Performer Interviews, Q & A, and performance excerpts
with Marsh and MarshStream founder Stephanie Weisman
Thursday, December 3 at 7:30pm
Mark McGoldrick is an Assistant Public Defender for Alameda County. He has represented poor people, mostly of color, in the criminal courts for over 25 years. In the early 1980s, he broke his neck and has navigated the world as a paralyzed person since.
His stories often draw from both worlds, exploring people on the fringes.
Click Box to Watch!
Trailer
About the Guest
McGoldrick started performing publicly with A Public Defense, 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 made its first appearance at The Marsh San Francisco in 2005, and reprised at The Berkeley Marsh in 2016.
The Golden Hammer was a flowing narrative, throwing the audience backward and forward through time, bringing to life a juvenile negotiating predation and an Oakland public defender fighting caprice in criminal courts, wondering how often and badly the legal system fails us.
Of The Golden Hammer, the San Francisco Guardian wrote, McGoldrick “wins over his audience with unpretentious charm and quiet intelligence. . . With ready humor and relaxed bonhomie, he regales and unsettles us with the personal, professional, and ethical conundrums that arise, while ultimately eschewing any pat response.”
The Golden Hammer was followed with another critically 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, and relaunched his life into an exploration of disability.
About the Host
Stephanie Weisman founded and has been the Artistic/Executive Director of The Marsh since its inception in 1989. Under her leadership, The Marsh has grown from a one-night-a-week performance series to producing 600-700 shows annually on its four stages. In addition to its developing work performance series, The Marsh’s programs include: artist-in-residencies, after-school and summer workshops for youth both onsite and in 5 SFUSD, and performance development classes, workshops and Performance Initiatives. In 1996 Stephanie spearheaded the drive to successfully buy their 12,000 sq ft facility on Valencia Street in San Francisco. This increased The Marsh’s programs four-fold as well as provided for a stable Bay Area arts organization. In 2010, The Marsh added a second venue in Berkeley. In 2020, Stephanie initiated MarshStream. She is currently at work developing her opera, Aphrodisia, with dancer, Wei Wang.