Magic’s 50th season includes world premieres and classics

San Francisco’s Magic Theatre, a bastion of creative contemporary theater founded by the late John Lion nearly 50 years ago in a Berkeley barroom, celebrates its forthcoming golden anniversary with a 2016-17 season that mixes now-classic works by two major writers associated with the theater — Sam Shepard and Paula Vogel — and premieres of new plays by other artists with the Magic on their resumes.

[...] comes the Magic’s Virgin Play Series, with workshop performances of in-progress plays by a diverse crew of writers that includes Jessica Hagedorn and Mfoniso Udofia (two of the plays in Udofia’s ongoing nine-play Ufot Family Cycle close the current Magic season).

Planning the 50th season, Magic Artistic Director Loretta Greco says, “we wanted to look back at the foundation of the Magic and those writers who changed the face of American theater, and look forward at some of the most explosive and exciting writing today.”

“That piece is inextricably linked to the Magic,” Greco says.

Because it was made in that intimate space of ours, there are so many things from the rehearsals with Kathy Baker and Ed Harris that are baked into the text.