Mixed Magic
13 Hallucinations looks for meaning somewhere over a graffiti rainbow, while Uncle Jacques' Symphony plays human truths like a jazz virtuoso.

By Robert Avila

THE OPENING SCENE of Stephen R. Culp's 13 Hallucinations of Julio Rivera – which leads off the Magic Theatre's enticing "Hot House" series (three world premieres in repertory over nine weeks) – plays like the first frames of Sunset Boulevard transposed onto urban blacktop. "That's me, chicos," a disembodied voice says, "facedown on the asphalt. Look at me. Don't this suck, or what?" The body in the schoolyard, lying in a puddle of blood, belongs to our astonished narrator. How he, Julio Rivera (Rudy Guerrero), got there and what it might all possibly mean, we're about to find out.

Culp's inspiration, the real-life Rivera, was a 29-year-old Puerto Rican bartender and resident of Jackson Heights, Queens. He was a denizen of the queer underworld in his particular slice of working-class multiethnic New York, and his brutal murder in 1990 by three gay-bashing skinheads galvanized an alliance of family, friends, and local LGBT activists whose unwavering efforts contributed to steep sentences for the killers and the passing of a hate-crime bill in the state senate.

In a style very much indebted to another Rivera, playwright José, as well as Tony Kushner, the play moves swiftly and irrevocably beyond the tabloid details surrounding Rivera's demise, spinning out an unabashedly bold and sassy, frequently funny, sometimes poignant fantasy in the form of 13 stage-hogging visions from a dying man.

At the same time, despite Culp's often inspired scenes and dialogue, the play feels less rooted and substantial than the best work in this genre. In part that's because 13 Hallucinations ties itself so closely to the real-life political narrative that made Rivera "famous in death" (as one character says) as a martyr for the gay rights movement. That's an important and inspiring narrative in its own right (and something like it was effectively advanced in the Laramie Project's documentary approach to the Matthew Shepherd case), but it outweighs here any other approach to what was clearly a complex interplay between race, class, and sexual orientation at work in the life and death of Rivera. Moreover, in being oriented by default toward legal process and reform, the play never raises fundamental questions about the systemic roots of violent bigotry as a by-product of state violence – something recent graphic photos from a U.S. prison in Iraq have made chillingly clear.

Jimmy Bohr's playful but rigorous direction and a solid, enjoyable cast make this an entertaining and even somewhat stirring debut. But in steering clear of the kind of thoroughgoing political-messianic mode that takes in history and society writ large – à la Angels in America and Marisol – the play's revelatory style can at times look gratuitous or like oversize garments on a modest frame.

But if the play's overreliance on Rivera the cause célèbre appears thin from the apocalyptic vantage point associated with magic realism, some of its best moments arise paradoxically from the door this leaves open to a robust bout of postmodern irony, as Rivera gets a glimpse of his own unlikely martyrdom. One particularly cheeky altered state, for instance, has a young activist (a terrific Ian Scott McGregor) visiting the schoolyard a year after Rivera's murder. As the music swells, the pilgrim turns into a Broadway-bound actor in the musical version of Rivera's life, and he's not a little resentful of the real-life/dead Rivera messing up his big scene. The extraneous Rivera can only say with admiration, "They made a musical. I'll be damned."

Symphony in Cool Major

In Uncle Jacques' Symphony, writer-performer Dominic Hoffman's sharp and engaging one-man show running on the Magic Theatre's proscenium stage, the music of Chicago jazz drummer Uncle Jacques flows through his loquacious hands and then gets transfigured in the lives of a series of random characters, each of whom registers a distinct musicality, an inner and outer grace. In capturing every inflection and nuance in these lightheartedly comical yet astute and moving human portraits, Hoffman – who most recently played the devil in the Magic Theatre's world premiere of David Mamet's Dr. Faustus – has the chops to make Uncle Jacques proud.

"I see God as this brother who wrote this terrific tune called life," says Uncle Jacques, a former jazzman of the Southside. Even after he hung up his drumsticks to put meat on the table for his family, Uncle Jacques never stopped hearing music.

"Life," Jacques says, "is the eternal pursuit of tunefulness." Yeah, I think I dig.

Oh, all right, look, if this jazz philosophy sounds a little hokey when written down, that's because, as with music, you're meant to feel it, man. And like a true virtuoso, Hoffman conveys every ineffable word through his deftly drawn characters. Believe me, by the end of Uncle Jacques' Symphony, you'll know what the cat's talking about. '13 Hallucinations of Julio Rivera' plays as part of "The Hot House: Three New Plays in Rep." Series runs through June 20 (see Web site for schedule). Magic Theatre, Northside Theater, Fort Mason Center, Bldg. D, Marina at Laguna, S.F. $20-$38 (three-play pass, $72). (415) 441-8822, www.magictheatre.org. 'Uncle Jacques' Symphony' runs through May 16. Wed.-Sat., 8:30 p.m.; Sun., 3 p.m., Magic Theatre, Fort Mason Center, Marina at Laguna, S.F. $25. (415) 441-8822, www.magictheatre.org.