Spanish Stew
Marga Gomez
The Marsh Berkeley Theater
With ample heart and over-flowing humor, GLAAD Award winning writer and performer known nationally and beloved locally — Marga Gomez — presents her latest of fifteen solo shows at The Marsh Berkeley Theater, Spanish Stew. Adapted for the Marsh after a successful world premiere in the autumn of 2025 at the New Conservatory Theatre Center, Spanish Stew is in many ways a love letter to a time in San Francisco when “on its horizon there were only two phallic-shaped buildings.” Generously alluding to places like Hamburger Mary’s, Tommy’s Joynt, the Ramrod, Mel’s, and La Rondalla, Marga Gomez’s memories of her first year as a twenty-year-old in San Francisco in the Bicentennial Year of 1976 is a hoot for all the Baby Boomers in her adoring audience — especially for those who recall what a magical time it was for them as younger queers in a SF that was teeming with newly arrived lesbians and gays seeking refuge and community.
From the moment she walks onto the small stage of Berkeley’s Marsh, Marga Gomez glistens with enthusiasm and energy, beaming a toothy smile and a confidence that she is amongst a packed crowd of likened souls who will eagerly respond to her opening request to cry out on the count of three, ‘Funk Ice!” With that resounding protest out of the way, she proceeds to take us back to 1976 and her road trip across the country in a yellow VW bug with her girlfriend Nancy where her job was to be in charge of maps “because I was so good at folding and unfolding.” The big round of understanding laughter — including after the former New Yorker adds, “I was on the lam … like Patty Hearst” — becomes early proof that the Sunday matinee audience is generally of an age to get and enjoy all the ensuing sidebars and jokes related to that era that are to pour forth during the next hour, fifty-minutes (longer than the advertised ninety, but absolutely no one present was complaining at all).
The young Marga soon gets a lesson that she is no longer in neither Kansas or New York. As she and Nancy head to a place on the map called the Castro — where she is sure they will find much-missed Cuban food from her upbringing — they actually land in the Castro Cafe where tuna melts and not ‘ropa vieja’ are all the rage. It also where a man in a “Gossamer red dress” is kicked out by the manager — not for a dress like she at first assumes but because he brought in a falafel from the outside.
Speaking of ‘ropa vieja,’ Marga swings back in time to become her eight-year-old self at her family’s Monday night dinners together — only Mondays because her professional entertainment parents were on stage all other nights. Typical on those nights would be to enjoy a big bowl of the dish that in Spanish means ‘old clothes.’ Marga tells us that as she once picked through the stew looking for threads of her favorite corduroy pants, her mama assured her “everything tastes better in Spanish.”
Food is an important part of Marga’s memories as we watch her become her Puerto Rican mother singing and stirring a post of ‘arroz gandules.’ With her mother now married to a second husband who preferred ‘American dishes’ like ‘lasagna,’ Marga tells us she that learned the ‘arroz gandules’ were only done “when the whole house smells like San Juan and second husband slams the door and drives away.”
And so the delightful stories continue to spill out, with Marga taking on the voice and persona of a father who seems not to care that she at seventeen is sleeping at his house in the same, small bed with a girl who wears baggy jeans and then switching to a mother who says with a bit of accented snarl, “you could only be going to San Francisco for three reasons.” When her mother rattles off “communist, drug addict, and homosexual,” I will let you imagine how the conversation hilariously goes from there.
The arrival and first year in San Francisco is a plethora of captivating anecdotes where we meet in her quick transformations in voice, accent, demeanor, and stance a variety of locals that Marga encounters as well as hear about her time living in a Rolfing collective in the Haight, getting her first job as a cook because the boss believed her lie that she had been a cook in the epicurean capital of New York, and moving into a tiny room in Duboce Triangle that made a New York apartment seem like a grand mansion. Her discoveries of places like the Rainbow Coop where “recently dumped lesbians like me come here hunting and taking down numbers” from the pinned notes on the grocery’s public board or of the Mission where finding her first burrito “was like being reborn” (showing us her near-sexual experience as she erotically strips away the burrito’s foil) are again so much fun and so much memory-joggers for many in the audience of their own ‘firsts’ when they arrived so long ago in the City by the Bay.
The generous mixture of references to Latin culture with both Cuban and Puerto Rican flavors, lesbian life as a recently-out twenty-year-old, and a San Francisco that mostly now exists only in her and our memories makes Spanish Stew a delicious dish just begging to be savored. But what makes Spanish Stew especially gourmet is the rich array of meticulously brewed ingredients that Marga Gomez naturally includes as a storyteller extraordinaire.
Rating: 5 E
A TheatreEddys Best Bet Production
Spanish Stew continues Saturdays at 7:30 p.m. and Sundays at 2 p.m. through February 22 (no show February 8) at The Marsh Berkeley Theater, 2120 Allston Way, Berkeley, CA. Tickets are available online at https://themarsh.org/, by phone at 415-282-3055 Monday – Friday 3-5 p.m. and Saturday 2-4 p.m., or by email at boxoffice@themarsh.org.
Photos Credit: Lois Tema
