. And it’s probably not as good as August: Osage County, the Broadway drama that just won Letts a Pulitzer Prize.

In Bug, Letts is dealing with lonely people and a whopper of a conspiracy theory, which makes them both feel a whole lot less lonely. Agnes (Susi Damilano) lives in a skeezy Oklahoma hotel room. She’s terrified her ex-husband, Jerry (John Flanagan) will get out of jail and come back to terrorize her some more. One night, while killing the pain with her friend R.C. (Zehra Berkman) and several lines of coke and a few puffs off the ol’ pipe, Agnes meets Peter (Gabriel Marin), a shy, intelligent drifter who needs a place to stay for the night.

You don’t have to ask Agnes twice. Just make her a cocktail – vodka and Coke – and you’re in. It won’t take long to learn Agnes’ biggest sorrow: her 6-year-old son disappeared from the grocery store about 10 years ago. Life just hasn’t been the same since. While Steve Wonder’s “Superstitious” plays on the radio, Agnes and Peter waltz through their strange courtship ritual. Agnes bares her soul and Peter theorizes about how none of us is ever really safe because of the chemicals, the technology and the information out there being generated by people and their machines.

Ah, the wondrous smell of romance and paranoia. Such a heady combination.

The titular bug first appears in the form of a chirping cricket, which actually turns out to be a faulty smoke alarm, which turns out to be more radioactive than plutonium (funny how you don’t read about that on the smoke alarm box). Then, one amorous evening, Peter awakes to find bug bites on his arm. He discovers aphids – he calls them plant lice – in the bed and the bug adventure really begins.

Peter sucks Agnes into his buggy world, a horrific place where soldiers are experimented on by demented doctors in the hope of creating bio chips to mark every human being since 1982. Or something like that. Peter, it turns out, is on the run and can’t let the bad people find him. They’re the ones that infested him with bugs. And Agnes believes every word.

Marin brings incredible intensity to his performance. When it looks like Agnes might leave him, Peter throws an incredible fit – it’s a wonder Marin doesn’t destroy Bill English’s superb hotel room set with his thrashing about. There’s also quietness in Peter – a sort of dim light of intelligence that belies all the weird stuff and makes you wish we were meeting him under less exterminating circumstances.

Damilano’s naturalness makes Agnes likable and understandable. We feel for her and watch helplessly as she gets sucked into the paranoia. There’s an incredible scene in Act 2, really the heart of the play, when Letts gives Agnes a monologue that makes a case for human faith, intelligence and gullibility as interchangeable pieces of our brain structure. Damilano sinks her teeth into the moment and makes it as powerful as it is sad.

Director Jon Tracy goes less for horror than for humor in this production. In Act 2, the tension goes slack when it should be taut, but Damilano and Marin (who appears bloody and shirtless through much of the play) somehow keep the play on track, making this a dramatic infestation you don’t mind squirming your way through.

Bug continues through June 14 at the SF Playhouse, 533 Sutter St., San Francisco. Tickets are $38. Call 415-677-9596 or visit www.sfplayhouse.org for information.

The cast and crew of SF Playhouse’s Bug. Director Jon Tracy is on the right in the hat.

Ask Jon Tracy what’s bugging him these days, and the answer is easy: Bug.

Tracy is directing the Bay Area premiere of the play, by recent Pulitzer Prize-winner Tracy Letts (August: Osage County) for SF Playhouse. The production begins previews May 7, opens May 10 and continues through June 14 at the downtown San Francisco theater.

Famously creepy and skin-crawly, Bug is a tale of paranoia – a man and a woman in a grimy, slimy hotel room suffer delusions of a bug infestation brought about by a nefarious government conspiracy…or mental illness…or actual bugs. A movie was made of the play in 2006 directed by William Friedkin (The Exorcist) and starring Ashley Judd and Michael Shannon, the star of the original Chicago production of the play. The movie, which some hailed and others reviled, did not impress Tracy, who was a fan of the play.

“Seeing that movie only made me want to direct the play more,” he says. “When you see a version of something you love that you don’t care for, that didn’t grab the story correctly, you want to fix it.”

What appeals to Tracy about the play is that there’s more to it than just the gore and horror it’s famous for.

“It’s an unbelievably wonderful look at a love story,” Tracy says.

The lovers in Tracy’s production are Gabe Marin as Peter, the AWOL Gulf War veteran who thinks he may have been subjected to experiments by the military, and Susi Damilano as Agnes, a cocktail waitress with a propensity for partying.

“What we’re finding in rehearsals is that Letts has a distinctive rhythm and sensibility,” Tracy says. “We’re working with two different rhythms in a farce staging that includes some really interesting rules to live by. There is a wit that needs to come out of it. There’s so much subtext. In most contemporary plays we don’t really say anything we mean, but what we mean is down there somewhere. Letts is an unbelievable wordsmith. He’s not afraid to punch you twice before you realize you got punched the first time. The play is beyond clever. The emotional journey is mathematically precise and goes well beyond the shock value he has become known for.”

Where the movie went wrong, in Tracy’s opinion, was in missing the natural comedy of the piece and messing up the ending.

“Friedkin misstated the end,” Tracy says. “We weren’t along for the ride. It was all screaming people, spinning camera and aluminum foil covering everything. Any amount of belief was blown out and it became silly. The central relationship wasn’t the love story I’ve come to see as so important to the play.”

SF Playhouse is just about the perfect space for a play like Bug that trades on paranoia and claustrophobia. Set designer Bill English (also SF Playhouse’s artistic director) has created a seedy motel set that Tracy says is “a character in and of itself.” The audience, for good or ill, is going to feel trapped in that hotel room and the paranoia that’s building around something that may or may not actually be happening.

That’s exactly how Tracy likes it.

“It’s time for theater to get back to holding the audience accountable,” he says. “That happens less in our modern theaters. We like to tell them what to do and what to think. Here, let me turn my imagination off. That’s counterproductive to why we started doing this in the first place.”

Why Tracy, a Vallejo native who now lives in Oakland, started doing this theater thing was simple: he thought it would be a cool way to meet girls. These days, though, he has a different philosophy.

“My thought is that we live today in an unbelievably beautiful, giving world that masquerades as a horrible, treacherous place,” he says. “If you’re looking for the good in it, it’s not going to appear. It’s about realigning ourselves so we can see what’s been there the entire time, and embrace what’s been there the entire time. I have to believe that theater is that bridge. For me, that’s what I believe we do. We call ourselves artists, but that’s the worst possible title for us. Instead, we need to look at the fact that we are like every other person pursuing their craft for the betterment of the community. By that definition, the plumber or the accountant is an artist. The problem is, that in the trappings of life – the mortgage, three kids and so on – we lose our art. That’s why we commune in the theater or go to a museum – to find a little of ourselves again and maybe to see that everything is actually here to help.”

Plucked out of the Solano College theater program by George Maguire who suggested directing over acting, Tracy says he has been lucky to have great people shepherd him along. Joy Carlin (right, with Tracy) and the Carlin family have been “incredible influences,” and now he says he has been embraced by co-founders English and Damilano at SF Playhouse.

“I’m a huge, huge, unbelievably huge believer in the people I work with,” Tracy says. “I know I will always learn more than I dish out. I know I’m lucky to be in the room.”

So far this year, Tracy’s directorial plate has been full of darkness – Macbeth, The Diviners and Bug – and now it’s time to lighten up. His next project, which will open Friday, June 13, in the Willows Theatre Company’s Martinez theater, is Evil Dead: The Musical.

“I listened to the music and thought it was raunchy and silly and fun,” Tracy says. “I grew up with the Sam Raimi films and just couldn’t say no to this one.”

SF Playhouse’s Bug runs from May 7 through June 14. Tickets are $38. Call 415-677-9596 or visit www.sfplayhouse.org for information.

Opened March 22, 2008, SF Playhouse

Stacy Ross and Louis Parnell try a new form of barroom therapy in Coronado. Photos by Zabrina Tipton

Lehane’s noirish thriller offers pulpy delights
three stars Time-bending mystery

If Dennis Lehane didn’t happen to have a brother who happened to be a New York actor, then Coronado, the play, might never have happened.

The best-selling crime author could easily have continued down the path of writing novels and having those novels — such as Mystic River and Gone Baby Gone — turned into high-profile movies. But during a visit from his brother and some of his actor friends, Lehand got inspired to write for the theater.

He ended up turning his short story “Until Gwen” (published in Atlantic Monthly) into the play Coronado, now having its West Coast premiere at SF Playhouse under the direction of Susi Damilano and with a first-rate cast of local actors.

Under the neon glow of Bill English’s barroom set, Lehane’s story unspools as a triptych of duets and trios all fueled by lust for, variously, alcohol, “illicit sexual congress” (as one character puts it) and a $3-million diamond.

In one corner a man (Will Springhorn Jr.) and a woman (Kate Del Castillo) are practically devouring each other until her husband (Phillip K. Torretto) shows up. In another corner a psychiatrist (Louis Parnell) is breaking all the rules by meeting his patient (Stacy Ross) for a drink and quite possibly more. And at the bar, a father (English) has just picked up his son (Chad Deverman) from prison, and now that they’ve disposed of the prostitute the dad got the son as a “happy release” present, they have some unfinished business to settle.

Alert viewers will start to pick on shared themes among the trio of stories, and even the not-so-alert among the audience will know something is up by the end of Act 1 when it becomes clear that everyone on the stage is related in some way or another.

Lehane is being tricky with time, and that’s one of the most enjoyable aspects of the first act — the relationships start to become clear, but the time element remains dodgy. Then, in the second act, the mystery abates and we just get a whole lot of story — too much, really. The story turns pulpy, and though the tension drains (even with the revelation of not one but two murders), there’s enjoyment in Lehane’s sheer force of storytelling.

This would all be so much noirish dramatizing if it weren’t for a couple key performances that connect with something deeper among these flailing characters doing desperate things and paying the consequences.

Ross can make anything interesting, and her wonderfully messed up character provides ample opportunity for juicy drunk scenes, blackmail and soulful regret. Her final scene, which is sort of gimmicky in a dramatic sense, actually works because Ross gives it the necessary emotional weight.

Also great is Deverman (above with English), as a young man who can’t escape the wicked influence of his father figure (English in a sly, creepy performance that underplays the arch villainy). We see his post-prison desperation, but we also get glimpses of a happier life he could have had with his girlfriend, Gwen (Rebecca Schweitzer). There’s real pain in his performance, and when he has to pull off the trick of being in two time periods simultaneously, he bridges the gulf seamlessly.

The various mysteries don’t end up having much impact when they’re resolved, but there’s a nice little dramatic flair at play’s end, which means Lehane might turn out to be a showman after all.

Coronado might turn out to constitute the Dennis Lehane theater festival in its entirety. Though the play was well received in New York in 2005, the author will likely be otherwise engaged. Word on the street is that his novel Shutter Island will be a movie directed by Martin Scorsese. Oh, and the story that inspired the play has also been optioned for the big screen.

Coronado continues through April 26 at SF Playhouse, 533 Sutter St., San Francisco. Tickets are $38. Call 415-677-9596 or visit www.sfplayhouse.org.

I was in the lobby at SF Playhouse for an opening a couple weeks ago, and while milling through the crowd, I heard a voice that zinged me straight back to childhood.

There I was, 8 years old, glued to the television while Ma, Pa, Mary and Laura (aka Half-Pint) attempted to make a life for themselves in a little house on the prairie.

The voice in the lobby belonged to Karen Grassle (pronounced Grass-lee), who played Ma for eight seasons on the NBC TV version of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House on the Prairie’’ books.

It turns out Grassle, though famous for her TV work, is a theater person and a Bay Area native.
We’ve seen her on stage a few times – in California Shakespeare Theater’s Hamlet during artistic director Jonathan Moscone’s debut season, and in SF Playhouse’s The Ride Down Mt. Morgan.

About three years ago, Grassle, 66, returned to the Bay Area for good.

She was actually born at Albany Hospital, but her family moved south to Ventura, and she wasn’t back in the Bay Area until after high school when she enrolled in the English Department at UC Berkeley.

During her college years, she was an apprentice at the Actors Workshop in San Francisco, and then did her post-graduate work at the London Academy of Music and Drama.

“Theater was just one of those things that was in my blood,’’ Grassle says. “Not being a practical thing to do, I tried to ignore it. My parents certainly tried to ignore it. Eventually I had to surrender. This was my calling.’’

Grassle has done a fair bit of traveling in pursuit of stage work. From London she landed in Memphis, Tenn., then headed to New York, where her big Broadway break, The Gingham Dog, earned her a Tony nomination.

After “Little House’’ ran its course, Grassle took time off to raise a family, but she kept a foot in the theater world. Eventually she moved to New Mexico to start a theater company there (“It was too hard trying to do everything.’’), then she landed in Louisville, Ky., where she worked for Jon Jory at the Actors Theatre.

In the last four years she has done Driving Miss Daisy four times, and now she’s making her TheatreWorks debut in Kathleen Clark’s romantic comedy Southern Comforts.

Directed by Bay Area veteran Joy Carlin, “Comforts’’ is a “December-Decmeber’’ romance about a Southern widow and a Yankee widower (the Bay Area’s Edward Sarafian) who get what they least expected — a second chance at love.

“My character is Amanda Cross, a former librarian from Tennessee,’’ Grassle explains. “She was widowed quite young and was a single mom for years. With any character you play, you find all the places in yourself that can touch the places in her. With Amanda, that’s being a single mom, loving books and wanting to share your happiness. That’s a longing I share with her.’’

And working with Joy Carlin?

“Oh, Joy is a joy,’’ Grassle says. “It’s like having a master class in comedy with her. Because she’s an actor, too, she’s extremely patient and sensitive with our process. She doesn’t lay all the pressure on you like some directors do. Besides, I just love her. I’m delighted I know her.’’

Southern Comforts continues through March 30 at the Lucie Stern Theatre, 1305 Middlefield Road, Palo Alto. Tickets are $20-$56. Call 650-903-6000 or visit www.theatreworks.org for information.

Opened Feb. 2, 2008 at SF Playhouse

The Scene makes a scene at SF Playhouse
Three stars Scene to be seen

By all rights, opening night of SF Playhouse’s The Scene should have been a disaster.

The company, which has really come into its own during this, its fifth season, had every reason to believe The Scene would in fact be a scene. They had imported a celebrity star in Berkeley native Daphne Zuniga, of “Melrose Place” fame. And they had a sizzling play from hot playwright Theresa Rebeck, who made her Broadway debut last year in the well-received Mauritius.

Then reality struck. Just days before Saturday’s gala opening-night performance, Zuniga contracted laryngitis and was under doctor’s orders not to perform. She missed Friday’s preview and was MIA for opening night.

Enter Nancy Carlin to the rescue. The veteran Bay Area actor, whose husband, Howard Swain, is also in the Scene cast, was already on deck to fill in for a few performances later in the run when Zuniga had scheduling conflicts. But she was hardly ready to step into the role yet.

So, Saturday night, artistic director Bill English made a pre-show announcement about Zuniga’s indisposition and warned us that Carlin would be carrying her script.

Turns out, Carlin was wonderful in the role of Stella, a bright, funny TV talk show producer who has been turned hard and cynical by her job, New York and life in general.

The theater’s electrical system, on the other hand, was less prepared than Carlin. The theater was plunged into blackout twice during Act 2.

The company (under the intrepid stage management of Nicola Rossini) soldiered on, and it’s a good thing they did. In spite of the sick star and the wonky wiring, The Scene is a terrific production of a sparky play that in many ways generates its own electricity.

The two-hour play begins and ends at swanky Manhattan parties (the slick, swiftly changing set is by English). At the first one, friends Charlie (Aaron Davidman) and Lewis (Swain) encounter what Rebeck calls a “scene machine,” which is a young person who thrives on the upper-crust party circuit.

This person is in the form of Clea (Heather Gordon, who also happens to be Miss Marin County 2008 and will compete for the title of Miss California in June), who keeps reminding us that she’s fresh off the bus from Ohio. Clea is a near-perfect specimen: gorgeous with impeccably cut long blond hair, a figure that doesn’t quit in her tight clothes and a brain that is far craftier than she’d like most of her acquaintances to know.

The first party scene sets up the impending disaster as Clea insinuates herself into Lewis’ and then Charlie’s life. She really is a monster — “some kind of succubus” as one character describes her — because she’s capable of being all things to all people. She can be genuine and artificial simultaneously, dumb blond-ish one moment and whip-crack smart the next. She’ll use sex to get what she wants and then verbally lacerate anyone who suggests she’s doing just that.

I can’t comment on Zuniga’s well-rehearsed performance, obviously, but I will say that Carlin is perfectly cast as Stella, Charlie’s wife, who turns out to be far more interesting than her hard, ultra-competent exterior suggests. Even in thrust into performance unready, Carlin was able to convey Stella’s depths, her humor and her soul-shaking hurt.

Davidman’s Charlie takes the biggest journey of the play, going from frustrated unemployed actor to — well, to say more would be to spoil the play’s trajectory. But he’s an intelligent man who takes responsibility for his choices, and he even tries to hold on to his integrity in a world that has no value for nor need of anything smacking of soulfulness.

The role of Lewis is the least flashy in the show, but Swain imbues it with great humor and warmth. Lewis does nothing the whole play but tell the truth — even if that means admitting his shallowness. He’s a good man, and with Swain in the role, there’s no doubt of that.

The play, well directed by Amy Glazer, really does belong to Gordon’s Clea, a repulsive, irresistible dervish who makes The Scene sexy and scary and something to be seen and savored.

After a career of movies (The Sure Thing, Spaceballs) and TV (Melrose Place, One Tree Hill), Daphne Zuniga was ready to go back where it all started: to the theater.

The Berkeley native was something of a rebel as a girl until a wise teacher channeled her energy into something completely foreign to her at that time: drama class.

That led to classes in the Young Conservatory at San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater, and from there Zuniga headed to college (UCLA) and a career that has kept her mostly in front of cameras.

At the moment, however, she is back in the Bay Area, living in the East Bay and commuting to San Francisco, where she’s starring in Theresa Rebeck’s acclaimed dark comedy The Scene at SF Playhouse.

“Last year, when I was on set, I’d find myself longing for the process of rehearsing,” the 45-year-old Zuniga says during a rehearsal break. “My job is a lot of work, traveling a lot, long hours. I was feeling like I had forgotten what I really fell in love with in the beginning. I was missing rehearsal, which you don’t get in TV because it all goes so fast.”

The other day, while driving into San Francisco across the Bay Bridge, Zuniga was struck by a thought: “It occurred to me that I had gotten exactly what I wished for. I was back on stage, and it’s in the place where I first fell in love with acting, two blocks away from where I studied at 14. I am overwhelmed with gratitude.”

Well, maybe not overwhelmed. “Now we’re rehearsing, and I’m bitching and moaning because it’s such a long, tedious process,” Zuniga says with a laugh. “Can’t we just print that already? I’m kidding. Theater is such a different animal. I love it. It’s so great to be back home.”

Zuniga has never been one to strategize her career. Even in college, when she was roommates with Amy Resnick, who has become one of the Bay Area’s most popular actors, she didn’t form a long-term plan. When she and Resnick auditioned for an agent as scene partners, they were both signed the same day.

“Every time I try to strategize, it never seems to work,” Zuniga says. “It’s not exactly like you’re blowing in the wind. But things have a tendency to come up.”

So how did Zuniga, who hasn’t been onstage since a production of Moliere’s Tartuffe in Los Angeles five years ago, end up in a hot play in her old stomping grounds? The simple answer: a friend hooked her up.

Jennifer Seibel, SF Mayor Gavin Newsom’s fiancee, had performed at SF Playhouse in Six Degrees of Separation, and while in LA having lunch with Zuniga and mentioned that she had just read The Scene.

Oddly enough Zuniga, who recently acquired a New York apartment to put her in proximity of more theater opportunities, had also read The Scene, which was sent to her by another theater company.

Within 24 hours, Zuniga had been in touch with SF Playhouse artistic director Bill English, with director Amy Glazer, and the next thing she knows, Zuniga is in rehearsal and spending a lot of time looking for parking spaces in San Francisco.

About Stella, the character she’s playing in The Scene, Zuniga says: “She works very hard. She strives to be the best at what she does, and because she’s a hard worker, a lot of people around her annoy her. She supports her husband, who was a TV actor, but he hasn’t worked in a while. Then this horrible thing happens with her marriage, and she doesn’t know how to cope. She’s worked so hard for a lfie that looks good on paper. Then this tragedy happens, life happens, and she’s at a loss. Her husband betrays her. How many of us know what to do when that happens? It’s a sharp play with relief in the humor.

In addition to her TV — and now stage — work, Zuniga is an activist.

“It’s all Berkeley,” she says. “Growing up in Berkeley put me in therapy for 20 years, but it also gave me a sense of no boundaries. No no’s. If there’s a no, challenge it. That’s from the Bay Area. That’s San Francisco. That’s the mentality, the world I was born into. There’s no other place like it, not even Greenwich Village. We combine creativity and open-mindedness with action. We create stuff here in California. That’s why I love it here and am thrilled to be back.”

One of Zuniga’s causes — saving the planet, basically — resulted in The Future We Will Create: Inside the World of TED a documentary based on the Technology, Entertainment, Design conferences that aim to bring together great thinkers and speakers from all walks of life and gives them 18 minutes to make “the best talks of their lives.”

“I’ve seen all these talks,” Zuniga says, “and I had to do what I could to inspire people. I though that the masses needed to see this and experience what I experienced there. I left with my brain burst wide open, my heart…it was like wow! So much more is possible than what we’re led to believe. human beings need to be reminded how amazing we are. We know down deep that our passions are worthy and our passion and longing for a better world are worthy. Why not believe in them, why not make these things come to be?”

The documentary is available at all the usual outlets includeing Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com and Borders.

For information about TED, check out the Web site here.

Visit Zuniga’s personal Web site here.

The Scene continues through March 8 at SF Playhouse, 533 Sutter St., San Francisco. Tickets are $38. Call 415-677-9596 or visit www.sfplayhouse.org for information.

With that nasty kerfuffle involving the stagehands and the dark Broadway theaters well behind us, it’s time to take a look at what’s going on in New York, where the play is really the thing.

Sure wish I could go see Tracy Letts’ August: Osage County, the hottest play on Broadway right now. On a more local front, Letts’ Bug will have its West Coast debut at SF Playhouse in May, filling the slot that was going to be filled with Mark Jackson’s Faust, Part One.

The big news on Broadway recently is that Rent’s lease is up. The pioneering rock musical, which won a posthumous Pulitzer prize for its creator, Jonathan Larson, will close on June 1 and enter the record books as Broadway’s seventh-longest-running musical.

When one musical closes, another one — most likely based on a movie — fills its place.

And here comes Shrek the Musical.

The CGI ogre, who has now starred in three hit movies, will make his musical theater debut this summer in Seattle before moving on to Broadway in November. The creative team behind the DreamWorks musical is impressive (even if the subject matter isn’t): Oscar-winner Sam Mendes is an artistic consultant (and sort of got the project rolling); Jeanine Tesori (Caroline, Or Change); Pulitzer Prize-winner David Lindsay-Abaire (Rabbit Hole) penned the book and lyrics; and Jason Moore (Avenue Q) is directing.

Moore has said the plot will follow the first movie, when Shrek joins up with his donkey cohort, Donkey, and falls in love with Princess Fiona.

Disney’s The Little Mermaid opened to reviews that were mostly piles of stinking fish. My impression, from reading those fragrant notices is that the show is overproduced, overstuffed and ought to have been thrown back early on. Still, I’d like to see it, if only to watch capable actors skate around on wheeled footwear.

With Mermaid packing in the family crowd, adult interest will shift to Passing Strange, the rock musical by Stew, Heidi Rodewald and director Annie Dorsen that had its pre-New York run at Berkeley Repertory Theatre. The show is transferring to Broadway and begins performances Feb. 8 at the Belasco Theatre.

The cast is the same one we saw in Berkeley in November 2006: de’Adre Aziza, Daniel Breaker, Eisa Davis, Colman Domingo, Chad Goodridge, Rebecca Naomi Jones and Stew, himself (with Rodewald on bass and vocals in the band).

And finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that Shrek isn’t the only ogre on Broadway. Clay Aiken opened in Spamalot.

There are some theater treats heading our way in 2008. Here’s a mere sampling.

The show I’m most excited about also seems the furthest away. The national tour of the Tony Award-winning musical Spring Awakening is slated to start sometime in the second half of the year, courtesy of SHN/Best of Broadway. Spring Awakening was the best thing I saw on Broadway last year, and I eagerly anticipate the tour and the chance to hear the Duncan Sheik/Steven Sater score performed by exciting young singer/actors.

A close second on the old excitement meter is Carrie Fisher’s Wishful Drinking, her autobiographical solo show coming to Berkeley Rep in February.

At SF Playhouse, Theresa Rebeck, a hot-hot playwright at the moment, arrives with the West Coast premiere of her The Scene starring “Melrose Place” alum (and Berkeley native) Daphne Zuniga. The show opens later this month.

At American Conservatory Theater, the most intriguing offering this spring is ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, John Ford’s Jacobean tragedy about a brother and sister who fall in love…with each other. The show begins performances in June.

TheatreWorks in Mountain View ushers in the new year with Wendy Wasserstein’s final play, Third, which begins performances next week. But the real excitement comes in April when the company mounts Caroline, or Change, the astonishing Tony Kushner-Jeanine Tesori musical.

At Berkeley’s Shotgun Players, the summer show will be Beowulf: A Thousand Years of Baggage, but the big excitement comes at the end of the year when director Mark Jackson (Death of Meyerhold) returns to take a whack at Macbeth in December.

This summer, California Shakespeare Theater gives us some really good reasons to head into the Orinda hills: Jonathan Moscone directs Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband (July) and Timothy Near is directing Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya (August).

And this one is a little iffy, but should the fates conspire, Thick Description will bring back former Bay Area actor Colman Domingo (fresh from his Broadway turn in the musical Passing Strange) in his autobiographical solo show A Boy and His Soul. Proposed show run is July. Keep your fingers crossed.