This Saturday, Feb. 19 at 2 p.m., the Magic Theatre in San Francisco will present a free show of its current play, “What We’re Up Against,” at Oakland’s Laney College, 900 Fallon St.

For a professional theater to come do a free show at a community college is pretty much unheard of, according to Michael Torres, the director of Laney’s theater department.

“For some of them, seeing plays is extremely rare, which kind of breaks my heart,” he said. “Now the students will get a chance to see, stress free, a high caliber performance from what I regard as a high caliber professional theater company. For most students even just getting to the Magic is pretty tough, and for some of them the expense might as well be a million dollars.”

“What We’re Up Against” by Theresa Rebeck, is the story of a young, talented new female hire at an architectural firm and how people react to her. The show will kick off a new series of free community performances at Laney called Magic Oakland.



This all started in October when playwright Octavio Solis – who had met Awele Makeba at the Cornerstone Theater Company – invited her to the opening night of a show he directed, Tarell Alvin McCraney’s “The Brothers Size.

Makeba said watching the play about two brothers, which uses West African storytelling and music, moved her deeply.

“After the show, I sat there with my big sister, just paralyzed, tears running down my face,” Makeba said. “I was wondering how are we going to get an African-American audience to this, and I just started thinking out loud.”

An audience member heard Makeba’s conversation with her sister and immediately introduced her to Magic’s marketing director, Pattie Lockard.

The two talked about what they could do to get the play out into the community, thinking along the lines of having a few of the actors go to high schools and talk about the rehearsal process and do a scene. Makeba said she would look out for a space and talk to various people to see what could happen. When Lockard called Makeba to let her know she had found a day the actors would be able to do a whole performance, Makeba thought of Laney, where she had taken classes and been a tutor.

The performance of “The Brothers Size” was such a huge success, Makeba said, that the actors, who had planned to get back to San Francisco to have time for dinner before their performance at the Magic that night, decided to stay so they could answer the audience’s questions. Loretta Greco, the artistic director of the Magic, wanted these performances to continue.

Getting to see this performance was almost like a religious experience for some of his students, Torres said.

“With live theater, there’s this energy between the actors and the audience, and they felt that electricity and the storytelling that isn’t just words,” Torres said. “When you go to the theater, you look at yourself and live vicariously thought the characters. No one’s preaching at you, and that’s a good thing.”

Makeba, the community producer for Magic Oakland, agrees. Along with the free performances, she would like to see open rehearsals and after performance discussions to turn the school into a sort of cultural hub.
 
“For me, theater becomes a potent art form that speaks to our spirit,” she said. “There’s a need for a cultural center and to use dialogue to pull us together as a community.”

About Emily Wilson

Emily is a radio, print and web reporter. She has written stories for KALW, NPR, KQED, The East Bay Express, Alternet, Diverse and Edutopia, among others. She teaches at City College of San Francisco, works at KCBS and writes about arts for the Examiner.com.