ACT’s ‘Co-Founders’ confounds and delights

LIMINAL SPACE: The cast of American Conservatory Theater’s world-premiere hip-hop musical Co-Founders includes (back row, from left) Keith Pinto, Deanalís Arocho Resto, Aneesa Folds, Tommy Soulati Shepherd and Adesha Adefela; (front row, from left) Ryan Nicole Austin and Jordan Covington. Photo by Kevin Berne 

If the Bay Area truly does provide innovators, entrepreneurs and hustlers a place to take creative leaps and be part of the next big thing, then all the rules that apply to tech startups should also apply to new works for theater. They’re both about creativity, reinvention and glorious imagination in service to innovation, hustling and, one might hope, big bucks.

American Conservatory Theater’s world-premiere musical Co-Founders made its debut this week, and it is a deeply Bay Area show. Two of the creators (and stars), Adesha Adefela and Ryan Nicole Austin, are proud Oakland natives, and the third, Beau Lewis, is a Stanford grad with firsthand experience of the tech sector’s entrepreneurial world through his Rhyme Combinator media company. They are, in essence, the co-founders of a hip-hop musical about a Black woman coder in Oakland trying to break into a San Francisco startup accelerator program.

All due respect to the tech startup folks, but there is probably nothing more difficult than starting up a new musical. There are some fantastic elements in Co-Founders, but like most fledgling musicals, there are story points that need clarifying, characters that need deepening and production tech that needs tweaking.

ALL PEOPLE POWERED: Esata (Folds, left) and her mom, Deb (Adefela). imagine new life for their Oakland neighborhood.  Photo by Kevin Berne 

At Thursday’s performance at The Strand, the show was about 15 minutes into Act 1 when the show stopped and the God mic announced a short break to deal with some technical issues. That break turned into a thrilling freestyle rap session led by co-producer (and co-founder of Freestyle Love Supreme) Anthony Veneziale, and then to an unexpected 20-minute intermission.

When the show resumed, with the elaborate projections (designed by David Richardson and engineered by Frédéric O. Boulay), it was instructive to have seen one particular number, “Valley to Vallejo” about the history of Silicon Valley, performed without the tech and then again when the tech had been restored.

One of my major notes about Co-Founders is the over-use of tech and projections. The humans in this story (and especially the vibrant, vivacious actors who play them) are so much more interesting than anything projected, and the relationships between characters – the conflicts and the concordances – could only get stronger with more focus on them outside of the barrage of digital imagery that leaves absolutely nothing to the imagination.

What the show has going for it is a strong central character, Esata, whose story is part of the universal question around who gets access to a world of possibilities and who doesn’t. She’s a young woman of color and a brilliant coder. She has developed an AI system that creates a nearly sentient avatar that blows away everybody else’s AI. Hers happens to take the form of her deceased father (and is voiced and played by Tommy Soulati Shepherd via elaborate tech gimmickry that crashed the system at Thursday’s show). But she can’t get anyone to pay attention (or pay for) her brilliance.

XCELERATE: Deanalís Arocho Resto (center) is Chadwick, a tech incubator leader, kicking off a new round of founders (from left) played by Tommy Soulati Shepherd, Jordan Covington, Roe Hartrampf, Aneesa Folds, Ryan Nicole Austin and Adesha Adefela. Photo by Kevin Berne 

As played by the powerful Aneesa Folds (the role will be played by Angel Adedokun after June 22), Esata is a quiet storm of intelligence and insecurity, ambition and fear. When she boldly breaks into a high-profile tech incubator program, she wows everyone with her skills and ends up with development partner (Roe Hartrampf as Conway) who doesn’t have an ounce of her skill or imagination, but he has a rich family so he’s already on the inside. He’s a distraction for Esata, who should really be paying more attention to her Oakland besties, Kamaiyah (Austin) and Dhameer (Jordan Convington, a thrilling dancer), who are smart and savvy about the world in ways that Esata is not. The three of them are great together, and it would be nice to see Kamaiyah and Dhameer become less supporting and more central to the story.

Once Esata makes her breakthrough, the show rushes through her ensuing bad choices and the corrective realigning of her values. There’s a stock tech billionaire villain (played by Keith Pinto who’s a real showman in a sadly predictable role) with a mercurial second-in-command (played with wily charm by Deanalís Arocho Resto) and a series of unbelievable events leading to an ending that posits powerful tech can be used for positive change.

The music throughout has electrifying energy and powerful emotional pull. When Folds sings, she commands attention the way Esata does when she codes. They each have superpowers. Co-creator Adefela, plays a number of roles, including Esata’s mom, and she’s another singer whose every note casts a spell. The score’s blaze of hip-hop in its many forms feels appropriate to tell a story about Silicon Valley, with its mix of outrageous ego and true invention. It’s’ always exciting to experience a musical that sounds like now, and Co-Founders brings some R&B and even some Broadway into the mix.

One of the show’s issues, other than the aforementioned rush to a conclusion that can feel more Sesame Street than Silicon Valley, is the under-explored issues around Esata’s creation of a “Dadvatar” to keep her father alive in virtual form. She converses with the creation as if it were human (so does her mother), and the avatar seems capable of independent thought and – this is not great – singing with humans. There’s a lot of emotional complexity and outright weirdness in all this, and it’s dismissed as tech innovation to be celebrated. Perhaps that’s for a different show, but resurrecting a dead parent demands dramatic exploration, and we don’t get nearly enough here.

Co-Founders has all the ingredients to be a fresh, exciting musical. There will undoubtedly be some tinkering, but that’s what creatives do – they learn as they go, and with the right alchemy within the team, they come up with something bigger and better than the sum of its parts.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Co-Founders by Adesha Adefela, Ryan Nicole Austin and Beau Lewis continues through July 6 at ACT’s Strand Theater, 1127 Market St., San Francisco. Running time: 2 hours and 40 minutes (including one intermission). Tickets are $25-$130 (subject to change). Call 415-749-2228 or visit www.act-sf.org.