San Jose native has full theatrical plate
Jeffrey Lo serves up nourishing fare as writer and director at Bay Area venues
One way to explain what’s special about playwright, director and San Jose native Jeffrey Lo is through cooking.
A Filipino American, Lo features the cuisine of his heritage in two of his current plays (including one prop dish, a pork blood stew known as dinuguan, made by his mother). Even outside of work, Lo keeps his actors fed. Upon learning that cast member Jomar Tagatac had a particularly grueling schedule one day, Lo brought him homemade beef brisket and pasta.
“He didn’t have to do that,” said Tagatac, who currently stars in the Lo-directed “The Paper Dreams of Harry Chin” at San Francisco Playhouse. “With his busy schedule, I’m surprised he even had time to do it. But that’s Jeffrey.”
Lo is also the kind of Instagram chef who, after the killing of George Floyd, started appending resources about racial justice causes to glamorous photos of his dishes. It became an ongoing series, with scores of posts. “Chili lime shrimp and mushroom skewers,” begins one, from 2020. “Also — If you are a theatre teacher looking to find ways to create an anti-racist curriculum and approach to your classroom, take a look at this two-day online workshop being taught in 10 days!”
“It somehow felt right, where it was both trying to find a way to be socially conscious but also understanding that we’re all living our lives,” the 34-year-old told The Chronicle before a recent rehearsal of “Waiting for Next,” which runs through June 19 at City Lights Theater Company.
Lo radiates that combination of purpose and compassion, both in person and in his work. His plays “Waiting for Next,” about how two contemporary young men evolve but stay friends over the course of decades, and Custom Made Theatre Company’s “Zac & Siah, or Jesus in a Body Bag,” which follows clumsy would-be apostles, are both buddy comedies with an “I love you, man” vibe that’s earned, not caricatured.
In Lo’s vision, men deserve to feel platonic love fully, unironically and unabashedly as part of being human. His characters brim with trust in and affection for each other, and with dexterity and daring Lo whips
them into frenzied states where they discover what lies at the far reaches of their minds. The results are hilarious.
“There is something about his style of comedy that is very warmhearted, as opposed to takedown comedy or making-fun-of-people comedy,” said Leslie Martinson, who directs “Waiting for Next.”
She likes to recall that when she met Lo more than a decade ago through TheatreWorks Silicon Valley, Martinson had told Lo to send her his resume sometime, and, on cue, he instantly whipped one out of his backpack.
The pair went on to work together for years.
Lo became interested in theater at San Jose’s Evergreen Valley High School, where students got to write and direct their own short plays.
“We all ended up finding our own
personal stories within the story that I had written, which I didn’t realize was going to happen,” Lo recalled. “That was the light bulb for me.”
As he continued studying theater at UC Irvine, he fell in love with the art form’s immediacy, its bare-bones core.
“If a big thing happened to your community, if you wanted to, you could literally have a writer sit down for 24 hours and get a bunch of actors together, get a director, go in someone’s garage and do a night of theater,” he said.
With three of his scripts getting productions now — the third is TheatreFirst’s “Balikbayan Box,” about a carefully negotiated green card marriage between a Filipina immigrant and a Filipino American — Lo might seem an in-demand playwright, but usually he gets far more directing opportunities than he does writing ones. That’s one of the reasons Lo fears he’s a better director than playwright. The other reason: As a playwright, “I always go in super scared, and I have no idea how the audience is going to react. When I’ve directed a show, 99% of the time, I’m pretty sure I know.”
Still, his approach to directing — which he credits Martinson for modeling — is humble.
“Your job as the director is not to know how to do everything,” he said. “Your job as a director is to know the play well enough to identify when someone else has a better idea.”
When Lo writes, he’s already trying to solve the director’s problems in his head. “When I make a far-flung choice, where I have no
idea how a director or designers would solve it, it’s definitely a conscious decision.”
“Balikbayan Box” is about different forms of love and the way it can be freighted with duty. The title comes from the cases Filipinos use to send or carry gifts for loved ones overseas.
“The balikbayan box is the symbol in the Filipino community of gift giving and bringing gifts back to your community,” he explained. “But in a complicated way, it can also feel like an obligation and like people are expecting to take things from you.
“What if you’re not in a place in your life where you can bring gifts, but they’re all expecting it? I’ve watched Filipino folks sort of really stressed out about what they’re going to bring when they go visit.”
He got the idea for the decades-long friendship in “Waiting for Next,” which was written specifically for actors and longtime Lo friends Max Tachis and Wes Gabrillo, from worrying about feeling dissatisfied with life.
“But when I objectively wrote down on paper how my life was going, I was like, I really shouldn’t be dissatisfied with my life,” Lo said. “So I started wrapping my head around how so many times we feel like we’re waiting for our lives to start.”
Later this year, after his overflowing calendar begins to level off a bit, Lo plans to take a small break from theater to get married — but even that day won’t be a complete break. The wedding venue is California Shakespeare Theater.