Brenda Wong Aoki has stories to tell. If you ask her for one, she’ll likely rattle off five others along the way. She knows it, too, and proudly touts that she’s America’s first Asian American storyteller.
“This is according to the archives of the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesboro, Tenn., so it’s a bona fide fact,” says Aoki, the prolific writer, performer and educator who has lived in San Francisco since 1974.
It is no surprise, then, that she plays the Storyteller in “Soul of the City,” which premieres on Saturday, Sept. 30, at the Presidio Theatre. An autobiographical multimedia work that tours through her family’s kaleidoscopic history, the 90-minute show serves as a modern parable about our seemingly fractured moment in San Francisco.
When the unnamed Storyteller finds herself lost and disillusioned about the city amid rising prejudice during a pandemic, she is confronted by a demon known as Mother, played by the poet devorah majors, whose original poems are featured in the show. As she hovers in a state in between life and death, she finds that recounting the memories, histories and myths of her life serve as a saving grace in an increasingly disconnected and polarized world.
It’s what Aoki came to believe when she was conceiving the work at the height of the COVID pandemic. At a time of rising anti-Asian violence, several of her friends had been assaulted, and Aoki and her husband, jazz…
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