Michael Hunter has a PhD in Drama and Directing from Stanford. Sounds fancy, right? It is fancy. I should know, I’ve got one too. We went through that particular circle of hell together, actually. Survived the same seminars, the same theoretical clusterfucks, the same drunken late-night arguments about Brecht.
We even co-directed Genet’s The Balcony together, staged it at San Francisco’s Old Mint, which if you know the building, you know it’s basically a fortress. Massive, imposing, all that 19th-century grandeur gone slightly to seed. Perfect for Genet. Because if you know anything about Jean Genet, you know The Balcony is not a show you mount because you’re looking for an easy time. It’s a descent into mirrors and brothels and power games, the kind of thing that either bonds you for life or makes you never want to speak to each other again. We’re not speaking.
Then there was Gombrowicz’s Princess Ivona. Staged it at the Performance Art Institute, and I use the term “institute” loosely. It was a warehouse. People lived there. Makeshift electrical wiring snaking across the ceiling like some kind of fire code nightmare. Random meth heads crashed on couches in the corners. No heat. You could see your breath in the air between shots of bourbon, which we drank to stay warm and to remind ourselves why the fuck we were doing this in the first place.
I did the lighting design and these massive video projections, wall-sized, immersive, the kind of thing that either elevates the production or swallows it whole. And there was this food orgy scene. Glorious, disgusting, exactly what Gombrowicz would’ve wanted. Excess as art form, performed in a space that was itself excessive in all the wrong ways. Or maybe all the right ones.
We also worked together on the Franconia Performance Salon, something that evolved directly from the work we’d been doing at Stanford. I documented the whole thing, because somebody had to, and brought in artist-scholar friends like Ryan Tacata and Angrette McCloskey. People who actually gave a damn about making something that mattered. Building a space where weird, difficult, necessary work could actually happen.
But the real story is in what he’s actually done. He’s directed in the Bay Area and the UK, Calderón, Orton, Genet, Ionesco, Kushner. If those names don’t mean anything to you, we need to have a different conversation. These are the playwrights who understood that theater shouldn’t make you comfortable. It should unsettle you, provoke you, maybe make you want to put your fist through a wall.
He’s also written his own stuff and had the guts to take it to the Edinburgh Fringe,, which takes either serious courage or a masochistic streak, probably both, depending on which year you catch it. Co-founded a theatre company called Collected Works, the group that produced The Balcony and Princess Ivona among other things. Spent a few years as a Senior Lecturer at California College of the Arts in San Francisco, actually teaching instead of just talking about it.
And currently? Hell if I know.
