Checkers Rosario could be described as a director of B movies in the Philippines, except that that grade level is too generous. His monster movie Squid Children of Cebu had a single midnight screening before a quick fade-out, and the studio boss is pulling the plug on Checkers' new movie about dinosaur-women. The movies are vehicles for his wife, Reva, except that she's all but unrecognizable beneath the costuming as an avenging squid mother or the bat-winged pygmy queen. When a fast-talking producer from the United States offers them a chance to fly to California, they jump at the chance.
"Hello, Hollywood," Checkers exclaims as their plane touches down. "Not exactly," says sun-streaked producer Gaz Gazman. "Do you know Dionne Warwick?" As in, do you know the way to San Jose? That's the kind of sharp, merrily off-kilter humor that characterizes much of Presenting...The Monstress!, one entry in a double bill of plays adapted from Lysley Tenorio's 2012 collection of short stories Monstress and being staged by ACT at its Strand Theater.
An insert indicates that the order of the plays has been reversed since the program went to press, which was a smart move. Remember the I-Hotel, now the opener, is a poignant tale set around San Francisco's doomed residential International Hotel. Poignant, but ineffably sad for reasons far beyond the urban-renewal demolition of the hotel. If you have a choice, better not to send audiences out into the streets in a state of gloom.
ACT commissioned local playwrights Sean San Jose and Philip Kan Gotanda to adapt two of Tenorio's stories that ACT Artistic Director Carey Perloff herself is directing. Tenorio, born in the Philippines and raised in California, looks at the various effects of cultural displacement often through a pop-culture lens, with the added outlier perspective of a gay man. The Green Lantern, the Beatles, and wayward Hollywood dreams figure into the stories of his Monstress collection, which also includes heartbreaking tales of unrequited gay love and the funeral of a transsexual woman as her brother and their mother diverge on which gender-state the corpse should be laid to rest.
It is unrequited gay love that is at the heart of Remember the I-Hotel, Gotanda's rendering of Tenorio's "Save the I-Hotel." From 1907 to 1977, the International Hotel was a residential hotel that became one of the last vestiges of San Francisco's Manilatown. The play shuttles between the 1930s and the 1977 eviction day, following two friends with a tortured history whose adult lives have been lived at the hotel.
Gotanda deftly establishes the characters of the savvy Vicente and Fortunado, an awkward new arrival from the Philippines, whom Vicente befriends. Vincente helps Fortunado land a job as a bellhop at a Nob Hill hotel, and also tries to hook a reluctant Fortunado up with women. But Fortunado secretly loves Vincente, and a brief reciprocated kiss leads Fortunado to naive expectations that turn from vile retribution to a lifetime of caretaking for the man he helped disable. Ogie Zulueta and Jomar Tagatac are in lovely harmony with their roles as the once-brash Vincente and the gentler (but guilt-ridden) Fortunado.
Gotanda provides something of a Greek chorus that occasionally pokes in its head to provide narration, but it's distracting and unnecessary. A variation on the technique works better in playwright San Jose's Presenting...The Monstress!, which needs a way to supplant the first-person narration of the original story. Two movie queens (Zulueta and Tagatac returning in much different roles) along with a gal-buddy (Rinabeth Apostol) conjure the tale of husband-and-wife Hollywood wannabes Checkers and Reva as they chase an impossible dream.
But much of the tale is upbeat, at least for the audience, with San Jose capturing the delusional passion of film director Checkers, and Melody Butiu finding a touching ambivalence as the more realistically ambitious actress Reva, who longs to be, in an ill-omened malapropism, a "femme fatality." Nick Gabriel is a constant comic delight as pseudo-Hollywood player Gaz Gazman, whose "soundstage" is in his grandmother's basement in Colma.
Perloff has comfortably directed both plays, highlighting the very different tone of each, on Nina Ball's multi-purpose set. This is the second production at ACT's Strand Theater, a venue smaller than its home base at the Geary, and Monstress is a good fit for this edgier alternative to the grand gaudiness of the Geary.
Monstress will run at the Strand Theater through Nov. 22. Tickets are $20-$100. Call (415) 749-2228 or go to act-sf.org.