six powerful productions

We are thrilled to announce our 2022 Season, In the Eye of the Storm: Meaning vs. Power—an exploration of hope, meaning, and transformation.

In Homo Deus, Yuval Noah Harari writes, “the modern covenant is that we have exchanged meaning for power.” In picking our 2022 Season, we sought plays that offer transformation from a power-oriented experience to one that affords meaning. For me, it often seems like genuine transformation becomes more and more difficult as reckoning with our reality is more and more painful. But I think hope is generated by facing hopelessness head on. I think art has a role to play in how we are able to both reckon with the present and re-imagine new possibilities—and we landed on magical realism as one means by which we can come out the other side of our challenges.

In each of these plays, meaning and power come to a head, and the motif of the storm manifests literally, figuratively, or as a form of the play itself.

As we continue to encounter a tumultuous time, it feels increasingly like we are in the eye of the storm, wrestling with whether or not we can forge an existence where meaning is paramount, or whether we have already resigned ourselves to one where power reigns. We hope theater has a role to play in offering stories that seek to create meaning from our time.

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PAST SHOW

Miranda, the only daughter of a powerful sorcerer, Prospero, recalls a series of supernatural events on a remote island, where her father once orchestrated a maritime storm, shipwrecking a group of travelers. As the survivors begin to encounter strange enchantments on the island, a larger shared history begins to unfold, revealing old secrets, reigniting a struggle for power, and compelling an unavoidable reckoning with the past.

“The production will frame Shakespeare’s last play as Miranda’s memory so that the play itself becomes a reckoning of both who Prospero is, and of the play itself,” says director Michael Socrates Moran. “As such, we hope the reckoning with this play serves as a reckoning for all of us in our time as we wrestle with questions of re-writing our history, who has power to tell whose story, colonization, and the relevance of Shakespeare itself in contemporary America.”

PAST SHOW

OTP is thrilled to present the West Coast Premiere of Endlings by Celine Song (a finalist for the 2020 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, selected for the 2018 O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, and included on the 2017 Kilroys list).

On the remote island of Man-Jae, Korea, three elderly women spend their dying days free diving into the ocean to harvest seafood. These haenyeos—“sea women”—are the last practitioners of their millennium-old tradition. On the island of Manhattan, a Korean-Canadian playwright navigates external expectations of how her own identity intersects with the stories she tells.

In a magical reflection of the interplay between narrative and identity, this whimsical satire humorously reveals how the stories we tell can obscure entire peoples, and asks: how we are to remove ourselves from an entrapping culture while we simultaneously perpetuate it for our own self-interest?

OTP presents the first-ever Bay Area production of the 1989 play The Mojo and the Sayso by Aishah Rahman, a writer, professor and active participant in the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s.

A prolific playwright who described her writing style as reflective of a "jazz aesthetic," Rahman was ahead of her time in experimenting with form, mixing magical realism with sharp-edged comedy in a context that copes with unfathomable tragedy in order to reveal the profoundly human cost of racial injustice.

Rahman’s work was a forebear to Marcus Gardley, Tarell Alvin McCraney, Lynn Nottage, Jackie Sibblies Drury, and others that are celebrated today. Her work carries a grounded sensibility of her time congruent with the work of Lorraine Hansberry, but it also risks reflecting back a mystery of the human existence that complicates her form – a complicated form that resonates with our shared reality today.

Based on the 1973 killing of a 10-year-old boy by New York City Police, The Mojo and the Sayso mixes comedy, drama and fantasy in its exploration of devastating loss.

The play centers on the Benjamin family, three years after the death of their 10-year-old son Linus at the hands of an off-duty police officer. Father Acts finds escape in repairing and restoring automobiles. Mother Awilda has leaned into her faith and her pastor for solace. Their son Walter, renaming himself Blood, looks to action and violence. As the family revisits their loss, layers of grief unfold—along with new truths and the possibility of healing—in a play full of what the playwright herself termed “absurdity, intimacy and magic mayhem.”

Based on the Salem Witch Trials of 1692–93, this Tony Award-winning allegory—originally inspired by Miller’s own experiences with McCarthyism—resonates anew in the dynamics of a decentralized, digital society.

Reimagined for a contemporary world, the production draws on dance and digital technology as the physical and virtual worlds collide, the roles between observer and observed are blurred, and fear is an ever-present undercurrent. 

“As a play that was borne of protest, The Crucible uses the context of one time in history to mirror another,” says director Michael Socrates Moran. “This production seeks to do the same, protesting how we often devolve into dehumanization in the name of purity, behind the guise of a digital world. This production asks us to reckon with the universally human impulse to scapegoat another, and what dignity and integrity still cost in today’s world.”

Oakland Theater Project is delighted to partner with California Shakespeare Theater (Cal Shakes) on a partnership to produce Marcus Gardley’s modern version translation of King Lear by William Shakespeare, directed by Cal Shakes Artistic Director Eric Ting and Aurora Theater Company’s Associate Artistic Director, Dawn Monique Williams. Set in San Francisco’s Fillmore District from the eminent domain crisis through to the subsequent displacement of the 1960s, and infused with a jazz score, Gardley’s deeply personal Lear reckons with uncomfortable legacies, with the consequences of our actions, and with the vulnerability and ultimate resilience of the human heart to find its way back again.

Staged at Cal Shakes’ Bruns Amphitheater (100 California Shakespeare Theater Way, Orinda), Oakland Theater Project subscribers get tickets and first access to this exciting show premiere!

*Subscribers will select their seats and performance dates at a later date when tickets become available for the production.

OTP’s 2022 Season culminates with a World Premiere from OTP Associate Artistic Director and award-winning playwright Lisa Ramirez. Based on Jorge Luis Borges’ 1975 short story, the tale follows a protagonist who is sold a mysterious book written in an unknown language, with an infinite number of pages—known as the Book of Sand because “neither the book nor the sand has any beginning or end.”

Inspired by magical realism, the tale unfolds as a dreamscape. With each page the protagonist reads, they delve deeper into themselves, confronting one internal world after another. Fascination soon turns to obsession and fear as the protagonist begins to face new facets of their own inner shadow.

As the story moves from one magical reality to another, larger questions arise: Where might the end be? How does one arrive at peace within oneself? How could that peace translate to the world at large? And is the obsession with the journey for such peace antithetical to the journey’s end?