A Filipino-American Theater Reopens in SOMA!

Bindlestiff Studios is a black box theater for performing arts in SOMA.  This is an insightful article I received the other day from Allan Manalo, Artistic Director of Bindlestiff Studios on Sixth Street:

Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Bindlestiff Studio (but were too tired to ask!): Origins of a black box theater

In 1989, right before the City experience the infamous ‘World Series’ earthquake, inside a street-level storefront of the two-story Plaza Hotel SRO on Sixth & Howard, a group of performing artists opened the doors to a tiny black box theater they decided to name “Bindlestiff Studio.” Ten years later and after several changes in management, I took over the theater along with my Filipino American experimental sketch comedy troupe, ‘tongue in A mood’ where we developed Bindlestiff into one of the premier epicenters for Filipino American performing artists in the United States.

By 2004, the Plaza Hotel was purchased by the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency who tore down the dilapidated SRO and erected a new building, giving Bindlestiff Studio a space in its original location. Coming this Fall, twenty-one years after it was established, Bindlestiff Studio (now a non-profit arts organization) will once again open its doors, not only as a true epicenter for Filipino American performing artists, but also as an essential center of creativity to inspire community involvement through the arts for San Francisco’s diverse SOMA neighborhood.

Below is an excerpt from the book STAGE PRESENCE (edited by Dr. Theodore S. Gonzalves, Meritage Press 2007) where I wrote an account of the first time I stepped into the original Bindlestiff Studio to watch a one-woman show entitled BABAE by Lorna Aquino Chui, a young Filipina stage artist who grew up in the alleys of SOMA.

One evening after rehearsals for an upcoming theater production, I had borrowed a friend’s car and made the mistake of parking on Howard Street to briefly meet some theater folks at Aurora’s karaoke restaurant. After my tearful rendition of “Three Times A Lady,” I returned to the car to find a broken passenger window, an old spark plug on the floor and my black leather bag gone. Was this karmic retribution for inflicting karaoke pain on my friends? I then realized that my missing bag contained the script for a play I was directing about a Filipino family who discovers their son is gay as well as the printed tickets for the entire run. I drove through the alleys off of Sixth Street to find information about my stolen bag.

I circled the block several times to see if I could catch someone pitching the script, perhaps a bearded dude named Rodney selling tickets to a back-lot production of a play about an Irish family who discovers their son doesn’t like beer. I kept driving past a storefront with a circus pink door, a dark marquee protected by black ornate iron bars, and a colorful sign that stretched above it all. I didn’t really read the sign. I didn’t feel I had to because the pink door told me exactly what this place obviously was – a sex club. I was in San Francisco. I had read the classified ads in the back sections of the SF Bay Guardian weekly. These places existed and the pink door storefront was one of them. So when my wife and I walked down Sixth Street to attend the closing night of “Babae” I was in for a shock. My fantasies of what was beyond the pink door, fantasies I have yet to share with my wife, dissipated into the colorful stretched out sign that read “Bindlestiff Studio.” 

I would have never guessed that within this obstacle course of panhandlers, broken glass, and questionable liquids on asphalt stood a funky black box theatre. The door was propped open with it’s “sex club” pink tones exploding onto the walls of the tiny lobby. As we entered to the right, the box office window greeted us without the pretension and anxiety you generally experienced when shelling out the cover charge at nightclubs.  Leaning against a black wall opposite the box office window, an old upright piano guarded a doorway framed by a dark velvet curtain. We handed the door person our red raffle tickets and proceeded down a short corridor not knowing what to expect. With each step, the theatre graciously revealed itself.

The black-washed wooden stage was at floor level and spanned about 15 to 18 feet in width. As you turned, you can see five rows of white-back seats with reddish-orange cushions rising on black platforms. Every seat had an unobstructed view of the entire play space. Every wall was muted in black creating an intimacy that contained the power of each presentation and thrust it towards the audience. I immediately fell in love with the space. After watching Lorna’s compelling performance, I knew we had found the place we had been looking for, a possible home for tongue in A mood.

Bindlestiff was ran by a consortium of artists who were into presenting theatre that was experimental. This was the exact direction tongue In A mood was heading although we really didn’t know it at the time.

Chrystene Ells, a Canadian puppeteer, artists, animator, and director (just to name a few of her many amazing talents) founded Bindlestiff Studio when she was only 18 years old along with her then boyfriend, theatre artist, Chris Brophy back in 1989. She would tell us amazing stories about the space and it’s many lives: from former barber college to a junkie’s hangout littered with discarded hypodermic needles before she and Chris cleaned it up and opened it’s doors to present dark circus-like theatre. For five years, Chrystene called Bindlestiff, home. Literally. She had a bed next to a make-shift office slash kitchen slash backstage area.

She said the name Bindlestiff was a depression-era term referring to working “stiffs” (also called hobos or tramps) who traveled from place to place looking for work. These wanderers would carry all their worldly belongings including a bedroll and cooking gear in a bundle tied to a stick. I remember these guys depicted in old cartoon series like Bugs Bunny and Popeye. The bindlestiffs would carve two interlocking oval-shapes on fence post and trees. The symbol stood for “Never Give Up,” an unspoken mantra among the brotherhood of stiffs. Chrystene adopted the symbol and mantra as the theater’s logo and motto.

From the opening of Bindlestiff in 1989 up through 1997, this little black box had gone through several reorganizations, finding itself on it’s last breath then somehow staving off financial and emotional crisis to keep it’s barred pink doors from closing. During one of these periods, Chrystene noticed the Sixth Street neighborhood changing around her. Hidden in the mix of litter lots, shattered glass, urine-soaked asphalt, and desperate broken people were kids playing in the alleys. These were children of immigrants making a hard living away from a home they missed with yearning, a motherland they called “Pilipinas” or the Philippines.

In time, Bindlestiff Studio became the place to find the most experimental, original, irreverent theater and music produced by Filipino Americans in the entire country. By June 1998, the Chrystene and Bindlestiff’s consortium decided to hand over the keys to the theater because only the Filipino productions were experiencing box office success. For yours truly, this was the beginning of my crash course in running a black box theater and an opportunity to build and institution.