EDGE San Francisco

Queers and clowns, tragedies and glee, on stages abound, and all of it for free.

Moved to poetry, I am, by the awesome scope, both logistical and artistic, of the San Francisco Theater Festival taking place on Aug. 8. This one-day event features 130 shows on 17 stages in and around Yerba Buena Gardens, and the presentations, all 30 minutes or less, range from fringe-y unknowns to excerpts from Beach Blanket Babylon.

This is the seventh year for the free festival, and is its most ambitious undertaking to date. While attendance is expected to surpass the 10,000 theatergoers who turned out last year, the abundance of choices at venues large and small, outdoors and in, means that with a schedule, a map, and a little flexibility, you can stay entertained from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. And even then you’ll have only scratched at the surface of possibilities.

Here is a sampling menu, actually more of a mere amuse-bouche, with a slant toward LGBT offerings. For times and venues, go to www.sftheaterfestival.org.

In the "L" file, you can find these lesbian solo artists. Comedian Julia Jackson mixes laughs and drama in I Didn’t Sign Up for This, about a bi-racial queer couple looking to adopt. In Lady Parts, Martha Rynberg uses her lesbian perspective to riff on women’s obsession with their bodies. Nicole Maxali pays tribute to her grandmother in an excerpt from I Heart Lola. Thao P. Nguyen explores her experiences as an emerging Vietnamese lesbian in a selection from Fortunate Daughter.

Among the gay-centric shows, you’ll find solo performer Enzo Lombard offering an abridged version of his popular collection of quick-paced monologues Love, Humiliation & Karaoke. Thrillpeddlers will offer a taste of its now-and-forever revival of the Cockettes’ Pearls Over Shanghai. SF Boylesque will be represented with selections from its ever-changing neo-retro tribute to burlesque. New Conservatory Theatre aims for a younger audience with OutSpoken, from its YouthAware Educational Theatre program.

In the hard-to-categorize column we find Fifi and Fanny Live at the Texas Whorehouse, a musical-comedy collaboration by Stephanie Lynne Smith and Carolyn Eldson, who have had managerial and performing connections to the Lesbian/Gay Chorus of San Francisco. In the most-unlikely-title category there is Jerry Springer: The Opera, which actually was a big success for the National Theatre in London several years back. Ray of Light Theatre is presenting a preview from its coming production at the Victoria Theatre.

There is room here for one final pick, and that goes to Florodora, partly because of childhood television memories of Spanky, Alfalfa, and fellow Our Gang members donning bustles and bonnets when the Flory-Dory girls don’t show up for their variety show. That short film was from 1936, which was 36 years after Florodora opened on Broadway, and its cultural impact, at least of its fabled chorus line, was still reverberating. That has faded, but the Lyric Theatre of San Jose dusted off the first Broadway hit of the 20th century last year as part of its Discovery series, and will revive it one more time for the omnivorous San Francisco Theater Festival.

As if all this isn’t enough, the festival is also hosting a benefit launch party on Aug. 6 at 111 Minna Gallery, and then on Aug. 7 will take different bills of festival samplings to venues in five neighborhoods around the city. There is no admission charge, but $10 donations are being encouraged to help defray festival expenses. It’s all explained at sftheatrefestival.org.

The future is now

Theaters usually keep under wraps plays planned for upcoming seasons until they can all be packaged for a big annual announcement. But New Conservatory Theatre Center is tipping its hand a bit in an announcement for the August staged readings of three plays in its New Plays Program. Each comes with a notice that they are headed for full productions, and when to expect them.

For example, Brad Erickson’s American Dream will be seen during the 2012-13 season, though a play-in-progress preview is available on Aug. 6-7. Erickson was previously represented at NCTC with The War at Home, and his new play deals with the romance of a recently divorced California man and a male Spanish teacher he meets during a learn-a-language vacation in Mexico. The American must enlist some unlikely compatriots in his effort to smuggle his beau across the border.

Waiting for Giovanni, having its official premiere at NCTC in the fall of 2011, will receive staged readings on Aug. 13-14. Written by author-activist Jewelle Gomez in collaboration with Harry Waters Jr., the play is a fantasia on the life of James Baldwin, inspired by the controversy surrounding Baldwin’s 1956 novel Giovanni’s Room, with its focus on a gay relationship.

NCTC’s Artistic Director Ed Decker and his husband, Robert Leone, are the creators of Rights of Passage, receiving its staged readings on Aug. 20-21 in anticipation of a 2012 world premiere. Created from research, interviews, and worldwide contributions, it focuses on international LGBT human rights progress, and its storytelling uses adaptations of Indonesian performance styles.

The readings are free and open to the public, but seating is limited. Reservations can be made at 861-8972.