The San Francisco International Arts Festival returns April 29 through May 10 with its mix of theater, circus, music and educational activities. The festival, founded in 2002, is an eclectic celebration of the performing arts worldwide. This year, it includes a North Bay touch.<\/p>\n
Sausalito-based poet and playwright Lynn Lohr has turned the experiences of her late husband and artistic partner, Lance Belville, a foreign correspondent in Brazil during its 1964 military coup, into a short play called Rio Journal.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI kept telling him to write it himself,\u201d Lohr recounts. \u201cBut he kept saying that the story happened to a man in his 20s and 30s, and now in his 70s he didn\u2019t recognize that man anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n
After Belville\u2019s passing in 2020, Lohr found a treasure trove of correspondence and journals. Using that information, along with transcripts and other sources, she wrote a two-person play.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s very relevant,\u201d says Lohr. \u201cIt\u2019s about a military dictatorship, the CIA, censorship and corruption.\u201d She pauses and continues: \u201cI don\u2019t want to get preachy. We\u2019re in the entertainment business, so I do want people to be entertained. But the play is set in 1963\u20131971, and here we are again.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe coup was in \u201964,\u201d says actress Juliana Eiras. \u201cAnd the way things are going here now, we can learn from that.\u201d<\/p>\n
Erias has other reasons to be excited about the show as well. \u201cI was so happy when Lynn invited me to do this project, especially since the story is set in Brazil. The lines in Portuguese and some of the songs really remind me of home,\u201d she notes.<\/p>\n
If one has yet to see Erias on stage, she is a relatively recent addition to the North Bay theater scene. Originally from Brazil, she has an impressively deep background in theatrical training. She was most recently seen on the local stage in The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui at Petaluma\u2019s Mercury Theater.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Erias plays all the characters except Belville, who is played by Bay Area actor Sean Mireles Bolton. The show will be at Theater of Yugen, a small Noh theater space on Mariposa Street in San Francisco, one of 16 spaces hosting various parts of the festival.<\/p>\n
\u201cFestivals are a great place for people to come together as a community. And it\u2019s international, so you can meet other artists and see how they do theater around the world,\u201d Erias says.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s only a 60-seat house, though,\u201d Lohr warns. \u201cSo get your tickets while you can.\u201d<\/p>\n
San Francisco International Arts Festival presents \u2018Rio Journal\u2019 at Theatre of Yugen\u2019s NOHSpace, 2840 Mariposa St., San Francisco. Thursday, May 7, 7pm; Saturday, May 9, 2 & 8pm. $25\u2013$40. 415.399.9554. sfiaf.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The San Francisco International Arts Festival returns April 29 through May 10 with its mix of theater, circus,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":290278,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[123962,26809,123963,101,103,123964,102,3624,104,106,105],"class_list":["post-290277","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-francisco","tag-lynn-lohr","tag-playwright","tag-rio-journal","tag-san-francisco","tag-san-francisco-headlines","tag-san-francisco-international-arts-festival","tag-san-francisco-news","tag-sausalito","tag-sf","tag-sf-headlines","tag-sf-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290277","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=290277"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290277\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/290278"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=290277"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=290277"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=290277"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}