The Best of Bay Area Theater in 2017

In these end days of the year and perhaps the country, we might ask, just to while away the time, what we want from our American plays.

It’s a child’s experiment, really, as there’s no theater imaginable that might save us from the disasters looming before us. Still, we might ask of our American playwrights that they perhaps point out a way, a path to follow that might have escaped our sight, or to paint a sign in the woods that might lead us to a new and secret city on a hill.

Here’s a rare group of American plays that did just that in the Bay Area of 2017, giving us a few gentle hints of where others have gone and where we might run.

6. The Curran Theater, Taylor Mac’s A 24-Decade History of Popular Music

If America were a 24-hour queer slumber party, then it would be something like Taylor Mac’s A 24-Decade History of Popular Music — the country’s history at its most unguarded, wacky, and tragic. Mac is an extravagant realist, daring us to experience in full the songs that have marked the history of the nation for over 240 years. It’s an audacious examination and surrender to all the delights and discontents of the simple pleasures of song. Mac knows what we’ve felt and what we’re feeling, and he yanks it all out onto the open stage for everyone to see with a razor wit and hard-fought joy.

5. The Shotgun Players, William Burroughs and Tom Waits’ The Black Rider: The Casting of the Magic Bullets

Robert Wilson’s production of The Black Rider was an international sensation, a lavish valentine to German expressionism, and a lovely artifact of what the lush, extravagant subsidies of European Art House Theater can accomplish. Yet lurking beneath all those Euros was a nasty American attack dog of a play. Director Mark Jackson strips William Burroughs and Tom Waits’ fairy tale of magic bullets down to dime store essentials and subjects us to the logic of a brutal equation -- if you love to shoot, you're aiming to kill. A beautiful and entrancing nightmare for which, unfortunately, there is no antidote. (You can still see the bullets fly in the Shotgun Players’ production running through Sunday, Jan. 21.)

4. Ubuntu Theater Project, Lisa Ramirez’s To The Bone

Lisa Ramirez’s play about a community of immigrant women working in a poultry preparation facility is an off-key bit of terror. Most of the screams are silent, and the victims more likely to simply vanish than to suffer the fate of the slaughterhouse — though that’s a constant threat, too. The play’s politics might be ripped from the headlines, but Ramirez’s characters are startling for their everyday dreams and concerns. This is what happens in America to all those the law refuses to recognize. And the Ubuntu production, under Michael Maron’s direction, never lets us escape the awful truth that what we're really watching is a human preparation facility -- as if cutting up chickens wasn't bad enough.

3. The Wooster Group, The Town Hall Affair (at the Z Space)

The Wooster Group often finds plays in the garbage heap of history, and The Town Hall Affair is as stunning a dumpster dive into the past as you’re likely to get: an acid-tinged recreation of Norman Mailer’s infamous 1971 state-of-the-woman summit, where the pugilist-minded author opined, bullied, and presided over a panel of feminist luminaries to hilarious effect. The sly Germaine Greer and the erudite Diana Trilling are worthy foils to Mailer, but it is Village Voice columnist and goofball supreme Jill Johnston who steals the show — and our hearts. In her antic tomfoolery, the Woosters discover a lovely dream of a possible future, one we’re only just beginning to glimpse.

2. California Shakespeare Theater, Marcus Gardley’s Black Odyssey

Why Shakespeare isn’t a model for American playwrights is a mystery of the field and an odd cultural misstep down the stairs of irrelevance. For now, at least we can marvel at Marcus Gardley’s contemporary twist on the Shakespearian romance, Black Odyssey, simultaneously a love letter to Oakland, a testament to African-American faith and resilience, and a complex accounting of guilt and innocence. Here is a true epic, where the twists and turns of life keep on revealing what a miracle it is just to hold on and make it through one more day -- over 16 long years of struggle. (Black Odyssey returns to Cal Shakes for two weeks at the end of next summer.)

1. Marin Theatre Company, Thomas Bradshaw’s Thomas and Sally

Easily 2017’s most controversial and outrageous play, Thomas and Sally (a Marin Theatre Company world premiere) rushes headlong into the shadows and corners of a newly minted America already tainted by its idiot embrace of slavery. Bradshaw’s depiction of the 44-year old Thomas Jefferson’s love affair with his 15-year old slave Sally Hemings is both a bold, grand romance and a wary take on whether love is even possible under those conditions. With a scientist’s eye for the ugly facts of human nature and a touch of Hitchcock’s Vertigo (Hemings was the half-sister of Jefferson’s dead wife), Bradshaw’s comic epic imagines that we are all the daughters of the revolution -- just not the revolution we thought.