California Story: A Faustian Preter-Capitalist Scream

Playwright -

Direction -

Movement -

Intimacy -

Stage Management -

Scenic & Video Design -

Costume Design -

Lighting Design -

Composition -

Sound Design -

Roger Q. Mason

Michael Alvarez

Joey Navarrete-Medina

Celina Lee Surniac

Christa Troester

Salmah Beydoun

Karen Boyer

Martha Carter

David Gonzalez

Levi Manners

Epic. Fabulous. Mythic. A little queer. California Story stood out to me almost immediately when I read the script. Within the first three pages, I knew I wanted to work on this monumental show.

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The show follows two distinct worlds: The past and the future. In the future, all land has been consumed by the ocean and a single white man owns the only rock left. In the past, Pio Pico, the last governor of Alta California, is trying desperately to gain wealth and fame by acquiring mission land.

 

Through this lens, a trio of queer storytellers dubbed "The Legendary Children" warn us of what might be by showing us what already was. As the show goes on, Pio sells more and more of his own soul, only to continue losing the game that was always rigged against him. In the future, the white man's obsession with being the King of the Moon distracts him from what he still has on Earth.

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Very early in the process, I identified three distinct layers of reality in the play: "Water World," "The Past," and the "in-between." Water world created the base. It was constant. The crashing waves reminded the characters of their own unavoidable mortality. That idea - our mortality, and what will remain - motivated the world of the past. If these two worlds, the past and the future, were mirror images of each other, then the "in-between" was the mirror. The liminal spaces allowed me to play with sounds from both worlds and reflect and twist them as the play progressed. This created a nice dramatic through-line as the two worlds converged on each other.

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The wonderful Peter Mendoza (Pio Pico) and I recorded lines from the script, and I used them in the transitions following the scenes they came from. Peter recorded different versions of the lines that echoed back at Pio as he dug himself deeper and deeper. 

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​Hear these transitions, and their ultimate climax, in the samples. The soundscape compliments the sharp, episodic nature of the play, and was meant to reflect the past onto the present as if the mirror were broken.

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Truly a beast to design, this show was a blast to work on, and has been one of the most artistically fulfilling shows I've ever had the pleasure of helping create.