THE GOLDEN HAMMER
Written & Performed by Mark McGoldrick
Directed by David Ford
Developed in Collaboration with Club Solo
November 3 – December 10, 2016 | Berkeley
Saturdays at 5pm
*Each extended night is a Benefit Performance! Combine doing good in the world with going to the theater.
Mark McGoldrick relaunches his acclaimed show, The Golden Hammer. In it, McGoldrick weaves together tales of adolescent judgement in 1970s Arizona, friendship in the wilds of the Yukon, and caprice in the criminal courts of Oakland. The characters we meet are vulnerable or reprehensible — McGoldrick keeps us from pretending we can always know which. We encounter an Oakland public defender counseling war veterans confronting old wounds, drinking, and accusations of forgotten misconduct; and we look back on a teenager in a world of sexual unknowns. It is a story of delinquency in the deserts of the Southwest, revelation on northern rivers, and life in the courts of the East Bay. With compassion and humor, he explores the elusive nature of truth, where we do not know how often we botch the job, or how badly.
Artist Biography
Mark McGoldrick is an Assistant Public Defender for Alameda County. He’s been representing poor people accused of crime in the East Bay for over 20 years.
Mark started performing publicly with a collection of short spoken-word pieces about the people who populate the world of indigent criminal defense. His first full-length show was The Golden Hammer, which ran at The Marsh Theater in San Francisco in 2005 to critically acclaim. Mark followed with another acclaimed show, Countercoup in 2007. Countercoup was a largely biographical show covering the turbulent teen-aged years before and following an accident that broke his neck. He has performed other shorter pieces before and since in venues around the Bay Area.
Benefit Nights:
Each of the following extended nights is a Benefit Performance! Partial proceeds will benefit each of the following evening’s organization.
Saturday, November 26: Planned Parenthood, Mar Monte
Saturday, December 3: ACLU Foundation of Northern California, with Senior Staff Attorney Michael T. Risher
Saturday, December 10: UnCommon Law, with Executive Director Keith Wattley
These organizations will have representatives present after the show in the cabaret bar to explain their mission, and how you can be involved in their important work.
These organizations are beneficiaries of the event, and are not the organizer or endorser of the event; and the views expressed in The Golden Hammer may not be those of these organizations.