The Marsh: Dirk Alphin – Axis

In Person at The Marsh SF Studio

Directed by Dirk Alphin
Performers: Erica Clark, Timothy Flanagan, Dirk Alphin, Dennis Hasty, Anneliese Stauff, Alan Brown
Click Here for Tickets
Online ticket sales close 2 hours before each performance,
and additional tickets may be available for purchase at the door.
July 7 – 28, 2024
Sundays at 5pm
Ticket Information

Tickets: $20 – $35 General Seating sliding scale | $50 & $100 Reserved Seating

Online ticket sales close 2 hours before each performance,
and additional tickets may be available for purchase at the door.

90 minutes | 1 Intermission | Ages 18+
Please do not bring infants to the show

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About the Show

Returning to The Marsh after its successful run in April, 2024, Axis is now extended for additional performances at 5 p.m on Sundays in July 2024 (7/7, 7/14, 7/21 & 7/28) at The Marsh Studio Theater, 1062 Valencia Street, San Francisco, CA. Tickets are available at: themarsh.org

The play Axis is a script bookended in short monologues that present Seth, an older ex-Navy man, who guides us back to the Bicentennial, Independence Day of July 4th & 5th, 1976. It is the last two days of the last family in town in a U.S.A. town that’s sinking underground. Seth takes us on his journey of self-discovery of his early twenties, coming to terms with his own closeted homosexuality. He reexamines both his own past and possible future, along with that of his single mother (Leora), and his aging grandfather (Gramps). In this extension, Alphin himself plays the role of Seth, the writer who journey’s into this past to explore the magic of personal transformation, spinning a tale to locate his axis.

In that past, the Foggs are all being evicted from their crumbling home. That home and entire town of Jessup is being swallowed up by corporate greed in the form of a nearby copper open air strip mine, which is expanding and causing all the nearby land to shift. With accompanying fireworks – this is the last year of that – and then followed by a powerful lightning storm – called in by Gramps’s belief in his mysticism – layers of the Fogg family’s lives are excavated to reveal their interwoven fates. The Foggs are both magnetically drawn to each other, and alternately polarized to push themselves apart. Ultimately they must come to some sort of strength found in their inevitable individuality. The play swings from naturalism to spiritualism as presented as magical realism confronting their fate.

In 1987, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Herb Caen (the voice and conscience of San Francisco) deemed Alphin’s production of the play AXIS a “success story.” Dennis Powers (A.C.T.’s Associate Artistic Director, dramaturg, book editor, theater critic, arts writer, and playwright predicted Alphin’s play AXIS to have “undeniable longevity and sustainable viability into future productions. . . .AXIS will be recognized as a first milestone in your (Alphin’s) canon of plays.”

Now 37 years after its original San Francisco production, The Marsh presents this playwriting milestone as a follow up to last year’s successful production of another play RECIPROCATING PUMPS, written and directed by Alphin. Stage & Cinema reviewed that production last July-August, 2023, and summarized it: “A riveting, emotional drama. There’s not a weak link in the whole cast.”