New home, bright future
03.04.23
Stephanie Holmes with “Mr. Pepper” outside YPT’s new home in Landmark Building D at Fort Mason
Stephanie Holmes is eager for Bay Area families to discover what’s percolating in Building D at Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture, where Young Performers Theatre is settling into its new home.
YPT’s Executive Director ticks off the reasons. The Southside Theater is “beautiful, ready to go” and has “a nice vibe to it.” There’s “a real tech booth” with a modern, fully functional light and sound board, plus dressing rooms, backstage and shop areas. And, compared to YPT’s former, more youth-oriented space across the parking lot in Building C, Southside’s proscenium space brings “a completely different element.” Not to mention the possibility of nearly tripling YPT’s audience capacity.
“Older actors will be able to find their footing in a more professional way without feeling constrained by being in their childhood theatre,” she points out.
At the same time, while Southside might not be as “intimate” as YPT’s former space, there are ways to make it “feel small and approachable to our younger students, including a whole room for real littles to have class off the stage.”
In recent years, the Bay School of San Francisco has presented productions at the Southside Theater. Its use of the space will continue, and YPT anticipates working with Bay to build additional learning and performance pathways for students.
The move to Southside also positions YPT to collaborate and share resources with Magic Theatre, whose space is connected to Southside, as well as offer classes and workshops covering a wide range of skills and disciplines including not just acting but auditions, theatre tech, sound design for film, screenwriting and film direction and production.
“One thing I always wanted was a real tech training program. A lot of kids want to be in theater but not on stage,” says Stephanie. In its new home, YPT has the requisite infrastructure. “We could do an apprentice program with YPT teenagers and Magic.”
Stephanie, who joined YPT in 2003 and became founder Matilda Kunin’s protégé, will be the first to admit to a visceral sentimental attachment to YPT’s old home, which it had occupied since 1985. It was “special and unique,” she says, providing a nourishing environment where generations of families and supporters experienced an abundance of love, creativity and magic.
YPT went dark for an extended period during the pandemic. After reopening for classes and camps, lingering problems with physical and technical infrastructure came to the fore. During a summer camp session in 2022, the electrical outlet that supplied power to the stage lights blew completely.
Still, every time she’d walk through the door, Stephanie thought to herself: “‘Oh, I could never leave this space.’ I’ve loved every second we’ve been in there.
“But this,” she continued, referring to Southside, “feels like a different level, a step up, opens our doors so wide. Magic has apprenticeships, internships to offer to students. We now have ability to bridge college students in summer, connect them with different aspects of theater.
YPT Founder Matilda Kunin as Mother Goose
“The future looks really, really bright.”
Established in Berkeley in 1967, Magic Theatre achieved national prominence by developing and producing of new plays from both emerging and established playwrights. The company moved to San Francisco in 1972 and, after occupying various spaces, found a permanent home at Fort Mason in 1977. It has premiered over 200 new works including Sam Shepard’s Buried Child, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1979. Magic premiered Shepard’s True West the following year, his Fool for Love in 1983 and The Late Henry Moss in 2000. Dr. Faustus, written and directed by David Mamet, premiered at Magic in 1984. Plays by the celebrated Irish writer Edna O’Brien — Triptych (2003), Family Butchers (2005) and Tir Na Nog (2008) — also premiered at Magic. More recent works that debuted at Magic include Don’t Eat the Mangos by Ricardo Perez Gonzales, The Kind Ones by Miranda Hall and The Travelers by Luis Alfaro. Among the actors who have appeared in Magic productions: Kathy Baker, Ed Harris, Joan Rivers, Peter Coyote, Sean Penn and Colman Domingo.
“Magic, at its core, is a play-development theatre,” notes Stephanie, who serves as the company’s Director of Communications. She sees cross-pollination with Magic enhancing YPT’s core educational mission while broadening its reach and relevance. “I want to appeal less strictly to 12 and under” and “create multi-generational, multi-level experience for people.”
“Older kids will feel more empowered,” she adds. Providing continuity for them has always posed a challenge because, after graduating high school, they felt as if they’d “aged out” of the old space.
“At Southside, while children’s classic will continue as a pillar of YPT’s programming, older actors will be able to find their footing in a more professional way without feeling constrained by being in their childhood theatre.”
One area ripe with opportunity: nurturing kids interested in playwriting. Stephanie loves the idea of YPT students and alumni participating in table readings of plays in development at Magic and having professional actors read plays written by young talents.
While children’s classics will continue as a pillar of its programming, the new iteration of YPT will in some ways represent a return to the original vision of Matilda, who founded YPT as an artistic alliance of adults and children, with the goal of expanding possibilities for participants and audiences alike. “It’s a privilege to watch generations of future talent ripen,” she once observed. In its early years, YPT fostered local writers, producing plays written specifically for YPT, and supplemented its core children’s theater enterprise with productions aimed primarily at older audiences.
Having survived Covid and found a new, more versatile home, YPT has an opportunity to reinvent itself while retaining the identity and ethos so essential to Matilda’s legacy. As much as everyone came to cherish YPT in its old space, what made YPT so beloved, Stephanie points out, was the people and art that filled it and the special atmosphere that lifted spirits, created community and provided a haven for those who, struggling to fit in elsewhere, felt like “fish out of water.”
At the Southside Theater, YPT can take advantage of more modern facilities and offer expanded educational programming and repertory infused with the spirit of the old space.
“That’s what I keep in my heart, the joy Matilda would have about it all.”