Now through August 25, the Marsh presents the inaugural In Front of Your Eyes Performance Festival. This series of live performances will present developing work by women and nonbinary performers and will include solo works by two lesbian performers.
The Latina lesbian experience will come to life with Tina D'Elia's "The Break Up! A Latina Queer Torch Song" on August 10 and 11. In an interview with the Bay Area Reporter, D'Elia described the show as "a queer dramedy mixed with magical realism that explores loss and how a quirky queer community may birth healing, hope and solace."
D'Elia is proud of her mixed-race Mexican heritage. She is an actor, writer, solo performer, casting director and producer and she strongly aligns herself with BIPOC LGBTQIA+ social justice politics, spirituality and movements.
"All my solo shows are fictional," D'Elia said. "My style of solo performance is spending a couple of years taking solo performance classes with David Ford and my director Mary Guzman. Spending a couple of years developing characters and bringing complexity, authenticity, and realness to each one."
D'Elia will be playing multiple characters in the show. She began developing this style in the 1990s when she was working on a solo show in which she played Groucho Marx. She feels that her comedic and farce storytelling style is her strongest point. Her intention with the current show is to have the characters connect with the audience through their vulnerability, humility, messiness, and reflection. D'Elia said she hopes that the show will help the audience to see that isolation can be detrimental to their lives.
"My first draft of this show was during the pandemic, and what truly got me through a time of extreme isolation was the friends I could see in person," she said.
D'Elia hopes that people outside of the Latinx community will give "The Break Up!" a chance.
"There is a universality to 'The Break Up!'," she said. "Especially for anyone who has gone through a break up and has a desire to find a way through it."
Marga, charming
For many Bay Area theatergoers, Marga Gomez needs no introduction. One of the first openly lesbian performers in the U.S., she has performed stand-up and solo plays to packed houses in the Bay and beyond. She has appeared on HBO, Logo and Comedy Central and is the recipient of a GLAAD Award. Most recently she won another BAR Bestie Award for comedy. Gomez' contribution to the "In Front of Your Eyes Festival" is titled "Spanish Stew" and will perform on August 10. It's her 15th solo play.
"It's based on my life and constructed as a series of funny vignettes set in San Francisco from 1976 to 1977," Gomez said in an interview with the B.A.R. "To me, the city at that moment was a wonderland. I was twenty years old, new in town, having escaped my authoritarian parents in New York for the gay mecca of San Francisco."
Her first stop was the Castro, which she didn't know was a gay neighborhood. She thought it was the city's Cuban neighborhood.
"With just a few hundred bucks in my pocket and perky boobs I easily lied my way into a job as a cook in a neighborhood cafe that threw pot parties in the walk-in fridge," she recalled. "As a cook, my soups of the day were based on my Cuban dad's recipes hence my show title. Thematically 'Spanish Stew' is about how food brings people together of different cultures, beliefs and gender expressions."
During the course of the show Gomez plays herself at twenty, herself now, her mom, her dad, her space case roommate on Duboce Street, the snotty waitress she wanted to sleep with, and an English sheepdog.
"The first challenge is to establish how they stand and move," Gomez said. "Of course, their sound is crucial and takes more hours to nail. Characters need to be distinct for clarity. I've played my parents in other shows, so I'm off to a good start. Like many of my shows, I switch from talking directly to the audience to being the character in the current scene."
Gomez added that her goal is to make "Spanish Stew" universal, unique and kitschy.
"It will rekindle some past joys for gay people who were there in 1976," she said. "I'm writing it with a contemporary sensibility and hope it will eventually attract all generations, genders and ethnicities. A good story is a good story and love is love."
In Front of Your Eye Festival at The Marsh, 1062 Valencia St.
'The Break Up! A Latina Queer Torch Song' by Tina D'Elia, August 10, 8:30pm, August 11, 1pm $15-$100.
Marga Gomez's 'Spanish Stew,' August 10, 5:30pm, $15-$100.
www.themarsh.org
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