Program Director: Alexa Almira
House Manager: Arnie Warshaw
Light/Soundboard Operator: Alexa Almira
About Monday Night Marsh
Stephanie Weisman, our theater’s founder and artistic director, started The Marsh because she wanted a place for writers and performers like herself to easily develop their work. IN 1989, she planted a see by starting a Monday night performance series at The Hotel Utah on Bryant Street. Monday Night Marsh is the seed that sprouted into what is now The Marsh Theater: A Breeding Ground for New Performance. The program prides itself in sharing personal stories and unique experiences of all types, with a goal of amplifying the voices of our community. It is crucial, now more than ever, to share your story. Local celebrities like Josh Kornbluth, Marga Gomez, Irma Herrera, Diane Barnes, and so many others got their start on Monday Night Marsh.
Every Monday (unless it’s a holiday), we feature 3 people who perform up to 20 minutes of their (work-in-progress) piece. Each group performs twice in a month. After each show, we do a Q&A with the audience and performers, which allows for the opportunity to give and receive any feedback. You can watch in person, or stream via zoom for free.
Follow us on Instagram! @mondaynightmarsh
You truly never know what you’re going to see at a MNM.
Join us. Wonderful things can happen.
Mondays at 7pm
Two Ways to Watch!
IN-PERSON
In Person at The Marsh Theater in San Francisco
1062 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
Doors open at 6:30pm | Show starts at 7pm
*STREAMING
*Streaming tickets are pay-what-you-can
Virtual doors open at 6:50pm | Show starts at 7pm
Submit Your Piece!
Are you a monologuist, solo performer, movement artist, solo musician, comedian, etc.? Whether you are in the very beginning stages of your piece, or have a polished piece on which you’re putting the final touches, MNM wants you! The submission period for the July-December (fall) 2026 series has closed. But fear not! We will soon be accepting submissions for the spring 2027 series. More information on how to submit and what to include in your submission will be made available the week before the next round of submissions opens.
January – June (Spring) 2027 Series
Submission Period Opens: October 5, 2026
Submission Deadline: December 7, 2026
July – December (Fall) 2027 Series
Submission Period Opens: April 5, 2027
Submission Deadline: June 7, 2027
If you have any questions, please email our program director at mondaynight@themarsh.org
Happy writing!
Spring 2026 Upcoming Performances
June 29
Rana Mookherjee’s
There-U-Have-It
Show Description: Chronicled are a few actual stories of my particular immigrant journey as a four-year old kid from Kolkata to finding my path through thirteen different schools in Canada and the U.S; the foundations of which as an adult, enabled numerous chanced encounters with humorous and sometimes poignant results.
Artist Biography: “Rana Mookherjee is a cocktail-party storyteller and chit-chatter.” He can best be described as the Indian Larry David where he is known for chronicling situationally-specific, mostly ridiculous, real-life stories that unconsciously unveils his very particular character, personality and idiosyncrasies. Unlike Larry David; Rana is widely acknowledged as a fun guy to be around.
Timothy Flanagan’s
Werner Herzog Said That
Satellite Campus’
What’s Our Vibe?
Show Description: Satellite Campus improvises comedic one-act plays based on an audience suggestion. We incorporate both grounded humanity and heightened absurdity into our performance as we explore the world of our characters—whether they’re a family on a road trip or a team of ghost hunters.
Artist Biographies: Satellite Campus is a 4-person improv team that formed after meeting during an improv summer intensive in LA. The team consists of Adam Williams, Elliott Jin, and Harmony Johnson-Wicker:
Adam has studied improv and sketch writing at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater. His sketches have accumulated over 200k views online. He’s also studied clowning at the Church of Clown in San Francisco.
Elliott is a member of the house team at the Endgames Improv Theater. He’s also performed as an accompanist for several local musical improv teams including Knockoff Broadway, Sonic Boom, and The Fledglings.
Harmony is a member of the main stage cast at the All Out Comedy Theater, as well as RiOt: The Improvised Rock Opera.
Fall 2026 Performances
July 6 & 20
*Performing July 6 Only*
Raman
My Date with the Buddha
Show Description: A decade ago, I was living in a tiny French town near the German border as the only Indian guy around. With loneliness and boredom as my only company, I found an unlikely solace in a new obsession with Buddhism, and a lingering fantasy of becoming, or at least being around, Buddhist monks.
One freezing Friday evening, my wish started to come true with a group of Buddhist monks appearing in the middle of nowhere. What followed was either the most miraculous manifestation I’d ever walked into.
My Date with the Buddha is a true story about boredom, a deep longing to belong, and one very confusing bag of flour – and the question that still keeps me up at night: Did I have a date with the Buddha?
Artist Biography: I’m Raman, a storyteller from Stockholm, Sweden visiting San Francisco for 1.5 months this June and July. I’ve been living in various European cities and countries for the last 16 years collecting some incredible incidents and stories along the way inspired by true events that’s happening all around us.
*Performing June 20 Only*
Abbey Glover
I’m a Businessman, Man
Show Description: Abbey is on a quest to become the ultimate businessman. She just has to change a few things about herself, but how hard can it be? Now, on the brink of achieving everything she’s dreamed of, the facade she’s spent a decade constructing starts to fracture. Instead of enjoying the rewards of her hard work, Abbey is forced to confront her deepest fears and face the insecurities she has tried to bury beneath her business suit. With her trademark wry humor, Abbey explores what happens when we lose ourselves to the whims of a society fueled by individualism, competition, and a pervasive feeling of never-enough-ness.
Artist Biography: Abbey Glover is a San Francisco-based writer and performer whose work explores themes of self-expression and vulnerability with wry insight that “wouldn’t be out of place in either a Greta Gerwig film or a Peanuts comic strip” (The Scotsman). Her first solo show Abbey’s Box premiered at the 2023 Edinburgh Fringe Festival, earning multiple 4- and 5-star reviews from publications such as The Scotsman and Broadway World.
July 13 & 27
*Mini Performance*
Paul Drexler
Learning to Listen
Show Description: Learning to Listen is a piece about fighting loneliness.
Artist Biography: Paul Drexler has been an entrepreneur, an instructional designer, and a journalist. He designed and co-produced SFPD Homicide, an award winning interactive first-person detective game/simulation used to teach police procedures.
For over 30 years he has been a journalist, writing humor for HBO, and true crime for numerous publications. His new book, Murder to Movies: The Real Story Behind Hollywood’s Darkest Films, was published in May 2026. Paul also wrote Notorious San Francisco:True tales of Crime, Passion, and Murder. He received the Oscar Lewis award for his writing on San Francisco.
Barbara Brady
My Dead Uncle’s Porn Collection
Show Description: Barbara has to clean out her “funny uncle’s” house. He’s dead. The whole family knows about him because, somehow, he was allowed to be around. All the time. Every family gathering. They had to warn each new generation about him. They never understood why he was the way he was. Maybe there’s something in his house that’ll explain it.
Artist Biography: Barbara Brady is a writer, performer and visual artist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. My Dead Uncle’s Porn Collection, her second solo show, had its first run at Tampa International Film Festival in June 2025. She performed her previous solo show, Father, Daughter and Holy Toast, to laudatory reviews at Rogue Performance Festival in Fresno, CA, Orlando International Theater Festival, and Cincinnati Fringe Festival. Her work has been featured in Solo Sundays at Stage Werx SF and Sunset Solos as well as Tell it on Tuesdays at The Marsh in Berkeley. She sings a cappella jazz with The Merlot Notes, a 7-woman ensemble based in Silicon Valley.
Kadie Kelly
Inner Child Museum
Show Description: This piece explores, play, danger and voice and asks the question: Will the past keep us frozen or will listening carry us forward? featuring original piano music (small ensemble if budget allows). Each piece of music allows thematic reflections on the story sections shared. This was originally a 1 hour show that premiered at the Rogue Fringe Festival 2026.
August 3 & 17
Sally Love Saunders
Mirthful Mummy
Show Description: Sally’s mother was very thrifty. To save money on toilet paper, she ordered from Sexton, who sold to industries. It was delivered by a big truck with a chute that sent it down into the cellar. They had floods in the basement and it got brown. It was a lifetime supply—she would go home to the farm to visit and there was still brown paper in use. To this day Sally enjoys white toilet paper.
Artist Biography: At 86 1/2, Sally Love Saunders has spent a lifetime bringing poetry to people wherever they are. She has devoted her life to making poetry accessible, healing, and joyful.
Sally wrote her first poem at the age of six and has followed that passion ever since. Sally’s belief that poetry belongs to everyone has taken her to hospitals, migrant labor camps remote school districts, and poetry readings across the country.
More recently, Sally has added stand-up comedy to her list of accomplishments, talking fondly and hysterically of her mother, her life experiences, and observations of human nature seen from her particular viewpoint.
Will Mattingly
Appropriately Aged Friends: Improv at The Marsh
Show Description: Appropriately Aged Friends is a SF based improv troupe, made up of some of San Francisco’s most appropriately aged friends, who have performed all across the Bay Area. Based on audience suggestions, AAF will create an evening of fast paced comedy on the spot.
Artist Biography: Coming soon!
August 10 & 24
*Mini Performance*
Rachel Biale
Growing Up Below Sea Level
Show Description: Rachel’s performance melds together three stories from her childhood on a kibbutz, growing up in Children’s Houses. The focus is on key moments of four-year-old kids taking care of each other and group collectivity, vs. moments of going against the collective “rules of the game,” how being different played out, and finding her own voice. More on her website: https://www.
Artist Biography: Rachel Biale grew up in a kibbutz in Israel. She earned a BA and MA in Jewish History at UCLA and a Master of Social Work from Yeshiva University.
She is the author of the pathbreaking book, Women and Jewish Law (1984); a memoir, Growing Up Below Sea Level: A Kibbutz Childhood (2018); a historical novel Lost and Found (2020); a joint memoir with her husband, Aerograms Across the Ocean: A Love Story in Letters 1970-72 (2020); And Now Love Can Begin: My Parents’ Imagined Memoir 1945-46 (2024); as well as What Now? 2-Minute Tips for Solving Common Parenting Challenges (2020).
She has worked in the San Francisco Bay Area Jewish community for over four decades and, until very recently, served as the Executive Director of New Lehrhaus, the Bay Area Hub for Adult Jewish Learning. She also works as a parenting consultant/coach, practicing for over 40 years.
Deanna Driscoll
To the Upfettered Place
Show Description: In this piece of storytelling, Deanna examines the question, ‘As a woman, how did I get to this place in my life?’, which leads to the larger question: Because there is no singular way to exist as a woman, how does one create their own meaning? What roles have we inherited and what identities have we reclaimed? What does our past teach us and what do we hope our future holds? Through biting and humorous stories combined with deep introspection, Deanna brings a fresh take on what womanhood means.
Artist Biography: DeAnna Driscoll’s career as an actor and theatre educator has spanned over 30 years. She is currently based in San Francisco, CA and was most recently seen at Marin Shakespeare Theatre’s product of THE TEMPEST, and previous to that, CenterRep Theatre’s production of ARSENIC AND OLD LACE. and she has the honor of teaching acting at Studio A.C.T. as well as other places throughout the bay.
Before living in the Bay Area, DeAnna spent many years in Southern California where she starred in more than 30 productions. Some favorite theatres include: The Old Globe Theatre, San Diego Repertory Theatre, Cygnet Theatre, and more. Previous to that, DeAnna was in NYC for five years studying at National Shakespeare Conservatory and working professionally with various artists and teachers including: Edward Albee, Peter Lobdell, Kennedy Brown, and Dana Zeller Alexis. DeAnna has written and performed two solo shows and is the recipient of several Critics Circle Awards, a Backstage Garland Award, and The Pate Award for her work over the years. Her television and film credits include: Unverified, Lincoln Heights, Point Pleasant, Veronica Mars, and Decaf among others. DeAnna is a proud member of Actor’s Equity.
Diana Medina
Niña Ajena (Someone Else’s Child)
Show Description: In a working-class Mexican-American neighborhood, a young girl struggles to escape Crystal, the child her mother babysits, the neighbor who never seems to go home, and the self-appointed best friend she never asked for. Set against the backdrop of a neighborhood scandal, the story examines childhood responsibility, family obligation, and the long journey from resentment to understanding. Through humor and hindsight, it explores what happens when children are expected to care for others before they understand how.
Artist Biography: Diana Medina is the first-generation daughter of Mexican immigrants, a storyteller, poet, author, and nonprofit executive based in Oakland, California. A Los Angeles native and the youngest of eight children, she grew up translating both language and emotions while serving as an accidental bridge between generations, traditions, and very strong opinions.
Diana believes stories are some of the oldest medicine we have and approaches storytelling as a practice of self-discovery, community healing, and connection. Her work explores family, culture, responsibility, belonging, and the gap between what we understand as children and what we come to understand as adults.
She performs original stories and poetry throughout California and currently serves as Storyteller in Residence with Capital Storytelling. Her work has been featured in The Moth, Modern Latina Magazine, The Risk Podcast, Redwood Nights, and more. She is the author of Healing Out Loud and co-author of Amplify Student Voices. She lives in Oakland with her Chihuahua, Kika.
Margaret Carroll
Myth of Creation
Show Description:Reeling from a breakup and intent on clarifying her identity, a young woman begins telling herself a series of stories about her past to help explain why she is the way she is – her myth of creation. Told through vignette scenes intercut with songs, the woman tries to reconstruct herself and make meaning from her pain. However, can this contrived meaning-making heal her, or will she bury herself in stories so that she becomes unable to grow?
Artist Biography: Maggie Carroll is a born-and-raised Bay Area resident. She has been lucky enough to have engaged with the performance arts scene in the Bay Area as a student, teacher, director, performer, and writer/songwriter. She worked with the UC Berkeley BareStage Theater Company from 2018-2022, serving on the board of directors, performing in the bi-annual cabaret group (BareTroupe), and directing the 2022 spring musical, Legally Blonde. More recently, Maggie coached the incomprable Hillsdale High School Improvisational Theater Tea, and engaged in several ACT Studio courses. Outside of theater, Maggie is an auditor, pottery instructor, and proud contributor/editor of the Bay Area Data Dump blog.
August 31
Special MNM One-Off!
Suraya Keating
Undercover Angel
Show Description: In Undercover Angel, Suraya traces the hidden threads of mental illness, family secrets, and addiction that shaped her life—until an unlikely messenger, a mouse, awakens her to break a lifelong cycle and choose a new path.
Artist Biography: Suraya Keating is a Registered Drama Therapist, Registered Expressive Arts Therapist, and founder of Soul Story Theater. She delights in coaching others to be wildly self-expressed by crafting life stories into performance art. Since 2005, Suraya has worked with Marin Shakespeare directing Shakespeare and life-story theater with people who are incarcerated & formerly incarcerated. A Playback artist, actress, mama, nature junkie & mystic, Suraya loves creating theater that builds community & opens hearts. www.soulstorytheater.com
Marianne Shine
Legacy of Silence
Show Description: “Legacy of Silence,” written and performed by Marianne Shine and directed by Suraya Keating, is a true story of a strained mother-daughter relationship. Through a cast of compelling characters, a Film Noir detective pieces together clues to uncover a silent truth: beneath the pain lies a deep and enduring love between two women.
Artist Biography: Marianne Shine is a performer, director, drama therapist, and activist who has created and performed more than eight solo shows at The Marsh, StageWerx, and CIIS. She teaches and directs Shakespeare at San Quentin through the Marin Shakespeare Company and serves on the board of The Curtain Theatre that offers free summer Shakespeare. Marianne is a storyteller with The Moth and The Fly, an advocate for models impacted by trafficking and sexual assault, and co-founder of the improv troupe Accidentally On Purpose. She maintains a private licensed Drama Therapy practice and continues her acting work, represented by Stars- The Agency for film, commercial, and print. Visit her websites to learn more.
Darshana Weill
The Dress
Show Description: On the eve of her wedding, a woman confronts a question she has spent a lifetime avoiding: What does she actually want? Joined by her Wise Fairy–the embodiment of inner wisdom–she journeys through memories of childhood, friendships, and relationships to uncover the patterns that have shaped her life. Blending humor, heart, and self-discovery, “The Dress” explores the challenge of listening to ourselves and the courage it takes to choose from our deepest truth.
Artist Biography: Darshana Weill is a Marriage and Family therapist and former professional musical theater performer. She performed in regional theater, summer stock productions, and Broadway national tours before leaving the theater world to pursue a deeper understanding of healing, relationships, and personal growth.
After years working as a yoga teacher, health coach, and therapist, Darshana is bringing together her backgrounds in performance and psychology in “The Dress,” an autobiographical piece inspired bye her own journey of learning to trust herself, listen to her inner wisdom, and make choices from a place of deeper knowing.
Lindsay Wood
Dimples
Show Description:“Dimples” Written and performed by Lindsay Wood, Directed by Suraya Keating is a funny, heartfelt solo performance exploring body image, aging, inherited shame, and self-acceptance. Through physical theater, movement, and a cast of characters living inside one woman’s psyche, Dimples asks: What if the body we’ve been fighting all along has been trying to love us back?
Artist Biography: Lindsay Wood has been a physical theater artist since the 1990s, using dance, movement, and embodied storytelling as her primary creative language. Dimples is her fourth original solo theater work. She is currently developing her first full-length one-woman show. Lindsay Wood has performed at the Marsh Theater with “Saloon Shivasana” and in a 5 week run with Menopause Show and her piece “In Search of Libido”.
September 14 & 28
Kevin Sadi
Intertwined
Show Description: Intertwined is a live performance that explore the experience of holding two futures at once, one where love lasts and one where it does not.
Artist Biography: Kevin Sadi, performing under the name pure!y – is a San Francisco based jazz musician, band-leader, and producer.
Cara Jones
Hot Flashbacks
Show Description:A guided mushroom journey erupts into panic, launching a woman into a visceral midlife reckoning with her cult upbringing, arranged mass wedding, and long-buried erotic self. In this harrowing and darkly funny performance, memory lives not just in the mind, but in the body. And what surfaces is not only old trauma, but aliveness.
Artist Biography: Cara is a storyteller with an unreasonable amount of source material. She has explored it through documentary filmmaking, writing, and on stages including The Moth. Hot Flashbacks is drawn from her memoir-in-progress.
Mia Brice
Calling Myself Home
Show Description: Calling Myself Home: What would you ask if you could call your future self? I’ve got a jar full of questions — everything from “does the world get better?” to “should I start that dog rescue ranch?” I found a way to reach myself as a child with a time machine phone from the 70s. I’m ready to dial up older, wiser me to get some answers. Join me as I finally make that call. I just hope she picks up.
Artist Biography: Mia Brice: wisdom alchemist, leadership and levity coach, devoted dog mom, student of Buddhism & seeker of doughnuts.
October 5 & 19
Eric Wilcox
Intertwined
Show Description: A man steps onstage and says, “My name is Eric, and I am a mime.” What follows is not a biography, but a possession. Mime>Demon is a darkly comic solo performance blending storytelling and physical illusion, tracing the moment a body opens to something larger than itself—and the strange presence that enters. Part monologue, part movement ritual, the piece invites the audience into a shifting world where gesture becomes language, memory becomes myth, and something unseen begins to move between us.
Artist Biography: I’ve called myself a mime for over forty years, which means I’ve spent a good part of my life arguing with things that aren’t there. I started in the classical tradition and worked hard across the U.S., including touring every school in Pennsylvania—twice. Along the way, I fell in love with San Francisco and its strange place in the American imagination. Over time, my work drifted toward a mix of movement, text, and a grotesque impulse. The universality of wordless gestures took me to audiences in Asia and in Europe, where I spent my fifties deepening the work. Now, more than ever, I’m interested in how theater can erase boundaries—how something invisible can pass between people and bring them together again.
Eddie Scher
Ukulele, What’s the Big Idea?
Show Description: Answer the deeply personal, political, and musical question: What is the sound of a ukulele? The story is real. The soundtrack is live. The instrument is small. A journey through harmony, dissonance, and songs from a long century-plus of American popular music.
Adam Gooch & Zoey Marcus
Some Tweaking, Here and There
Show Description: Coming Soon!
Artist Biography: Coming Soon!
November 9 & 23
Devon Cuny
Assigned at Birth
Show Description:“What if the original script needed heavy rewrites?” Through storytelling, humor, faith, pop culture, gender, and spectacularly awkward 80s and 90s adolescence, Assigned at Birth is a funny and deeply personal solo show about the exhausting art of performing “normal.”
Artist Biography: Dev Cuny (they/them) is a writer, performer, facilitator, and former hospice and hospital chaplain whose work explores gender, faith, belonging, and resilience through storytelling and humor. As an openly trans person who previously worked in ministry and spiritual care, Dev’s work bridges trauma-informed systems, restorative justice, and the power of personal narrative to create connection and healing.
Warren Mac
Part L. Part D.
Show Description: A journey through the ambivalence of living when mental illness and poverty take over my life. Stuck in this in between state, I seesaw up and down while searching for some kind of resolution. Is that living? Is that dying? How can I decide? What will push me in one direction or the other? My piece explores this dilemma through words, movement and sound.
Artist Biography: Warren MacMillan is a visual artist with an MFA in Sculpture. Their work explores masculinity, shame and the difficulty living in a world that is hostile to those who are different. They express these issues through drawing, video, installations, performance and dance. They currently reside in San Francisco.
November 16 & 30
Evelyn Jean Pine
The Fold
Show Description: “The Fold: a well-mannered mom who practices origami, yoga, and “community” is unnerved when she keeps walking by people on the street who are folded, frozen over into what looks like the yoga posture, Uttanasana. With the help of the audience, she unpacks the history, meaning and impact of “the fentanyl fold.”
Artist Biography: Evelyn Jean Pine is a playwright, librettist, performer and poet. Her one-woman show, _Freeloader in the House of Love_, directed by Charlie Varon, won the “Most Compelling Story” prize at the Boulder Fringe and is published in _Wild Garlic_. Her play, _Oakland 1982: You, Me and Rickey_ is the first drama published in the baseball journal, _The Twin Bill_. _The Invisible Project_, written with Katja Rivera, launched the Bay Area’s Latinx Mafia’s Staged Reading series. Her short opera, _nada_, written with Norwegian/Finnish composer, Tze Yeung Ho, premiered at Strange Trace Opera’s Stencils Festival. A June Ann Baker Award winner, she is a PlayGround-SF alum. Her poetry is published in the Gunpowder Press anthology, _Women In A Golden State_, as well as _Pulp_, _Fourth Wave_, _Scrittura_, _Paper Poetry_, _Crow’s Feet_, _The Lark_ and _Ain’t No Crime in Rhymin’_.
December 7 & 21
Sean Geary
I Played Barbies with Julie
Show Description: A gay man’s journey of discovery and friendship with a dash of television nostalgia.
Artist Biography: Sean Geary is an improvisor in the Bay Area scene, but this is only the second script he’s ever written. He’s a personal trainer by trade and lives on the peninsula with his husband and two cats.
Allan Pleaner
It’s the Small Things
Show Description:Fifty years resisting authoritarians .. from an ICE vigil at a Home Depot parking lot to the suburbs of Johannesburg .. it’s the small things that really matter !
Artist Biography: Along with story-telling, Allan does woodturning, collage and magic illusions and works as a psychotherapist. He lives in San Francisco and is about to cross the threshold to grandfatherhood.
Andrea Mock
Bezerkeley
Show Description: BEZERKELEY is comedic battle which pits embryo choreographer, Mock, against the Bay Area’s Artist Industrial Complex. Fresh out of UC Santa Cruz dance department, Mock arrives in the Free State of Berkeley, where everybody is unique, just like everybody else. Mock seeks an artistic career alongside her financially-challenged composer boyfriend, but when life hits hard, she learns what it means to love. Really love.
Bezerkeley is Act 3 of a full-length play, DELUSIONAL.
Artist Biography: Born and bred in the farming community of Porterville, CA, Mock received four creative grants from the Flora and William Hewlett and Zellerbach Foundations. As playwright-in-residence from 1996 to 2002 at the Speakeasy Theater, Mock had five plays produced: SURVIVAL OF THE WEIRDEST, FIRST TIME, BRAIN_IN_A_BOX, JANE AUSTEN IN BERKELEY, and AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT. In 2015, funded by a grant from ODC SF, she crafted two dances using script-writing techniques. The resulting pieces won ODC San Francisco’s “Take 5” choreography competition. “Call Me Ishwhale,” became the finale of her fifth play, THE MOBY DICK DIARIES shown at the Marsh, Exit Theater, and The Garage SF. Another solo show, RIVER RAT CLUB, was performed at Berkeley’s Waterfront Playhouse. Mock’s sixth solo show, THE AGED OF AQUARIUS, was performed at the 2023 SF Fringe Festival and the Monkey House in Berkeley as a fundraiser for Flip the Vote during the run-up to the 2023 presidential election.
December 14 & 28
Debi Mason
Porch Songs: Night Blooming Jasmine & Fig Trees
Show Description: Imagine, if you will, growing up poor and black during the depression in the middle of the Arizona desert. Porch Songs are my mama’s stories told to me while I was her caregiver in the final year of her life. She would spend hours bringing to my memory that old, white wood framed house that seemed to hold the stories of the Oby family in every creaking board of the front porch. This meager house was veiled in the petite flowers of night blooming jasmine that had a welcoming fragrance for any weary traveler looking for a cool spot to rest a spell. Ancient shading fig trees with their twisted trunks and branches kept the family gathering place cool during the hot summer months.
Artist Biography: Playwright, director, storyteller and activist with more than 40 years of experience doing the art and campaigning for equity and representation for artists and creatives of color across most genres.
She is the founder of Oby House Tellers and a founding former member of the Black Storytellers of San Diego. Her stories include African folktales and original tales for children, spiritual poems and verse for women of color and uses the art of story to bridge the gap among people of color, diverse religions, ethnicities and ages. Debi is active with Stagebridge Senior Performing Arts in Oakland.
Debi is also the current president of the Berkeley Branch of the California Writers Club and is a licensed minister with The Pentecostal Assemblies of the World (PAW)
Reginald Wilkins
An Ideal, Plain
Show Description: A runaway slave runs from the slave patrols, complete with helicopters and dogs barking. What happens when he runs into a modern day young Black man?
Artist Biography: Reginald Wilkins performs on stage. He is a voice-over artist, painter, woodworker, and playwright. He really enjoys creating.
*Mini Performance*
Sanjit Sengupta
Ivy and Daddy
Show Description: A single father explains the harsh realities of life to his 8-year-old daughter.
Artist Biography: Playwright Sanjit Sengupta will direct this 15-minute play in collaboration with two local Bay Area actors, Reginald Wilkins, and his granddaughter, Cali Roberts. Sanjit’s short plays, Dance With Me, and Shoeshine Chemistry, were performed live in Monday Night Marsh in September 2025 and February 2026 respectively.
Jenn Castro
Proprioception
Show Description: Lucille does the details: fixes the breakfast, chooses the bathroom tiles, tightens the cabinet door hinges. Meanwhile her husband Mark lives carefree. When Mark has a mishap and lands in a wheelchair, Lucille regrets she’s not living a fantastic life; should she have gone to Thailand? After Mark commits a reckless act, Lucille gets unhinged herself – confronting her wedding vows, revisiting her past life, and questioning her choice to get married at all. What does for better or worse mean, and what will Lucille accept to stay married?
Artist Biography: Jenn Castro is a playwright and fiction writer living in the Bay Area. A reading of Proprioception, her debut play, was produced in May by Greenhouse 2026. Her work has been published in Transfer Magazine and Voices, and she’s the author of MOM-ME a kid picture book. Jenn needs to start submitting her work! She just completed her MFA from SFSU and served there as a fiction editor for Fourteen Hills: SFSU Review. She holds a BA in Women’s Studies from UMass and a teaching credential from SJSU. Jenn writes about aging bodies, aging relationships, and young adults growing up.
