Crushing

Crushing

Nine Various Writers & Performers;

Megan Calfas & Carly Steyer, Co-Producers & Co-Directors

Bayfront Theater

After a “bad heartbreak” break-up in 2021, Carly Steyer began collecting first-person love stories, soon discovering — as noted in the evening’s program notes — “we all have a love or almost-love that has altered how we know ourselves.”  

Nine selected stories from those interviews related in monologues by their authors became the heart of a sold-out, much-lauded Crushing in New York in 2023, co-produced by Steyer and Megan Calfas.  Joined by Natachi Onwuamaegbu — a star in the New York premiere — the three open a San Francisco Crushing, featuring nine new, transformative stories of love lost, love gained, and lives changed.  A sold-out, first night at the Marina’s Bayfront Theatre is unfortunately only to be repeated for one additional performance.  The nine, very personal revelations of first-hand encounters with love and all its craziness, messiness, and wonderment are a Crushing success and so aching for a much-deserved longer, S.F run.

With haunting, sultry, and thoroughly mesmerizing vocals, San Francisco native recording artist, Rozzi, opens the evening singing, “I know I will be fine; I don’t want to be fine without you.”  Emoting beautifully the crying pain of a break-up, Rozzi follows her stunning musical performance relating in spoken confession how post break-up, she could no longer remain in the City that carried too many memories of happier days: “I had to get away from floors that sounded like they sounded when he walked across them.”  But in a theme to be continued throughout the evening, self-learning for the better came for Rozzi, even from such a traumatic experience.  “In hindsight, [I now realize] it is so sacred to hurt like that.”

San Francisco’s star of “America’s Test Kitchen: The Next Generation,” writer, Garrett Schlichte relates with much humor and aplomb how meeting and falling for a “hot bisexual rock climber” nudged him out of his comfort zone of the safe indoors into a weekend of backpacking and ascending a steep (and scary) wall of rock.  Even though that hottie faded into a memory, Garrett leaves us with the promise that each love gained and lost has the possibility of our finding “space to do something new.” 

Vowing after a bad love-split and subsequent over-indulging in “bad food and liquor” that “the last thing I wanted was a girlfriend,” Richmond-raised Keef Brown (educator and artist) tells us with eyes twinkling while his large stature dances back-and-forth how he surprisingly found “love at first sauce”.  A mutual craving for honey mustard on fries becomes the first-step in his journey toward the altar to say “I do,” but not before experiencing how true empathy and understanding can feel and can change one’s life.

Oakland-based poet and award-winning novelist Sam Sax engagingly and often hilariously recites two of his poems describing their experiences of queer first-crushes and of a search what to call their latest heart-throb (“My boutonnière?” “My goof queer?”).  

Reading from a book, New York screenwriter and podcaster Drew Semler answers his mom’s “Why are you single?” with a litany of laugh-out-loud reasons including “I am bald as fuck” and “My old college ID no longer gets me a discount.”  A self-proclaimed narcissist, Drew takes us through his big ‘ah-ha’ that “adult love” is not the same as those loves one has earlier-in-life.

Learning important life lessons definitely is an important thread connecting so many of these stories, related mostly by twenty-to-thirty somethings.  Aspiring therapist and accomplished line-dance teacher who recent arrived in Berkeley, Nora Gomperts leaves little hidden as they describe in raw bits and pieces the queer, sexual escapades they had on both sides of the Atlantic with a hot, French anthropologist — eight months of Nora’s alternating between “bliss and despair.”  But in the end when “a lover who made me feel inadequate” arrived unannounced in S.F. to rekindle the up-and-down affair, Nora triumphantly reveals, “I knew enough to walk out, and I did.”

One of the night’s self-discoveries that most sticks in my mind is Los Angeles comedian, writer, actor, and filmmaker Karan Menon’s realization that “all the things that [once] made me nobody are the things that led somebody to love me.”  The one that captured his heart was one who like his nerdiness, his soft side, his caring — not someone drawn to the alpha male image he so wanted to emulate from his college dorm neighbor, the rapper 24KGoldn.  Like so many of the others, Karan’s story is funny, revealing, and heartwarming.

Nothing short of amazingly impressive is Oakland’s fourteen-year-old Myles-Alexys Jones who holds the audience spellbound as she describes the angst and hesitation she felt wanting but not daring to tell a freshman girl how “my heart catalogues every piece of her.”  Confessing that every conversation was “like sacred scripture,” “MJ” tells us that this was the girl who could “make me feel like I can be enough for once.”  Needless to say, we awaited with baited breath for her climatic and happy reveal.

But it was another climax surprise from the evening’s last writer and speaker, Shameeka Wilson, that had the entire audience whooping and hollering in genuine joy.  Not to give away even the slightest clue, it is enough to know that “Smeek” (as she calls herself) can easily hold an audience’s attention with a personality that glows and a story that is captivating and uplifting from beginning to end.  Something I will never forget that I learned from her: “lip capability” (i.e., lips that fit well in a kiss) is an important sign of finding one’s soulmate.  

The eighty minutes of Crushing fly by much too quickly.  Each story is worth a retelling, and all will leave lasting memories for the standing ovation audience.  Hopefully, the three co-producers along with executive producer Rosario Dawson will continue bringing these stories to audiences in many venues, including more right here in San Francisco, the original “City of Love.”

Rating: 5 E

Crushing continues for a final performance tonight, February 28, 2025, at Bayfront Theatre, 2 Marina Blvd., Fort Mason, San Francisco.  Tickets are available at www.crushing.show/tix.