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While relatively new to USF, this link between performing arts and a larger mission of engagement with civic issues is in fact as old as theater itself; “politics” and “drama” have been consonant since ancient Greece: so many kings, so many tragedies. Yet in more recent history, particularly in the United States, art and artists that acknowledge creative performance as a powerful and age-old tool for social transformation have become surprisingly scarce commodities. Broadway’s Legally Blonde: The Musical or The Little Mermaid trump Bertolt Brecht hands down in American cultural consciousness.
At USF, this merging of performance and social activism begins in the classroom. Even coursework in traditional performance areas is approached with an eye toward greater social, political, and even global implications. In voice classes, for example, a technical course taught by acting programs everywhere, students at USF “discuss the socioeconomic impacts of speech, as well as learning the International Phonetic Alphabet and Edith Skinner’s techniques,” said Novak.
“Our students go out into various San Francisco communities and interview people with different accents and learn to replicate them,” he said. “Then they go back on the street and ask people to take a survey based on first impressions. They learn the basic but profound fact that there is a tremendous amount of bias against people based on the way they speak. And our students have learned this from the inside out.”
Adjunct professor and Bay Area actor and director Ken Sonkin said the program’s non-doctrinaire course offerings are its calling cards. “Where else can you take hip-hop theater, Latino and Chicano theater, jazz and social justice, (and) women’s music through the ages?”
Carlos Menchaca ’04 credits the program’s unusually eclectic curriculum with instilling in
him “an understanding that performance can empower communities.”
“Every arts program will teach you Shakespeare and modern dance, but no one else will teach you to look at the world through, for example, the lens of a performance brigade in Latin America that uses theater as a way to educate the public about corrupted leaders and policies,” he said.
Menchaca’s experiences reaffirmed his commitment to political action, both within and outside the arts world. During his junior year, he served as student body president and since 2005 he has worked in big-city politics as capital budget and policy coordinator for Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz. “Theater isn’t all that different from politics. The success of an elected official requires a solid performer, a brilliant playwright, flawless technical team, and a whole lot of creativity.”
Other hallmarks of the program are the numerous productions students perform in collaboration with diverse communities outside USF.
Jwayad, for example, performed the lead role in the program’s 2001 production of Brecht’s The Good Person of Setzuan, a groundbreaking collaboration between USF actors and Soapstone Theater Company. All Soapstone members are ex-offenders and survivors of violent crime, brought together by the San Francisco Sheriff Department’s Resolve to Stop the Violence Project. Performances sold out at USF as well as in downtown San Francisco at the Lorraine Hansberry Theatre and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.
“The Good Person was the most important show I ever did at USF,” Jwayad said. “I not only grew as an actor, but I advanced as a director. Working with the Soapstone members I learned to have patience and an attentiveness to every possible kind of actor, and to appreciate their courage, lessons which have greatly helped my skills as a director.”
In 2002, students performed Polaroid Stories, a retelling of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, inspired in part by photographer Jim Goldberg’s photo essay of young runaways, “Raised by Wolves.” During the development and rehearsal of the production, student actors interviewed homeless youth in San Francisco and incorporated their personal stories into the play’s dialogue.
The program’s first commissioned play, The Doll Hospital, was inspired by a visit Roberto Varea, associate professor and program chair, took to the site of Troy (Turkey) in 2003. He came home envisioning a contemporary adaptation of The Trojan Women, Euripides’ great commentary on
the Peloponnesian War and women’s resistance to violence. Christine Evans, an Australian playwright and a visiting scholar at USF at the time, wrote the script to address issues surrounding the war in Iraq. Instead of incorporating a Greek chorus, the performance used a chorus of people displaced by the war and performed by actors in El Teatro Jornalero!, a San Francisco theater group made up of Spanish-speaking immigrant day laborers.
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