Author, actor Gamal Chasten brings solo show about homeless to 6th Street Playhouse

Crawfish wants to talk to you.

The main character of playwright and actor Gamal Chasten’s 50-minute one-man play, “Crawfish: We, the Invisible,” has something to say.

You can get know Crawfish better in the 6th Street Playhouse presentation of the show, running online Friday through Sunday. The virtual workshop production was recorded at the Santa Rosa theater.

A homeless Black man, Crawfish is a character who refuses to slip into some preconceived stereotype.

“He’s not your crazy drug addict or lazy schizo. Historically, Crawfish was a stand-up comic in New Orleans and lost his home in Hurricane Katrina. Then he moved to the Bay Area with his mother, who has Alzheimer’s,” said Chasten, 59, of Greenbrae in Marin County. “This character has been with me since 2007.”

As a co-founder of the Universes ensemble, originally based in New York, Chasten wrote a monologue for Crawfish that was part of “Americaville,” a larger show created in response to the hurricane, which ravaged New Orleans in 2005. But that was not the end of the stage life of the character.

“I had a feeling I wanted to know more about Crawfish myself. I wanted to write a solo show about him,” Chasten said. “The poor are like any other community. They are very diverse. This is not a caricature.”

In the new show, Crawfish is speaking to the audience from the streets of Berkeley. Both frank and tenacious, Crawfish shares stories about life on the streets, systemic racism and climate change, chronicling his efforts to survive in the world around him.

Listen to an excerpt from the show

“If all it does is focus a little attention on these issues, that’ll be good,” Chasten said.

The Universes ensemble, now in its 25th year, is a national theater company dedicated to the creation of new theatrical works that incorporate poetry, dance and politics. The troupe has performed at Oregon Shakespeare Festival and Berkeley Rep. Chasten’s work as a playwright and actor with the company includes “The Wall,” “Slanguage” and “The Ride.”

In 2020, Chasten co-founded The Breath Project with Marieke Gaboury (thebreathproject2020.com). The company collaborates with theaters around the country to work toward purging racism from the American stage.

The Breath Project launched a festival dedicated to the length of time Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on the neck of George Floyd, arrested May 25 last year after Floyd was accused of passing a counterfeit $20 bill at a grocery store. Floyd’s death sparked a storm of protests nationwide.

Each of 24 videos in the Breath Project’s digital offering ran 8 minutes, 46 seconds long.

“For that, we had theater partners around the country,” Chasten said. “We were attempting to dismantle systemic racism and capture a moment in the country’s history.”

“This is very new, and very fresh. I’m excited about doing it,” Chasten said. “Developing a new theater piece during the pandemic has been really interesting. We didn’t know what we’d be able to do with it.”

So, what is the future of live theater?

“We all need to figure that out as we go,” Chasten said. Most theaters are putting their recorded performances online now, he noted. “Film will an element that the audience will stick with after live performances come back.”

You can reach Staff Writer Dan Taylor at dan.taylor@pressdemocrat.com or 707-521-5243. On Twitter @danarts.