Tracy Martin

Ross Travis as Hermes, Nathaniel Justiniano as Zeus and Julie Douglas as Athena in the We Players' production of The Odyssey on Angel Island.

For the We Players, all the world is truly a stage -- or at least the Bay Area is. The site-specific theater company brings drama to dramatic public spaces: Macbeth at Fort Point, Hamlet on Alcatraz, The Odyssey on a historic schooner as it sailed the San Francisco Bay. For its latest project, the company is exploring more chapters of Homer's epic, this time on Angel Island.

The all-day adventure is an odyssey in its own right. You take a ferry that departs Pier 41 at 9:40 a.m., and you don't return until after 5 p.m. You walk three to four miles on paved and unpaved paths, up and down hills, around almost the entire island, all with no official lunch break. Like true adventurers, I suppose, you must eat while you journey; indeed, by comparison to the We Players' past two shows, The Odyssey on Angel Island has the highest travel time-to-theater ratio.

Taxing as the experience is, especially for theatergoers accustomed to exercising their sitting muscles, it is not without rewards, chief among which is the scenery itself. There's the bay, with its pools of blues and greens unobstructed by hills (or condos). There are Pride of Madeira in full bloom and the painterly, peeling bark of eucalyptus trees. And of course, there are views of San Francisco, Marin, the East Bay, and the bridges from unfamiliar, even disorienting angles.

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Photo by Sarah Roland.

Jomar Tagatac, Kendra Lee Oberhauser, and Tonya Narvaez.

One of the things that makes theater special, of course, is that it's live. Every night of a performance is a unique event; no matter how much you rehearse and standardize, certain variables always defy control.

Sleepwalkers Theatre's world-premiere production of Adam Chanzit's Down to This, about a homecoming, a holdup, and a booty call gone awry, amplifies this unpredictability by offering two endings. Choose-your-own-adventure this is not; each night chance determines which way the play goes.

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Holly Wallace

Terry Baum (left) and Carolyn Myers are the Crackpot Crones.

The socially and politically charged theater of Terry Baum and Carolyn Myers isn't always meant to offend, but that sometimes happens. At World Pride 2000 in Rome, an Italian version of the production Dos Lesbos is said to have offended Pope John Paul II.

Baum and Myers have worked together since the early 1970s, when they met at UC Santa Barbara. Two years before their first production, Baum volunteered on the campaign of women's movement leader Bella Abzug's for the House of Representatives. (She won.) In 2011, Myers served as press liaison for Baum's campaign for mayor of San Francisco. (She didn't win.) Regardless of the setting or goal, the duo's work seeks not just to entertain, but to offer alternatives to the way we think of certain aspects of life.

We recently spoke with Baum and Myers before this weekend's performance at the Dark Room of MOMS! Sketch Comedy & Improv for Anyone Who's Ever Been or Ever Had a Mother, and what lies ahead for the self-dubbed "Crackpot Crones."

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Look at them go!

In 1990, Kevin Bacon put on a dazzling performance in Tremors, a film about mutant worms and trailer parks. As children, we played a game in which, side by side with Kevin Bacon, we would destroy the underground monsters and bring peace to the world. Each kid carried out the appointed duties with great seriousness -- for us it was not only a game, it was making Mr. Bacon proud and protecting mom and dad from harm.

Whether it's starring in Tremors or claiming the principal is a sea monster, one thing is for sure -- children are capable of creating outlandish and spectacular worlds. Aiming to illustrate this potential while building literacy skills with inner-city kids, StageWrite presents "Short Plays by Short People: Rotten Lunches & Bubblegum Punches" on Friday at Brava Theater Center.

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Carrina Schindler

Damien Chacona in the title role.

Ham Pants' production of The Wrong Dick, at the Dark Room this month Thursdays through Saturdays, is as much a love letter to detective noir as it is a spoof. And like so many love letters (not that we critics receive a lot of them, but we can imagine), this one goes on a little too long.

When it parodies, however, this show shines. It follows Mort Fiskarmann (Tim Kay), a fishmonger who stumbles upon, throws up in, and then finds himself somehow responsible for a pile of dead whores -- or as one character says it, "hoo-oars." Complicating his exoneration is a madcap adventure through various San Francisco neighborhoods, on which he encounters a parade of multiple stock characters in the genre: the inscrutable, opium-peddling Oriental (Cameron Eng); the "dame" who's dying to tell her story of woe to "a capable man" but then erupts with histrionics into her handkerchief (Monica Hernandez); and of course, the trench coat-sporting hard-boiled detective (Damien Chacona).

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Annie Paladino

The cast of Tenderloin

Mark Ellinger spent six years living on the streets, addicted to heroin. When he shot some bad dope and ended up in the hospital for two and a half months, he resolved that things would be different when he got out.

"It was a decision I made that whatever door opens, I was going to walk through it," he said. "That was my modus operandi, and it worked. "

The door that opened was getting a digital camera from a neighbor who didn't want it anymore. Ellinger, who had studied at the S.F. Art Institute when he moved here from Ohio, lived in a single room occupancy hotel in the Tenderloin. When he returned from the hospital, he started taking pictures of the neighborhood, particularly the Beaux Arts architecture .

"The perspective that I started working on and continue working from is to look past the veneer of crime and decay," he said. "Look up, actually. Look up above the street level, because that's where you'll see the architect's original intent."

Ellinger started a blog, Up from the Deep. http://upfromthedeep.com/ This is how director and writer Annie Elias found him when she sought people to interview for a documentary play for the Cutting Ball Theater, about the neighborhood where it resides -- the Tenderloin.

The result, Tenderloin, has its opening tonight (Friday) at Exit on Taylor.

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Chris Alongi

Sarah Moser as First Dumpling in Megan Cohen's Three Little Dumplings Go Bananas, a highlight of the Bay One Acts Festival.

When you enter the Bay One Acts Festival, you might expect something like the SF Fringe Festival. Ten companies produce 10 one-act plays, and it's hard to know what to expect. It's adventurous theater-making and theatergoing. The artists all take risks, and some inevitably pay off more than others. But when you do witness success, the pleasure is more than just watching a good show; you feel like you're discovering exciting new artists.

That said, the Bay One Acts Festival is definitely not the Fringe. The 10 companies -- the Playwrights' Foundation, 11th Hour Ensemble, Threshold, San Francisco Theater Pub, PianoFight, Precarious Theater, Sleepwalkers Theatre, No Nude Men, Ragged Wing Ensemble, and Instrumental Theatre -- are all local. It's been said that the Bay Area theater scene is uniquely collaborative and supportive, and in the festival that sense of community is abundantly displayed. The directors, producers, playwrights, and actors clearly value each other and are deeply invested in one another's work.

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Can you envision a "live magazine?" How about an event that combines the best parts of your favorite magazine, like great writing, unusual and illuminating topics, and beautiful, challenging images, with the spontaneity, ephemerality, and added sensory elements such as live music? Pop-Up Magazine is that event, and in its short existence (it has produced six issues in three years) it has become one of the city's most exciting cultural happenings. Tickets to the production sell out in minutes, and presenting at the event has become something like appearing on Saturday Night Live for intellectuals, a high-profile career touchstone earned on stage. Photography and recording is prohibited, so we give you what we can with images from a party associated with the event.More >>

Nina de Torres Ignacio

The cast of Bill Peters' production of Hamlet.

To some ways of thinking, the title role in Hamlet is a natural part for female performers. Unlike the other male characters in Shakespeare's tragedy, who are all too ready to kill or banish or compromise their loved ones the moment the thought crosses their minds, Hamlet thinks before he acts. The Prince of Denmark is a university student, much more at home in the world of words and thoughts and debates than in the one in which he finds himself: a revenge plot.

Hamlet's father has died, and his mother Gertrude has married his uncle Claudius, isolating Hamlet in what Claudius calls "unmanly grief." Literature historically leaves mourning to women -- Hamlet's closest predecessors might be Penelope and Electra. Hamlet revels in his grief, using it as a weapon, a comfort, yet still insisting that what he shows the world is "but the trappings and the suits of woe." But when he finds out that Claudius killed his father and that he must avenge his father's death, his grief proves ill suited to spur him to kill.

Many actresses have taken on the Dane, including legendary Shakespeareans Sarah Siddons and Sarah Bernhardt. Director Bill Peters, in a minimalist San Francisco State production, is now taking the femininity up a notch by casting actresses in all the roles. That doesn't mean that the characters become female. Nor does it mean a lot of fake beards and artificially deep voices -- rather, it's a lot of unflattering menswear. Actually, it's easy to forget that Peters' performers are women. Once in a while, Hamlet (Alix Cuadra) and his confidante Horatio (Maia Knibb) giggle like schoolgirls, or Claudius (Kayla Lauzier) and Gertrude (Celeste Conowitch) whisper sweet nothings to and pet one another, calling attention to gender much in the way that Shakespeare's all-male troupe did. Other than that, the performers might as well be men.

It seems there's no larger purpose to the cross-gender casting. Not that there has to be. Women ought to be able to interpret any role in whatever way they choose without the imperative to be subversive or "feminist." The trouble with Peters' production is that "just because" seems to be the answer to every artistic question.

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We don't think Jimmy James will be there, but he sets a high standard for those who will.

When Michelle Williams was cast as Marilyn Monroe in My Week with Marilyn, the blogosphere lit up with outrage and petulant assertions that "even drag queens" could do it better. Well, duh. When it comes to larger-than-life female sexuality, drag queens always do it better.

A contest Wednesday night at the Eureka Theatre called Marilyn Madness will prove which one does it best. Theater company 42nd Street Moon has invited a parade of Blonde Bombshells to pout, heave, and flutter their bedroom eyes for the cameras prior to the staging of Sugar (whose director, Dyan McBride, we interviewed last week), a musical comedy based on the screenplay Some Like It Hot by Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond. (While this 40th anniversary production features a real-live girl in the title role, don't hold it against her; Joe and Jerry still get dolled up.)

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