The world premiere of an interactive theater production inspired by the historic riots that launched transgender activism in San Francisco opens for a four-week run on February 22 at the New Village Cafe, 1426 Polk St. Tickets, already sold out for the first weekend, are $60, and include a meal (breakfast for dinner), which is served before the play begins. Co-produced by the Tenderloin Museum and playwright Mark Nasser, "The Compton's Cafeteria Riot" is an "immersive and interactive" performance that's staged in a cafe a few minutes away from the long-gone Compton's Cafeteria at Turk and Taylor.
The production features a 12-person cast who interact with the 50 audience members to recreate life in the Tenderloin in the 1960s, when drag queens and their allies got together regularly for late-night breakfasts at Compton's. In 1966, a drag queen threw her cup of hot coffee in the face of a police officer as he made an unwarranted attempt to arrest her. The riot that followed would come to be known as the United States' first recorded act of militant queer resistance to social oppression and police harassment, three years before the famous gay riot at New York's Stonewall Inn.
The new production, in the works for two years, brings together an accomplished playwright and two transgender women whose memories of life in the Tenderloin provided the storyline and dialogue. The collaborative production was conceived and developed by Bay Area playwright Mark Nasser and Tenderloin Museum director Katie Conry. Nasser wrote the script with neighborhood drag queens Donna Personna and Collette LeGrand. The three then workshopped the play through 2017, incorporating community feedback.
Conry, who took the helm as museum director last year, got grants from from the California Humanities, a nonprofit partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Zellerbach Family Foundation, the Horizons Foundation, and the Neighborhoods Arts Collaborative/Grants for the Arts.
The idea for the production came spontaneously, when Nasser, a straight man, visited the Tenderloin Museum and was intrigued by what he learned about the community activism illustrated in its permanent collection. A playwright and actor best-known for developing "Tony and Tina's Wedding," the longest-running Off Broadway comedy in New York City history (25 years), Nasser hopes the new production will resonate with theatregoers.
In a telephone interview with the B.A.R., Nasser, 60, said he became interested in writing about the Tenderloin after visiting St. Boniface Church, where he saw homeless people sleeping in the pews, and meeting Tenderloin Museum director Katie Conry. "Can we collaborate on something?" Nassar asked Conry.
"I'd ordinarily mull over a new project for a long time," he said, "but I knew immediately this was something I wanted to write about. It's historically significant and still so relevant today."
Nasser said an important part of the production was finding transgender people to play the roles of the "queens" in the production. "It wasn't easy" to find trained actors for the parts, he said, "but it was important to us." The production came together slowly, gelling after Nasser was introduced to two community activisits, Collette LeGrand and Donna Personna, who were interested in working on something so close to their hearts.
Personna, 71, an artist who performed with the Cockettes and serves on the board of directors for the Trans March and the Transgender Day of Rembrance, had a 45-year career as a hairstylist in the South Bay, taking the Greyhound bus to San Francisco on weekends, where she spent time in the Tenderloin. Going to beauty college guaranteed Peronna a job in a field where transgender women were accepted, she said in a phone interview with the B.A.R.
"It wasn't as if I made an informed decision," she said, "but thanks to the suggestion of my brother I was able to work in a field where heterosexual men and women welcomed queers." But when she visited the city, she witnessed the everyday "trauma and hatred" transgender women faced on the street, including the time a car she was riding in got riddled with bullets. "Life on the streets was scary," she said. At 37, Personna went back to college, graduating with honors from San Jose State. "I consider myself a warrior, activist, and rebel," she said. "I was honored to be given the opportunity to tell my personal stories that were adapted into the play. So everything the audience sees and hears actually happened."
LeGrand, 69, the twice former Grand Duchess of the Ducal Court of San Francisco who has raised funds for charity in the Tenderloin for 30 years and has her own biweekly drag show, "Dream Queens Revue," moved to San Francisco in 1973.
When she first arrived in the city, she spent years "pretty much as a streetwalker. Back then," she said in a phone interview with the B.A.R., "there weren't many jobs available" to transgender women. In the 1980s, LeGrand began a 27-year career with Pacific Bell, a "welcome relief" from her years working on the street.
When LeGrand was first asked about getting involved with a play about life in the Tenderloin in the 1960s, "I really didn't want to do it. I didn't like the idea of my life being out there in the public eye," she said. But after she and Personna met with Nasser for several weeks, "the idea of a straight man writing about transgender people starting making a lot of sense to me." Now, she said on the eve of the premiere, "I realize this is probably the most interesting and exciting thing" that has ever happened to her.
Others in the production include Kelly J. Kelly, who recently appeared in her comedy solo show "Stepford Wife Wannabe"; Clair Farley, a trans advocate, actress, writer, and the Mayor's Senior Advisor on Trans Initiatives; Pleasure Bynight, a recent transplant to San Francisco who performs at shows around the city; LaVale Davis, who can be seen as his drag alter ego Coco Buttah; Jaylyn Abergas, who twirls hair at Smoke & Mirrors Salon downtown by day, and twirls her legs as her drag persona Miss J by night; Shane Zaldivar, who came to the Bay Area to attend Oaksterdam University, now a drag performer; Drew Olvey, pursuing a degree in theatre and performance studies; and Steve Menasche, a conservatory-trained actor, musician and martial artist who has toured the world with West Side Story, Jesus Christ Superstar and the American Folk Theatre. Also in the cast are Jacob Ritts, Joseph Paul, Barbara Pond, and Persia.
"The Compton's Cafeteria Riot" tickets: www.eventbrite.com