Features

This semester at San Francisco State, I’m taking classes with several excellent, talented instructors. Nona Caspers is the recipient of the 2005 Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction. Toni Mirosevitch is the author of Queer Street and My Oblique Strategies, winner of the 2005 Frank O’Hara Chapbook Award. Michelle Carter’s play, Ted Kaczinski Killed People With Bombs, has won a slew of prestigious prizes including a 2003 Pen Award, a commission from the Mark Taper Forum, and a 2005 residency for the playwright at London’s Donmar Warehouse. 

Additionally, I’m enrolled in a playwriting workshop with Roy Conboy, Chair of the Theatre Arts Department at SFSU and head of the graduate playwriting program. If this isn’t enough, Roy is currently performing in his solo show, Drive My Coche, at the Black Box Theatre, El Teatro de la Esperanza on 16th Street in the Mission. 

The Black Box Theatre is a small, square, black room three flights up a narrow staircase in the building that is also home to Theatre Rhinoceros. The Drive My Coche set is decorated with flowers, candles, and graffiti. At curtain time, Roy strides to center stage in flannel shirt and jeans, a guitar draped around his neck, his shoulder length hair appropriate for the story that is about to unfold. 

Conboy starts with a song about a man lost in a fog-shrouded San Francisco evening who suddenly finds himself transported back to Los Angeles, circa 1970. No longer a family guy driving a KIA, he is an 18-year-old Chicano, a college dropout who has lost his way, and his student deferment. He is nervously counting down the days before his draft board hearing. While working as a busboy, cruising with his on again-off-again girlfriend in his tricked out Chevy, experimenting with sex, drugs, and rock and roll, the Vietnam War moves from backdrop to foreground as combat intensifies, napalm shipments increase, and the body counts escalate. 

Originally created and performed in 1999 at San Francisco’s Tu Solo Tu Festival, and again at the New Works Festival in Los Angeles, and Teatro Vision de San Jose, this one-man show combines music, poetry, and movement, and is just as relevant today as it was pre-9/11. Conboy is regarded as one of the leading Chicano playwrights in the country, but Drive My Coche, though set within the Los Angeles Hispanic community, explores universal and everyday themes of unrequited love, violence, and highway driving. That wars are instigated by the rich and powerful, but fought by the young and disenfranchised may be familiar and recurring subject matter, but it is, regrettably, current and needs to be kept in the forefront of public conscious. One leaves the theater mindful of this premise, cognizant of how history repeats itself. 

Several of my creative writing classmates were at the production last Friday night. Just minutes before curtain call, one of them received a cell phone message from her mother, informing her that the U.S. Congress was still in session, heatedly debating the pros and cons of troop withdrawal from Iraq. 

After Roy’s performance, we reconnoitered to discuss the play, the Congressional debates, and to decide where to go next. Several younger, more energetic individuals rushed off for a late night performance by The Funky Meters at the Fillmore, but I took a solo BART ride home, lost in memories of 1970, hoping, as I hoped then, that the war would end soon, the troops would come home safe, and peace would be given another chance. 

Subconsciously, a decade-appropriate soundtrack played in my head, including 

a tune from the show: “Baby You Can Drive My Car,” or as Roy sang it, “Baby You Can Drive My Coche.” 

Roy Conboy performs Drive My Coche at 8 p.m. Dec. 2, 3, 9, 10, 16, and 17 at the Black Box Theatre, El Teatro de la Esperanza, 2940 16th St. (at Capp Street), San Francisco. $15 general/$12 students, seniors, and groups. Online ticket sales at www.ticketweb.com or by phone: (415) 240-9594. For more information see www.collegeofcreativearts.org.