Created by Erika Chong Shuch & Charles Mee
The Fall Show
You never know where love will find you, or when. Sam and Eddie are in the autumn of their lives and finding out that love doesn’t get easier with age. In a surreal story that’s full of big hearted fun, tender moments, and vibrant expressions of emotional depth, The Fall Show is a visceral exploration of how we relate told through movement and music.
This is not a play.
And this is not a pipe!
This is
TheFall Show
The Fall Show is not a play. It’s a feeling. A dream. A strange little world. A walk inside the imagination of Belgian artist René Magritte. It’s surreal. It’s impossible. It’s beautiful, and nebulous, like the feeling you get when you’re in love.
Go Behind the Scenes
Don’t miss these
Special performances
Sept 25 – Oct 2
Pay-What-You-Can Previews
Pay what you can for any of our four preview performances.
Opening Night
Sat, Oct 3 at 8 PM
Thu, Oct 8 · 7 PM
MAD Night
25 and under? $15 gets you a ticket, pizza and a beer (21+) or soda. MAD Nights sell out, so don’t wait. Bring your ID.
MAD Night ticketsSun, Oct 11 · 2 PM
Masked-Audience Performance
All audience members, ushers and staff wear masks. Performers are unmasked on stage.
Fri, Oct 16 · 8 PM
ASL-Interpreted Performance
Interpreted in American Sign Language. Interpreters are visible from every seat in the theater. Use code ASL for exclusive seats with the closest views.
ASL performance ticketsSun, Oct 18 · 2 PM
Haptic Tour & Audio Description
For guests who are blind or have low vision: a pre-show touch tour of the space, costumes and props, plus live audio description on headsets.
Thursdays & Sundays
Post-Show Conversations
Stick around after every Thursday and Sunday performance, starting October 4, for a conversation about the play.
Video on Demand
Nov 2 – 16
Watch from home. A captioned video of the show streams for two weeks, and captions can be turned on or off.
“If most plays are prose, ‘The Fall Show’ is a poem… This is the weird, wonderful Bay Area theater we need more of”
What our audience is saying
– Mel“Wondrous, funny, and moving”
– Nar“I want everyone i love to see this show”
– Marie“So creative, so compelling and so life affirming”
– Jane“Fantastic music. Didn’t want it to end.”
Photos
Photography by Ben Krantz
The Cast
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Atosa Babaoff
EnsembleShe/Her
Atosa Babaoff is thrilled to be back working with the beloved Shotgun Players. One of her favourite experiences ever was playing ‘Betty 2’ in Collective Rage and she is so happy to be back. She has worked all over the Bay Area and beyond. Her most recent piece GHOST PERIOD (an original work co-created with Hope Mohr/ SF Arts commission) was performed at SPACE 124. She is co-founder (along with Beatrice Basso and Nora El Samahy) of AFFINITY PROJECT, an arts collective dedicated to making devised theatre.
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Marit Brook-Kothlow
EnsembleShe/Her
Marit Brook-Kothlow is thrilled to be working with Erika Chong Shuch, along with this incredible cast, and the highly talented folks at Shotgun Players. As a longtime member of the Joe Goode Performance Group, she has contributed to the development of more than 30 dance/theater works and has toured and taught throughout the US, and internationally in Jordan, Egypt, Brazil and France.
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Vivian Huang
EnsembleShe/They
Vivian Huang is a performer, writer, and teacher based in Oakland on unceded Ohlone land. She last performed as Actor One in My Obsession with Hamletmachine at Dance Mission. Vivian is ecstatic to perform at Shotgun Players and thanks everyone involved with The Fall Show. Thanks to Grace for Magritte early on. Thanks to 姐姐, 媽媽, nar, and Mel for bringing piano into Vivian’s life.
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Louel Señores
EnsembleHe/Him
Louel is a Berkeley-based actor & Stage Manager and is thrilled to be working with Shotgun Players again! Previous acting credits include To My Girls (New Conservatory Theatre) & Four Play (Theatre Rhino). Previous Stage Manager credits include The Prince Parts 1 and 2 (Central Works) and Yerma (Shotgun Players). He’s a proud company member of Berkeley Interactive Theater & PlayGround SF, and is also a member of Shotgun’s EDIB Committee.
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Apollo Javier Sohrabi
EnsembleHe/Him
Apollo Javier Sohrabi is so excited to make his Shotgun Players debut! He is a Mexican-Iranian actor from the Bay Area and recent graduate of Theater & Performance Studies from UC Berkeley. Recent theater credits: Cabaret (Oakland Theater Project), Natasha, Pierre, & the Great Comet of 1812 (BareStage Productions), The Wednesday Club (UC Berkeley). He thanks his friends and family for their continued love and support. IG: @490110js
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Chris Steele
EnsembleShe/They
Chris Steele (she/they) has been performing, producing, and creating in the Bay Area for a decade. Her work centers on highlighting queer and trans narratives throughout history, with a focus on reimagining classics and uplifting genre-explosive new works. She lives with her husband and their 3 cats.
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Reginald Wilkins
SamHe/Him
Reginald Wilkins is originally from Texas and has been acting for 12 years. He’s had the privilege of performing in multiple plays by August Wilson with the Lower Bottom Players. Besides action, Wilkins is also a playwright, musician and multi-platform artist who loves to create! Once a middle-school teacher in another life, and also a singer in a reggae band, the Nephalim, he spends as much time as possible giving thanks for this wonderful thing called life!
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Beth Wilmurt
Eddie; Music Director & Vocal ArrangementsShe/Her
Beth Wilmurt is a long-time actor, director, and company member with Shotgun Players, and has also had the pleasure to work with Erika Chong Shuch for many years, most recently in Cabaret with Oakland Theater Project. She enjoyed creating and performing The Cassandra Sessions: Recording This World with Shotgun Players, and leads choirs with San Francisco Community Music Center where her work bridges performance and community engagement. More at www.bethwilmurt.com.
The Creative Team
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Charles Mee
Playwright
Charles Mee is an American playwright, historian, and author famous for his collage-style plays made from reconstructed texts. His works, such as Big Love, bobrauschenbergamerica, and Orestes 2.0, mix classical texts, pop culture, history, and philosophy. In the 90s, Mee removed copyrights from his plays and encourages theater-makers to use them freely in their own processes. Also a graduate at Harvard University, he now lives in New York and is a Special Lecturer of theater at Columbia University.
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Erika Chong Shuch
Director, Choreographer
Shuch is a performance maker, director and choreographer whose work spans experimental performance and social practice, and unexpected forms of audience engagement. She is the co-founder of For You, a collective exploring performance as creative mutual aid. Recent projects include The Table, commissioned by Pink Fang, co-created with Mei Ann Teo, (2026, Judson Church NY) and 1,000 Ways To Hold, a ceramics exhibition (Anderson Collection, Stanford, 2026 and Flag Art Foundation, NY, 2027).
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Natalie Greene
Intimacy Choreographer
Natalie Greene is an artist and educator whose interdisciplinary work centers community and consent. Her choreography and intimacy work have appeared regularly here at Shotgun Players, as well as at A.C.T., Aurora Theatre, Stanford University, Cal Shakes, and many other Bay Area theater, dance, and site-specific venues. Formerly Artistic Director of the award-winning devised ensemble Mugwumpin, Natalie is currently Director of Education & Community Programs at American Conservatory Theater.
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Sarah Rose Leonard
DramaturgShe/Her
Sarah Rose Leonard is the Senior Dramaturg at the Ojai Playwrights Conference. Her production dramaturgy credits include works at MCC, Berkeley Rep, MTC/Broadway, Signature Theatre, and The Denver Center, among others. Sarah Rose was the Co-Editor of the Obie Award-winning theater criticism publication 3Views on Theater from 2021-2025. Her day career is as the Senior Producer of Live Events and Strategy at KQED, the Bay Area’s NPR/PBS member station, where she brings journalism to life through interactive experiences. She is happy to be back at Shotgun, where she last dramaturged Best Available by Jonathan Spector.
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Jasmine Lew
MAD Directing ObserverShe/They/He
Jasmine Lew is a theatre maker, educator, and social worker based in the Bay Area. By day, they run arts-based programming for transitional aged youth experiencing housing insecurity in the SF Tenderloin. By night, Jasmine specializes in facilitating devised theatre and new work development, most often working in directing, producing, and stage management roles. Jasmine is so glad to be a part of The Fall Show and the larger Shotgun Players community!
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Claire Morton
Stage ManagerShe/Her
Claire is a stage manager, theatrical technician, and current PhD student in Statistics based in Berkeley. She has worked as a stage manager and assistant stage manager at Oakland Theater Project, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Festival Napa Valley, the San Francisco International Arts Festival, and Stanford University. This is her first time stage managing at Shotgun Players and she’s so excited to be here.
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Ashley Renee
Costume DesignerShe/Her
Ashley has built a textile-based practice as a costume designer, natural dyer, and material alchemist. She is a proud member of the Bay Wardrobe Collective where she instructs various textile workshops for the community. Most recent design credits include The Motion (Shotgun Players), Legally Blonde (Berkeley Playhouse), Urinetown (Ray of Light Theatre), The Fre (Oakland Theater Project), Of Love and Information (Napa Valley College), Pippin St. (Mary’s College LeFevre Theatre).
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Noah Rojas-Domke
Assistant Stage ManagerThey/Them
Noah Rojas-Domke is thrilled to be back at Shotgun Players but this time as Assistant Stage Manager. His experience spans scenic, lighting, stage management and choreography. Selected credits include La Comedia of Errors, Into the Woods, As You Like It, The Addams Family, The Lightning Thief, Les Misérables, Carrie, Legally Blonde and Rent. Noah is excited to be working on this great devised piece.
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Sophie Ruf
Scenic Design DrafterShe/Her
Sophie Ruf is a former MAD Scenic Fellow. She is delighted to work on another Shotgun Players production. By day she is an architect and origami enthusiast.
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Matt Stines
Sound Designer
matt stines is an SF-based self storage facilitator and is always stoked to be back at Shotgun Players. massive thanks to Didi, Gogo, Lind-zo, and Steve.
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Mikiko Uesugi
Scenic DesignerShe/Her
Mikiko has designed Kill the Debbie Downers!, Women Laughing Alone with Salad and Kiss for Shotgun Players. Recent theater credits include: In a Memory Palace for Theatre Nohgaku, Arab Spring for Golden Thread Productions & SF Bay Area Theatre Company, Pilgrimage for Golden Thread & Z Space. She is a recipient of the SF Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle Award and the NEA/TCG Career Development Program for Designers.
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Zoe P Wagner
Props DesignerThey/Them
Zoe P Wagner is a visual artist based in the San Francisco Bay Area, CA. Zoe P primarily works in relief printmaking and paper mache, with an emphasis on large-scale puppetry. Since 2024, they have worked with non-profits and community groups to create giant puppets for their movements, utilizing community-engaged research to help create symbols that share messages with a greater audience. They are thrilled to be a part of the joy and chaos of the work in their first Shotgun Players production.
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Allen Willner
Lighting DesignerHe/Him
Allen is excited to be working on his 4th Shotgun Players collaboration with Erika Chong Shuch. Past design awards and nominations include: TBA Lighting Designs: We Player’s Beowulf, Shotgun Players Eurydice, Theater of Yugen’s This Lingering Life, SF Playground The Obligation. Bay Area Critics Circle Lighting Design, Shotgun Players God’s Ear, Isadora Duncan Dance Design Awards for inkBoat’s Line Between, inkBoat’s Heaven’s Radio and Deborah Slater Dance Theater’s Private Life.
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K. Sid Zhang
Assistant DirectorShe/Her
K. Sid Zhang is a director, dancer, and poet from Nanjing, China and currently based in the Bay Area. She searches for space between words and their silence and creates visual poetry with interdisciplinary, movement-based performances. Her work has been presented at, among others, Edinburgh Festival Fringe, San Francisco International Arts Festival, and Stanford University. Sid is a co-founder of Moon Dog, a theatre company.
The Production Staff
- Cal ScenicScenic Building
- Gracie BrakemanDirector of Production
- Raisa DonatoAssociate Producer
- Lia FindleyWardrobe Assistant
- Todd LoydElectrics Supervisor
- Michael KellySound Supervisor
Contributing Artists
- Wakes WillnerOriginal Music
- Marie AcostaContributing Artist
- R. BlackGraphic Artist
- For YouArtists & Elders
- UC Davis Granada Artist Residency Program
- Student collaborators / workshop participants
Season Sponsors
- Karen Elizabeth Austin
- Donald Kaufman
- Craig & Kathy Moody
- Russell Nelson
- Les & Sue Polgar
- Ragesh Tangri & Daralyn Durie
- Bibi Tiphane
- Richard & Kate West
Production Sponsors
- May Lynne & Tim Gill
- Joe Kane
- Denise Tyrrell
- The Tournesol Project
About the Show
Shotgun Players presents a surreal story of older love based on the works of playwright Charles Mee. Director Erika Chong Shuch and dramaturg Sarah Rose Leonard combed the expanse of Mee’s corpus of plays to create a new story that resonated. “I’ve been thinking about how the love stories of middle-aged and older adults–and I include myself in this category–are muted. Falling in love, being in love, maintaining love: it’s complicated, twisty, chaotic,” says Shuch. “I hope I continue to be baffled by how to love, because it means I’m still thinking about it, still trying for it, still rooting for it, still valuing it.”
American Playwright, historian, and author Charles Mee encourages theater-makers to use his words freely in their material. He does not hold copyrights or charge for licensing. He says,
“I think of it almost the way historians think that the quotes they insert into their narratives are evidence of the world they are talking about. So texts from today prove that the piece is set in the world of today.”
Dramaturg Sarah Rose Leonard
Creating The Fall Show
Charles Mee is the legendary American playwright you’ve never heard of. He is a contemporary of Sam Shepard, Edward Albee, and Arthur Miller, who all broke open our ideas about theatrical structure, but Charles questioned the notion of structure altogether. If you ask him what story his plays tell he’ll often say “well it’s summer then spring, fall, winter, and summer again.” He allowed for his plays to be licensed by anyone, and allowed artists to produce his work in any type of way. This openness meant his work traveled far. Since the 1990s, his plays have been produced everywhere from the famed Festival d’Avignon in France to the Brooklyn Academy of Music to colleges across the country.
He grew up in Illinois, played football, contracted polio at age 14, and his father swore if his son could make it then he’d go to church every Sunday. He survived, his father went to church every Sunday, and Charles proceeded to move to NYC, zipping around Manhattan in a wheelchair, becoming a fixture of downtown theater in the 1990s and 2000s. He asked that his plays be populated by actors of different physicalities, race, genders, abilities – never writing a part for a specific type of actor.
The Fall Show takes its format from his wild stage directions, which often look like this:
We mashed stage directions with sections from many of his plays, but mostly First Love, about two older people falling in love for the first time. Charles is now 87, and he won’t stop writing.
Director Erika Chong Shuch
The Fall Show: a fantasia
Erika Chong Shuch
From the Director
And yet, there it is. Maybe I am hoping–no, longing–to be brave enough to be flawed and hungry and opinionated and stubborn and hopeful and afraid and powerful and horny and trying and, sometimes, very quiet. I think it is brave to fall into love. I hope I keep doing so for the rest of my life. These are the things I’m thinking about as we made The Fall Show.
Chuck wasn’t physically in the rehearsal room but he was with us every day; a kind of long-distance trust. It turns out you can build a play that way too: thread by thread, message by message. Maybe that’s fitting, for a writer who has always built his plays the same way: out of fragments that, put together, add up to a life.
Sometimes I’d get stuck and a little textmessage assignment would arrive— something like, “I’m thinking about you and what you’re doing, and how I’m more and more loving how theatre throws chunks of words into worlds of performance art and music and visual arts and dance and happenings and everything you do.”
I went back to this text a dozen times. Here was explicit permission—no, instruction— to make wildly, to trust the deep gut, to keep faith that the abstract means something. So I ran with the experiment, forever grateful that Chuck sent us into this forest, and that Shotgun Players gave us the extraordinary gift of building this from scratch.
Chuck tells a story about trees. I won’t give it away here, because I want the tree onstage now to hold multitudes, but in a recent text exchange I asked, “If the beginning of the story is the trunk, and the middle is the branches… how does the story end?” Those three pulsing dots didn’t stop for two minutes, and then…
“With millions of trees being who and how they are. And no oak tree feels it has to be like a pine tree — or even like another oak tree.”
We asked Chuck: What about this project made you excited?
“Just knowing you, Sarah Rose and Erika… made me super eager to see what you would make of things of mine. I’ve never heard of anyone taking my stage directions and making what they want of those — and then throwing in some texts from First Love?! What do I wish when I go to the theatre? Take me someplace I’ve never been before!”
What I like
Playwright Charles Mee
My own work begins with the belief that human beings are, as Aristotle said, social creatures—that we are the product not just of psychology, but also of history and of culture, that we often express our histories and cultures in ways even we are not conscious of, that the culture speaks through us, grabs us and throws us to the ground, cries out, silences us.
I don’t write “political plays” in the usual sense of the term; but I write out of the belief that we are creatures of our history and culture and gender and politics—that our beings and actions arise from that complex of influences and forces and motivations, that our lives are more rich and complex than can be reduced to a single source of human motivation.
So I try in my work to get past traditional forms of psychological realism, to bring into the frame of the plays material from history, philosophy, insanity, inattention, distractedness, judicial theory, sudden violent passion, lyricism, the National Enquirer, nostalgia, longing, aspiration, literary criticism, anguish, confusion, inability.
I like plays that are not too neat, too finished, too presentable. My plays are broken, jagged, filled with sharp edges, filled with things that take sudden turns, careen into each other, smash up, veer off in sickening turns. That feels good to me. It feels like my life. It feels like the world.
And then I like to put this—with some sense of struggle remaining—into a classical form, a Greek form, or a beautiful dance theatre piece, or some other effort at civilization.
—Chuck Mee
This Is the World of Magritte
Charles Mee’s play First Love begins with the words:
“We are indoors and out at the same time.
This is the world of Magritte.
There is a tree.
A piano.
We hear birds singing.”
Sure, but also Chuck doesn’t remember writing half of this. It’s not because he’s 87 years old. It’s because his plays come from his subconscious. He thought of two older people falling in love for the first time in the world of the surrealist painter René Magritte. He thought of a stack of magazines, oldie songs, a striptease, an Allen Ginsberg poem, and some wild stage directions. The Fall Show places First Love in a world populated with an ensemble who bring Chuck’s imaginative stage directions to life, covering everything from falling to throwing to dancing to butt wagging. And in a few places, the ensemble create brief moments right out of Magritte paintings. See if you can find some of these images in the piece!
The Lovers
1928Thwarted desires are a common theme in Magritte’s work. Here, a barrier of fabric divides the intimate embrace of two lovers, transforming an act of passion into one of isolation and frustration. Some have speculated that the death of Magritte’s mother, by suicide, inspired a series of works in which he obscured his subjects’ faces. The artist was fourteen years old when her body was found in the River Sambre in Lessines, Belgium, with her wet nightgown purportedly wrapped around her face. Magritte disagreed with such interpretations, writing that meaning was elusive in his paintings: “‘What does it mean?’ It does not mean anything, because mystery means nothing either, it is unknowable.”
The Therapist
1937Magritte did not want to put up with the fact that each of his paintings became the subject of discussion among colleagues, not so much because of its artistic value, but because of the attempts to analyse the artist’s personality. He believed that the people who primarily needed therapy were the psychotherapists themselves (by the way, in the modern world, supervision is a prerequisite for psychotherapeutic practice). The subject of his painting is an excellent illustration of this statement.
Magritte portrayed his “therapist” as a certain wanderer in a wide-brimmed hat, with a crook and a shoulder bag, who is sitting on the edge of a sea cliff. Like many other Magritte’s subjects, he does not have a face, but he opens his cloak wide open, as if allowing the viewer to look into his soul for a moment, opening the veil of his own secret. Hidden under the cloak is a cage with two white doves: one bird inside, behind the closed door, and the other outside. One gets the impression that the free pigeon is trying to communicate with its fellow who is imprisoned in a cage, to support him, to help him get free. So does the therapist helping his clients get out of the dark and lonely place that is within them. Surprisingly, despite his dislike for psychotherapists, Magritte managed to portray the principle of their work very subtly.
The Son of Man
1964The Return
1940Ceci n’est pas une pipe.
La Trahison des images (1929)
“This is not a pipe.” The Treachery of Images
Special showcase
Falling For You
Saturday, October 10 at 2 PM
For You (a socially engaged art group led by Erika Chong Shuch, Rowena Richie, Ryan Tacata) presents a special matinee showcase combining excerpts of The Fall Show with new stories and stage images inspired by their recent connections with East Bay elders. Working with the themes of The Fall Show, For You spent the past few months connecting with elders living near and around Shotgun Theatre—learning about their experiences of falling (in love, into new phases of life, out of touch with old friends). They’ll present creative responses to those elders, and their stories, alongside excerpts of The Fall Show. This collaboration with Shotgun Theatre is the latest engagement in an on-going project from For You called Artists & Elders. For more information, visit: www.foryou.productions/artistsandelders