Writer Keiko Green and director Jesca Prudencia cheerfully cite "Wayne's World" and "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure" as major aesthetic influences on "Exotic Deadly: Or the MSG Play," which opens on Jan. 30 at the San Francisco Playhouse.
"'Saved by the Bell' and 'Lizzie McGuire,' too," added Green during the pair's recent interview with the Bay Area Reporter.
The show, set in 1999, is a kitschy genre mash-up underpinned with intellect and tenderness. Its wild knot of a plot centers on the coming of age of an awkward 14-year-old, Ami, whose self-perception is entangled with umami:
After learning that her Japanese grandfather invented the oft-maligned flavor enhancer monosodium glutamate (MSG), Ami's vivid imagination leads her on a teen-tastic identity quest, spangled with references to anime, video games, ramen and other pop culture totems. It's a Fantasian American odyssey.
In its 2023 world premiere at San Diego's Old Globe Theatre, also directed by Prudencia, "Exotic Deadly" garnered reviews that called it "wildly funny" (The San Diego Union Tribune) and "a rollicking romp"(New Play Exchange).
"I started writing ["Exotic Deadly"] during the pandemic lockdown," said Green. "Honestly, the only goal I had was to do something that would make me laugh. I was just writing for myself and I ended up with this play that seemed impossible to produce in so many ways."
Creative possibilities
In addition to loads of jokes, Green's mile-a-minute script includes elements much more commonly seen in movies than plays.
"There's time travel," said director Prudencia, "There are scenes that take place at the bottom of the ocean. There are constant location changes." (Also, bizarrely, there are Matt Damon and Ben Affleck).
"When I first read 'Exotic Deadly,'" Prudencia recalled, "It activated my imagination in an exciting way. I asked myself how I'd do it. And I didn't know. Which meant it was worth doing.
"I don't want to direct anything that I already know how to do."
Befitting this boldly curious approach to her craft, Prudencia, in 2017, was the first recipient of the Julie Taymor World Theater Fellowship, created by the groundbreaking director and conceptualist of 'The Lion King.'
The award supported her through a year of independent travel in Japan, Thailand, and the Philippines where she studied a wide range of performance styles, including puppetry and masked theater.
She describes that experience as an opportunity to just soak in ideas, without knowing how they might eventually inform her work. As it happens, some of the physical movement of Japanese Noh dance unexpectedly came to mind as she was developing "Exotic Deadly"'s undersea scenes.
"Working with a collaborative playwright and an amazing creative team, we can make anything happen on stage," said Prudencia, adding that it can be done without a Hollywood or Broadway budget.
"We're not interested in spoon-feeding the audience. We're asking them to bring their imaginations. And we trust that they're smart enough to meet us halfway."
Influential fun
"I love that Jesca draws from such a diverse toolbox," said Green, whose plays, produced and developed by organizations including he Kennedy Center, and the Atlantic Theater Company, rarely hew to a single genre. "She is such a joy to work with."
Green explained that Bay Area playwright Lauren Yee has also had a major influence on her work and career.
As an actor, Green performed in the world premiere of Yee's "The Great Leap" in Denver and Seattle and later attended a workshop Yee conducted. The two went on to become friends and, recently, collaborators, working in the writers' room of "Interior Chinatown," the Hulu miniseries based on Charles Yu's phantasmagoric metatextual novel.
And Green says that Yee's semi-autobiographical "King of the Yees," which the San Francisco Playhouse produced in 2017, helped inspire the tone she's aiming for in "Exotic Deadly."
"When I read that play, I was like 'Oh! I didn't realize we were allowed to do this. We're allowed to be really funny and fly by the seat of our pants and play a million characters."
That loose-jointed playfulness and hellbent desire to entertain makes "Exotic Deadly" stand out from the glut of heavy, self-serious identity dramas that, frankly, have drained some of the fun out of San Francisco theater-going in recent years. Sure, the MSG play is a message play; but the way its messages are delivered is delightful.
'Exotic Deadly: Or the MSG Play,' Jan. 30-Mar. 8, $20-$130. San Francisco Playhouse, 450 Post St. www.sfplayhouse.org
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