It’s been quite a journey for San Francisco writer Star Finch’s new play. Finch, who was announced Crowded Fire Theater’s playwright-in-residence in May 2020, hoped that “Shipping & Handling,” despite COVID lockdowns, would be produced in a year or two. Video-submission casting began in November 2021, with a run planned for September 2022.
Since then, Crowded Fire transitioned to a collective model and left its longtime venue Potrero Stage, and Finch wrote the acclaimed “Josephine’s Feast” for Magic Theatre. Yet “Shipping & Handling” remained postponed, until now. The premiere opens in previews Aug. 8 at Magic Theatre.
Finch doesn’t see the false starts as detrimental to her tech-centric, artificial intelligence-themed story.
“Strangely enough, the delays feel like we were being rerouted to land in this moment where we’re being bombarded with AI from every angle,” Finch says. “We’re witnessing a coordinated push to accept an ‘AI future’ across multiple industries without any pause for our actual consent. So, I definitely think that this play will enter the audience at a different angle in 2024 than it would have in 2020.”
The show merges traditional and immersive theatrical experiences in what’s described as “a night out at the theater told in reverse.” It examines the complex history of Black theater, comparing creative strides and setbacks with the rise of generative AI, which has stoked fears of artists being replaced by automation.
The play earned Theatre Bay Area’s Rella Lossy Award, given to the best new full-length script by an emerging playwright.
Interestingly, a 2016 Crowded Fire show, Young Jean Lee’s “The Shipment” about Black characters seen through white gaze, was the initial catalyst for Finch’s play.
“The experience of watching the [“The Shipment”], sitting through a painfully cringe talkback, and then hanging out talking in front of the theater for another hour as a large group of Black actors vented about the various auditions and roles they’d been navigating that season—I drove home later that night feeling a buzz around wanting to translate the themes of that evening on stage somehow.”
After developing an early version for a 2019 reading, events of 2020—the rise of the pandemic, Black Lives Matter protests, racial reckoning in the theater world—further shaped the text.
While Finch notes that there haven’t been significant changes following We See You, White American Theater, a 2020 manifesto for dismantling traditional white theater hierarchies and creating greater opportunities for artists of color, she adds, “I think our tolerance around what we’ll swallow as Black playwrights, actors and audience members has definitely shifted. That’s reflected in my rewrites in terms of moving away from the initial impulse to engage with the violence of white supremacy within theater spaces as a step toward creative liberation, and choosing instead to focus on direct transmissions to audience members who have ears to listen.”
Also fueling her creative fire was the mainstreaming of AI, with Finch’s hometown at the epicenter: San Francisco is home to ChatGPT-creator OpenAI and testing ground for unregulated self-driving cars that have injured pedestrians.
“Why is only one type of imagination still in a position of power to create our collective reality?” Finch asks. “We didn’t get to vote if Waymo cars should flood the streets day and night, yet suddenly empty driverless cars are our daily experience? It’s madness. And that wildfire feeling has yet to let up.”
The subject of voting highlights how Finch watched “The Shipment” in 2016, announced “Shipping & Handling” in 2020, and is finally staging it in 2024, all election years, all featuring a candidate known to embrace white supremacists.
For Finch, who says she “cannot take this election seriously,” major national and world problems have come to the forefront in San Francisco, where she learned her activism.
“The deafening silence on [the War on Gaza] from Bay Area arts organizations—I felt like I was losing my bearings in reality to some degree because my whole life I’ve experienced the city as a site of creativity in service to resistance and liberation. I was educated on political topics through poetry readings, murals, hip-hop, theatrical protesting tactics, independent bookstore readings. I basically felt like I was in ‘The Twilight Zone’ when the arts community, for the most part, hid its head in the sand. Meanwhile, City Hall was being lit up nightly in [the colors of the Israeli flag], while our ‘liberal’ leadership was using genocidal talking points to try to intimidate and vilify protesters. It was like a remix of WeSeeYouWAT that moved beyond words or sound. A sort of unmasking, which also happens to be a theme in my play.”
Finch—who finds inspiration walking along city beaches and supporting institutions like SOMArts and Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive—notes that “Shipping & Handling,” premiering as streaming has become popular, could reach a wider audience than originally expected.
“I don’t know for certain, but I do know that Crowded Fire is trying to make [a streaming/on-demand option] happen. The play is definitely an experience that activates by plugging into the collective within the physical space. Our talkback frames the audience as cards dealt in a cosmic deck. But I also know that people have very specific and valid reasons for enjoying theater from afar, so I hope to give them an option to take a sip of the play as well.”
Crowded Fire Theater’s “Shipping & Handling” runs Aug. 8 to Sept. 7 at Magic Theatre, Landmark Building D, Fort Mason Center, 2 Marina Blvd., San Francisco. Tickets are $20-$95, with pay-what-you-can options, at crowdedfire.org.
Charles Lewis III is a San Francisco-born journalist and performing artist. He has written for the San Francisco Chronicle, KQED and San Francisco Examiner. Dodgy evidence of this can be found at The Thinking Man’s Idiot.wordpress.com.
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