San Francisco Recovery Theatre - CURRENT PRODUCTIONS

The Spot Written/Produced by Geoffrey Grier
1) The Spot - Written & Produced by Geoffrey Grier

Lots of theatre companies produce political works and then claim to be involved in social activism. But SF Recovery Theatre is not just talking the talk; it's walking the walk. The company's latest production, Geoffrey Grier's The Spot, is about a teenage couple whose lives change dramatically when she gets pregnant at fifteen. Torn between supporting his new family and going after his dream to be a big basketball star, the boy gets overwhelmed by peer pressure and starts dealing drugs to make some bank. Soon, he gets wrongly blamed for the deaths of two people –– and carted off to jail. When he gets out, his twin daughters are grown, his old girlfriend's got a new man, and he's tempted, once again, to do something bad. But this time, he starts listening to himself, instead of to the word on the street. The play is part fiction and part fact, and the cast contains people who have actually been incarcerated or homeless, so it's the real deal. Grier contends that the artistic process of working in theatre gives folks a chance to take down the masks they wear on the street and learn how to communicate from the heart, in the moment. What we get in return is unmasked theatre that is illuminating real issues and changing people's lives.

2) The Dutchman - written by Amiri Baraka

Amiri Baraka, born in 1934, in Newark, New Jersey, USA, is the author of over 40 books of essays, poems, drama, and music history and criticism, a poet icon and revolutionary political activist who has recited poetry and lectured on cultural and political issues extensively in the USA, the Caribbean, Africa, and Europe.

With influences on his work ranging from musical orishas such as Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Thelonius Monk, and Sun Ra to the Cuban Revolution, Malcolm X and world revolutionary movements, Baraka is renowned as the founder of the Black Arts Movement in Harlem in the 1960s that became, though short-lived, the virtual blueprint for a new American theater aesthetics. The movement and his published and performance work, such as the signature study on African-American music, Blues People (1963) and the play Dutchman (1963) practically seeded “the cultural corollary to black nationalism” of that revolutionary American milieu.

The Dutchman, Amiri Baraka's most widely known dramatic work, was first presented at the Cherry Lane Theater in New York City in March 1964. This explosive examination of race relations in America, easily the most talked about play of the year, brought its writer the Village Voice's Obie Award in recognition of the play being the most outstanding Off-Broadway production of the year. This highly controversial play was given film treatment in 1967.

His awards and honors include an Obie, the American Academy of Arts & Letters award, the James Weldon Johnson Medal for contributions to the arts, Rockefeller Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts grants, Professor Emeritus at the State university of New York at Stony Brook, and the Poet Laureate of New Jersey.

**2009 Guest Playwright 3) Paradise Revisited - Playwright Larry Americ Allen

Larry Americ Allen has a Master's in Creative Writing and is the author of the Shakespeare's Lost Masterpiece. The play was selected by the National Black Theater Festival as One of the Best New Plays by an Emerging Playwright. The play made its premiered last summer at the Buriel Clay Theater in San Francisco before moving to Laney College in Oakland. Americ is also the winner of the Ebony Passages Award for Best Dramatic Script for The Expulsion of Malcolm X. His plays have been performed at the Lorraine Hansberry Theater, the Black Repertory Theater, and the New Zephyr Theater.

A look at the life of a Tenderloin resident that receives an unexpected visitor.