‘HOME’ a stunning full-length debut for Star Finch
Visionary and poetic, it heralds a promising theatrical career, and it reaffirms Campo Santo’s role as a discerning cultivator of new voices, even as that 20-year-old company has gone nomadic for the past three years since ceasing to be the resident company at Intersection for the Arts.
The sleek, Sci-Fi show follows Chima (Lauren Spencer), a sex worker in the not-too-distant future who lives in Oakland, but only for now: “I just so happen to be exiting the planet shortly,” she tells the audience as she gazes into her telescope.
Everyone on Mars walks around in Robocop-style, light-up sunglasses (the spacey and sassy costumes are by Courtney Flores), which characters refer to as their “screens” — devices necessary for activities from navigating Mars’ warren of underground hallways to breathing.
The legacy of racism, the difficulties of a job in the sex industry and our addiction to glowing screens might already be too many newsy themes to address meaningfully in 90 minutes.
(To Campo Santo’s credit, the company cast a gender nonconforming actor, Davia Spain, in the part.) While the pair’s discussions about what it means to be a woman are interesting and rendered with Finch’s signature lyricism — “I may not be going to Mars,” Spain says, “but I’ve been space traveling all my life” — they feel like tangents, unconnected to the show’s central conflict between the two sisters, each of whom thinks she knows what’s best for a boy who’s now a man and who now has his own ideas about his path in life.
Sante thinks it leads away from smooth, cold screens and toward imperfect flesh, specifically to Apple (Jasmine Milan Williams), who dances for VIP male clients on Mars.
Given Finch’s promise as a writer, Bay Area audiences should cross their fingers that this duo goes on making music together.