Playwright at a prolific stage of her career

SFGate
Jesse Hamlin

Lauren Gunderson’s new plays are sprouting around the Bay Area right now in a run of premieres one well-regarded local pundit calls unprecedented. 

At Thick House in San Francisco, in a Crowded Fire production, three actresses are playing multiple roles in Gunderson’s “The Taming,” a contemporary riff on Shakespeare’s “Taming of the Shrew” that she describes as a “feminist time-traveling political farce.” Among other roles, they play George Washington and other Founding Fathers, in their wigs and white stockings, “in drag,” as the playwright puts it.

Across the bay in Mill Valley at Marin Theatre, two young actors, Jessica Lynn Carroll and Devion McArthur, play unlikely teenage friends in Gunderson’s “I and You,” an intimate story about youth and mortality and making connections that revels in the music of Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass.” 

Marin is premiering the piece, which was commissioned by South Coast Rep, where Gunderson’s “Silent Sky” premiered in 2011. Based on the brilliant early 20th century American astronomer Henrietta Leavitt - the first to see patterns in the shifting luminosity of stars - the play gets its second major production in January 2014 at TheatreWorks in Mountain View.

The Gunderson bonanza, which began in May in Berkeley with the premiere of her “By and By” by the Shotgun Players, continues in March with the San Francisco Playhouse premiere of “Bauer.” It’s a commissioned piece about the once-celebrated but now-forgotten abstract artist Rudolf Bauer, who made it out of Nazi Germany only to quit painting in his prime because he felt wronged by his patron, copper magnate Solomon R. Guggenheim. The artist had unwittingly signed a deal assigning his future work to the collector’s foundation.

Graceful and animated

“Basically he was bitter until the end of his life,” said Gunderson, 32, a graceful and animated woman who grew up in Decatur, Ga.; earned a master’s degree in dramatic writing at New York University; and moved to San Francisco from New York four years ago to be with the man she has since married, virologist Nathan Wolfe. Among other questions, “Bauer” asks, “How do you go meet your maker feeling that you might have wasted half of your life?”

Like many of her plays, each in their way about “discovery, defiance and love,” this work puts characters who don’t want to be together - in this case, Bauer; his wife; and his longtime lover, Guggenheim curator Hilla Rebay - in the same room and lets the sparks fly (she cites Tennessee Williams’ influence).

“I like cramming people into a room they can’t get out of, and that’s how drama is born,” said Gunderson, who finds her premiere-packed schedule, with all the rewrites and rehearsals it entails, “wonderfully overwhelming. It’s crazy.”

She was sitting one recent afternoon on the patio at Marin Theatre, where she’d been working in the rehearsal room with the “I and You” actors, director Sarah Rasmussen and dramaturge Margot Melcon, wearing gray jeans, a red V-neck sweater, horn-rimmed glasses, green slippers and gray fedora.

In “The Taming,” the playwright plops three disparate women - a liberal blogger (Marilet Martinez), a conservative Southern senator’s aide (Marilee Talkington) and a liberated beauty queen (Kathryn Zdan) - in the same space.

As in “Taming of the Shrew,” which Gunderson has called a big misogynist joke, “there’s a lot of yelling and differing opinions. And not a lot of listening.” (There was no yelling in Gunderson’s cheerful family home, which may be why she puts so much of it in her plays, she noted with a laugh.) Instead of the Bard’s battle of the sexes, she serves up a “battle of partisan politics,” red versus blue.

Irreverent and loud

“In the middle part, they go in drag as the Founding Fathers, which should be hilarious. That was really fun to write, because it’s irreverent and loud and fast,” Gunderson said.

To help inform the writing, Crowded Fire, with a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, arranged for Gunderson and director Marissa Wolf to meet on different occasions with Jennifer DeVere Brody, a Stanford professor of theater and performance studies affiliated with the Center for Comparative Studies of Race and Ethnicity, and Hastings Law School Associate Dean Joel Richard Paul, a constitutional law expert.

Gunderson, a sponge for all kinds of information - “the more smart people I hear from, the better,” she said - picked up insights from both that enriched the script. Brody’s discussion of elaborate male presentation in the powdered-wig period fueled a line delivered by the beauty queen:

“I’m as smart about the Constitution as the Founding Fathers - and they take just as long to get dressed as I do.”

There’s an abundance of ironic humor and sarcasm, as well as dark shades, in “I and You.” It brings together two ethnically different teenagers, one waiting for a liver transplant, the other a Coltrane fan with a taste for poetry, in a sort of coming-of-age story that deals with “youth and mortality,” the playwright said, “connection and complete openness and honesty.”

Gunderson was summoned back to the rehearsal room, where her colleagues were struggling with the play’s final scene and needed authorial input. After listening to what vexed them and talking about motivation, the playwright took a pencil and cut out chunks of dialogue from various pages.

“They felt there was lag, too much space, too much air,” she said. “When we get to the end of the play, we need to accelerate to the climax. Cutting is always the right answer,” she added, laughing.

Gunderson calls herself “a happy-ending kind of playwright.” Which is why writing a character like Bauer, who’s examining his life as lung cancer begins to take it away, was hard.

“If you get it right, you can make it transcendent at the end. I’m a transcendent-ending kind of playwright, too. I stopped fearing the ending of plays, because I think that stops a lot of people. It’s art, right? We can do anything. It’s like the ‘Thelma & Louise’ ending: just run off the cliff.”

The Taming: Through Oct. 26. $15-$30. Crowded Fire, Thick House, 1695 18th St., S.F. (415) 746-9238. www.crowdedfire.org.

I and You: Through Nov. 3. $37-$58. Marin Theatre Company, 397 Miller Ave., Mill Valley. (415) 388-5208. www.marintheatre.org.

Jesse Hamlin is a freelance writer. E-mail: sadolphson@sfchronicle.com