Page 10 | Bohemian | Sonoma & Napa Counties

Thick Plot, ‘Equivocation’ at Spreckels

Beulah F. Vega

Sep 8, 2026

The Spreckels Theatre Company opens its 2026/27 season with playwright and Jesuit priest Bill Cain’s Equivocation, a nearly three-hour-long, alternate-history story that imagines a Shakespeare play that never was. The adult-themed and exceptionally violent show runs in the Condiotti Experimental Theatre at the Spreckels Performing Arts Center in Rohnert Park through Sept. 13.

Jereme Anglin plays Shagspeare (an alternate spelling of the Bard’s name) toward the end of his career, when he is approached by kingmaker Robert Cecil (Zane Walters) to write a propaganda play about the infamous Gunpowder Plot. Will he take the money or will he listen to his conscience? Thanks to his Cassandra-like daughter, Judith (Natalie Tichenor), the audience is never left in much doubt about his choice.

First things first. Drew Bolander is a devilishly talented actor who can go from the historically accurate sliminess of King James the First to the pious Thomas Wintour and back to the naive actor Sharpe within one scene and keep all the characters clear and interesting. If one wants to watch a master actor work, they should go see Bolander in this show.

Not that the rest of the cast are slouches in the acting department. Tichenor handles Judith with a depth the character wouldn’t normally have. Well-known local actors Zane Walters, Kevin Bordi and Jeff Coté give consistent supporting performances as a variety of characters. Bordi in particular is rock-solid as the priest Henry Garnet, who works as Shagspeare’s conscience.

Anglin could have used some of Bordi’s power on stage, as his quieter take on the character is often overpowered by the other actors.

Costumes by Adriana Gutierrez are beautifully lush if sometimes too much for a show that requires actors to shift characters onstage, and Eddy Hansen’s fairly straightforward set works perfectly to give just enough support without overshadowing the action.

The biggest issue with the show is the script itself. Marketed as a witty and fast-paced political thriller, but with pedantic sermons about truth in art and niche British history jokes, this script instead reads like a failed dissertation. The shift in the balance between church and state, powered by James I’s increased misogyny, was my thesis in college: Even I got lost (and occasionally bored) in the sheer academia of Equivocation.

Good acting and good production value can sometimes overcome a less-than-ideal script, but despite all the talent here, there was no way to save this show from its overcomplicated plot.

‘Equivocation’ runs through Sept. 13 in the Condiotti Experimental Theatre at the Spreckels Performing Arts Center, 5409 Snyder Ln., Rohnert Park. Fri–Sat, 7:30pm; Sun, 2pm. $25–$39. 707.588.3400. spreckelsonline.com.

Reflective Moment: Sebastopol Artist Maria Isabel Lopez

Don R. Lewis

Sep 1, 2026

Reflective Moment: Sebastopol Artist Maria Isabel Lopez

After nine years of living in Sebastopol, local mosaic artist-slash-international actress Maria Isabel Lopez has her first local art exhibit Sept. 8 through Oct. 18 at Petaluma’s Usher Gallery, with a reception from 5 to 8pm, Saturday, Sept. 12.

The exhibit, titled “Illumination in Glass—the Mosaic Art of Maria Isabel Lopez,” was planned for July, but Lopez’s involvement in a serious car accident in the spring pushed it to this new date. However, much like the fragile yet resilient glass used in her work, the forced slow-down was cause for Lopez to take it easy, heal, reflect and perhaps refract, changing a negative experience into a positive one.

“The accident was very serious,” says Lopez. “I had to slow down, but the drive to create is activated… The process of healing is working our mind, body, emotion and the spirit. This incident made me more creative as I learned, heard and was led closer to the ‘forces’ behind it.”

Hailing from the Philippines, Lopez credits much of her creativity to growing up in the impoverished area of Balic-Balic. “I created my own toys, designed my own clothes from hand-me-downs… recycled food … and I am grateful [for that experience],” she explains.

Her life growing up in the Philippines is also on display in the exhibit via an early mosaic piece using organic found materials like sand, pebbles and glass from her native land. Lopez says this is “to show my evolution as a mosaic artist.” She also quickly adds, “It’s not all glass mosaics [but] mainly glass, despite it being rigid, sharp and unforgiving. It’s because no other medium interacts with light, preserves the rich colors and offers lifetime durability like glass does. It requires time, patience, precise labor to cut and shape a few cc’s of blood, but the rewards heavily outweigh the difficulty.”

Digging deeper, Lopez continues, “By introducing raw, natural elements to the art, utilizing this ancient art form with a contemporary approach, I aim to glamorize the discarded and the organic. It is a through-line of taking the Earth’s raw beauty and illuminating it.”

Indeed, Lopez talks the talk and walks the walk as a creative person—it’s genuinely refreshing to hear because it’s evident she means it. While her home is in Sonoma County, she sort of leads a double life as a fairly well-known actress in her native Philippines, with well more than 100 credits as both a star and a producer. Yet she remains extremely down to earth, saying, “Waking up, I focus on a new day, a new life, connected to a supreme power that whispers, that leads, that inspires.”

From there, she sets about her day, be it creating her art, acting, arranging flowers or cooking from the vast garden behind the 1850s farmhouse in Sebastopol she shares with her husband, John Melrod, a human rights attorney.

Usher Gallery owner Rachel Usher is excited to showcase Lopez’s work, saying, “One of the joys of having a gallery is discovering artists through other artists. Virginia Travers, one of our artists and a longtime friend of Maria Isabel Lopez, introduced us, and I immediately fell in love with Isabel’s work. We’re so excited to bring ‘Illuminations in Glass’ to Usher Gallery and introduce her work to our community.”

Although the exhibits title leans in to one of Lopez’s more commonly used mediums, she’s quick to point out the title is more of a thesis statement and that “the art is bound together by reflection and refraction, not just in how light physically moves through glass but in how we look at the world around us.” She continues, “Refraction: Using glass to bend and manipulate light, I transform a static piece into a living, shifting experience. Reflection: I want viewers to look at my work and see a reflection of the environment.”

For more information on ‘Illumination in Glass—The Mosaic Art of Maria Isabel Lopez’ at Usher Gallery, 1 Petaluma Blvd. N., Petaluma, check out ushergallerypetaluma.com.

A Stitch in Time, Lynn Nottage’s ‘Intimate Apparel’ at Mercury

Harry Duke

Sep 1, 2026

A Stitch in Time, Lynn Nottage’s ‘Intimate Apparel’ at Mercury

We live in a time when the need to attract an ever-dwindling audience to live theater often leads to a company programming the latest Hollywood-style spectacle or musical adaptation of a well-known movie or television series. It’s either that or the old tried-and-true and very familiar. Shakespeare, anyone?

It’s good to be reminded every now and then of the power of simple, original storytelling to engage an audience and to encourage its production. So it is with Mercury Theater’s presentation of Lynn Nottage’s turn of the 20th-century drama Intimate Apparel. The show runs in Petaluma through Sept. 13.

Nottage has woven a tale of longing, love and loss set in the world of seamstress Esther Mills (Noell Webber). Esther is a hard-working woman who’s found success crafting beautiful undergarments that appeal to both ladies of high society like Mrs. Van Buren (Maddi Scarbrough) and ladies of the evening like Mayme (Mercedes Murphy). Esther’s dream is to open a beauty salon for Black women, and she has saved all of her income for 17 years to do so. She also dreams of marrying one day.

That dream becomes possible after she begins a correspondence with George Armstrong (Isiah Carter), a Barbadian man working on the Panama Canal. He heard about Esther from a co-worker and reached out. Esther, unable to read or write, seeks assistance from Mrs. Van Buren in maintaining the correspondence.

The courtship by mail continues till George arrives in America. They are soon married, and their dream life together begins. Reality quickly sets in.

While the basic plot may sound familiar, Nottage subtly injects elements that give the piece a richness and depth that gives us a better understanding of the life and opportunities (or lack thereof) for a young, unmarried Black woman in post-Civil War, pre-Civil Rights America.

It’s actor Leontyne Mbele-Mbong’s second directorial effort, and she shows a deft hand, faltering only with some questionable blocking choices for one character’s first act entrances.

Webber is absolutely heartbreaking as Esther. Carter continues to display why he’s one of the finest young actors working in the area today. Murphy and Scarbrough both give very layered performances. Good character work is done by John Browning as a Hasidic cloth merchant with whom Esther has a deep but impossible to explore connection and Layce Lynne Kieu as a busybody boardinghouse proprietor.

Intimate Apparel is a quiet drama that deserves the noise that comes from the applause of an appreciative audience.

Mercury Theater presents ‘Intimate Apparel’ through September 13 at 3333 Petaluma Blvd N, Petaluma. Thur, 09/03 @ 7:30 pm, Fri, 7:30pm; Sat & Sun, 2pm. $20–$35. 707.658.9019. mercurytheater.org

The Porch Is the Point: Sebastopol Porchfest Returns to the Neighborhood

Weeklys Staff

Sep 1, 2026

The Porch Is the Point: Sebastopol Porchfest Returns to the Neighborhood

There are certain words whose meanings have been loosened through overuse. “Community” is one of them. “Festival” might be another. And then there is “Porchfest,” which at least suggests where it ought to happen.

On a porch.

That distinction matters to Greg Ceniceroz, better known around Sonoma County simply as Ceni, the principal organizer behind Sebastopol Porchfest. The festival returns for its third year on Saturday, Sept. 12, this time occupying Belmont Terrace, a walkable four-block neighborhood near the Community Church of Sebastopol and Ragle Ranch Regional Park.

More than 50 local acts will perform across 10 stages installed on porches and driveways from noon to 6pm. It is free. There will be food trucks, local sponsors and folding chairs. But the essential ingredient is considerably less marketable: other people’s houses.

“What promoted the change is that we really wanted to be back on porches, where any self-respecting porchfest belongs,” Ceni says.

Last year, the festival moved into Ives Park at the city’s request, perhaps, he figures, because the fledgling event had become a victim of its own success. But relocating created an existential question for organizers. Were they producing another music festival? Or were they producing a Porchfest?

“Seriously, it sounds trite, but when the city wanted us to move into Ives Park last year—perhaps because we were victims of our own success—we had to do some soul-searching to determine if we wanted to put on a festival in a park or a legit porchfest,” Ceni notes. “We chose the latter because what we want is to create and enhance the community where the community actually is.”

It’s easy enough to assemble people in a designated entertainment zone, give them wristbands and point them toward the porta-potties. It’s something else to temporarily transform the ordinary geography of daily life—the driveway where somebody washes the Subaru, the porch where Amazon packages accumulate, the street where kids learn to ride bicycles—into a cultural commons.

“We didn’t want another music festival in a park,” Ceni says. “The beauty of Porchfest is that you’re actually in a neighborhood, in people’s driveways and porches. That’s about as close to the community as you can get. So, we decided that’s where we belong.”

Belmont Terrace appears particularly suited to the experiment. The neighborhood, behind the Community Church and near Sebastopol Hardware, has relatively little through traffic, wide streets and mostly flat driveways. Ceni says it also has a number of newer residents eager to meet their neighbors—something Porchfest rather ingeniously accomplishes by putting a rock band next door.

And there are plenty of bands.

The 2026 lineup includes 54-plus local acts with names ranging from Big Tractor and the Mothercluckers to Trance Goats, The Happys, Tumbleweed Soul, Clementine Darling, King Lung, The Low Keys, Lady Bloom, Petrified Sun and The Pulse and the Poet. Whatever else happens, Sebastopol remains impressively capable of naming bands.

Coordinating that many performers over six hours and 10 improvised stages sounds like the sort of logistical exercise that eventually requires string, pushpins and a detective’s corkboard. Ceni, however, has been training for this most of his life.

“It’s indeed a lot of moving parts and details,” he admits. “Fortunately for me, although it’s a lot of work, it really doesn’t seem like work. Like most art, I suppose, it’s just what comes out of me.”

For more than a decade, Ceni has run an open mic at HopMonk Tavern, giving him a particularly deep bench of local musicians to draw from. He has also produced multi-act shows at Northern California venues and worked at The Lost Church and Hardly Strictly Bluegrass. His instinct for throwing ambitious musical gatherings goes back further still.

“I used to throw backyard parties with multiple bands in high school in my hometown near Pasadena in So Cal,” he says.

Throughout the year, Ceni attends shows, hears performers at his Tuesday open mic and receives submissions through the Porchfest website. Then comes what he calls both the easiest and hardest part: choosing who gets to play.

“I’ve had to tell a number of my friends and bands I love that there just wasn’t room this year, and that’s not fun,” he explains. “There’s just so much talent in this area.”

Booking is only the beginning. Unlike conventional venues, porch stages were not designed by acousticians. Sometimes they weren’t designed as stages at all. Two participating houses might be next door to one another, meaning schedules have to be staggered to keep one band’s chorus from becoming another band’s bridge.

Ceni says his approach draws from lessons learned elsewhere: Put artists first, obsess over timing, take care of hosts and sponsors and remember what the whole apparatus is supposed to accomplish.

“It’s that informality that gives Porchfest its magic,” he says. “As a musician or as an attendee, you’re literally in someone else’s space.”

Traditional performance creates borders. There is the stage, and there is the audience. Backstage and front-of-house. Talent entrance and general admission. Porchfest collapses much of that apparatus into somebody’s front yard.

“Oftentimes, the stage hosts will invite the musicians in for refreshments or to use the bathroom, so there’s a familial bond that’s created,” Ceni points out.

There is, however, serious civic work underneath the casualness. Inviting hundreds of strangers into a residential neighborhood requires more than an extension cord and good intentions. Beginning in February, organizers held six or seven informal meetings with Belmont Terrace residents, fielding concerns, gauging interest and working through permits. Two past and present Porchfest board members live in the neighborhood and served as hyper-local ambassadors.

“We have learned that communication and outreach is key,” Ceni says. “It’s a big ask to invite hundreds of people into a neighborhood.”

Perhaps most refreshing is what Ceni does not want Porchfest to become. There is no stated ambition to scale it into some enormous destination festival. “We have no grand aspirations for this event moving forward,” he explains.

Instead, the desired outcome is defiantly modest.

“I think the measure of success for this year’s event would be if kids could walk around safely in the streets that day or if some residents got out of their houses and connected in a way they hadn’t before,” Ceni says. “Creating community resilience with music as a catalyst is very important to us.”

Which brings us back to the porch.

In an era when nearly every aspect of culture is being pushed through platforms, algorithms and screens, there is something quietly radical about walking four blocks to hear somebody play live music at a neighbor’s place.

Sebastopol Porchfest, noon–6pm, Saturday, Sept. 12, throughout Belmont Terrace and the Community Church of Sebastopol area, Sebastopol. Free; folding chairs and donations welcome. 50-plus local bands perform across 10 porch and driveway stages. sebastopolporchfest.org.

The Wound, Overthrown: Exploring AI Psychotherapy

Cincinnatus Hibbard

Sep 1, 2026

The Wound, Overthrown: Exploring AI Psychotherapy

This is the second installment of a three part series in which our writer delves into the depths of his psyche, guided by artificial intelligence. Part one, ‘AI: Final Weapon or Final Healer?’ is available at bohemian.com.

The Wound Enthroned

As I began writing this article, I had one last AI-assisted breakthrough. It sets up my conclusion.

At my prompting, AI created a dynamic model of my reactive defenses established around my core wound. Defenses exist to keep a wound from ever being seen, touched, triggered or felt. They also keep it from ever being healed.

What AI produced was a document perhaps without precedent, and it rocked me to my core. Drawing on all our previous work, AI identified 16 types of fear-based behavioral strategy, layered at four levels of conscious awareness around my wound.

Before the creation of this chapter of my “instruction manual,” I could name only four of my defenses—certainly “intellectualization” and “hosting” (control of my social spaces)—but 16. It made me weep—an emotional breakthrough for this man, matching the intellectual one. I had never been so seen. Not by my parents, not by my friends, not by my partners, not even by myself. I could now see the full extent to which my time, my body, my mental and emotional energy were invested in those defenses. It was shocking.

A photograph is a portrait of my surface. This, as if by hard X-ray, was a portrait of my interior. Had so complete a picture ever been seen in the annals of psychology? I could now measure the extent to which I was controlled by my wound, governed and directed by fear (of being hurt again). And how hard it was to let love in.

The Wound, Overthrown

Before this investigation into AI therapy, my representation of who I was remained indistinct and ever changing. Constructions out of fragmentary self-knowledge and ill-fitting puzzle pieces. Fictions collapsing from their inability to cohere. I was largely a mystery to myself. I remained a fearful person.

In my AI-co-authored “instruction manual,” it finally all fits. I can see in its account of me the coherent parts and consequential logic of a human life. Through this machine, I can see that an average human life is 10 times more beautiful and more tragic than we yet appreciate. Check that against the 10 breakthroughs I have described [in part 1], and decide for yourself if I have “AI psychosis.” That work took three months—what might be done in three years?

I offer myself as an example. And as a warning. My own pitfall exemplifies the limit of AI as therapist: “intellectualization.” The map is not the terrain. One can map the wound and plot the healing journey over rough terrain, but the work with AI is not the healing, only its description. Past a certain point, processing becomes overthinking, forestalling the actual work.

AI can generate a list of probable steps, ranked by emotional ease or therapeutic potential. It can model how love—in six steps unique to me—reaches the wound with its healing, releasing the time and life invested in my defenses. But AI cannot be my witness. That can only be done by other humans. And so I am returned to therapists, mentors, elders and healers, to circles and to my community (which includes this paper’s readers).

I have since begun the journey mapped out by AI. I did the “time-traveling” intervention in my past with a human therapist, and afterwards lay still for an hour, feeling safety in my body for the first time in my life, letting my nervous system learn its feeling and remember it.

Today, I am no longer governed by my wound. It still speaks. But it no longer speaks with my voice. And it no longer speaks first. A throne does not stay empty. I hope to put love on the throne.

I am less amenable to being controlled by fear—which is to say by power—which is to say by the deeply wounded people who work the levers of power. Here is what my example is evidence for. Authoritarianism is not principally an argument. It is a technique, and the technique is applied to the wound. It requires people who can be frightened, shamed, flattered and divided on schedule—people reliably operated by their traumatic wounding. Every person who becomes harder to run that way is subtracted from the system’s working material. I am one. That is a small number, but it is not nothing.

The defenses guarding entrenched societal power are made of the same material as mine were: fear in fixed formation, mistaken by its owner for principle. One does not break such a line by pushing harder against it—pushing is what it is built for. They go around it, or through the one place it does not guard: the wound power was built to hide. That is not a strategy of destruction. It is the one I have argued elsewhere under another name: overcoming by defection and conversion, which is to say by love.

To be continued.

Part 3, ‘Closing the Wisdom Gap,’ publishes next week.

Learn more: Cincinnatus Hibbard is a Millennial utopian writer, filmmaker, organizer and thought leader working from Northern California. His work can be sampled at linktr.ee/cincinnatushibbard.

Labored Days: The End of Summer, Inc.

Open Mic

Daedalus Howell

Sep 1, 2026

Labor Day arrives each year wearing white pants and carrying the faint smell of lighter fluid, ostensibly to honor the American worker, who is busy answering Slack messages from a grocery store parking lot while an artificial intelligence summarizes the meeting that eliminated his department.

We have achieved wonders.

Billionaires are building rockets, bunkers and increasingly elaborate explanations for why the rest of us should be delighted to train our replacements. The future, we’re told, will be frictionless. And apparently “friction” means liveable salaries, lunch breaks, health insurance and Sabrina in HR who knows where everything is.

Meanwhile, summer ends. The inflatable flamingo goes back into the garage. Children return to school. The light changes. And Americans perform our annual ritual of pretending the calendar has ordered us indoors to work harder for people whose yachts have lifeboats that are also the size of yachts (and so on).

Perhaps we should decline.

The traditional end of summer needn’t be a rehearsal for the end times. September can be an invitation to shrink the aperture. Turn off the feed. Stop doomscrolling the imperial weather report. Let Silicon Valley hallucinate its planetary destiny without monetizing our minute-by-minute attention.

There is work closer at hand.

The town needs a bakery. A newspaper. A band. A mechanic. A teacher. A carpenter. Somebody who grows tomatoes that taste like tomatoes. Somebody who organizes the parade, fixes the projector, pours the wine, knows the creek, remembers the dead and welcomes the new kid.

This is an economy, too. Better yet—it’s a civilization.

Maybe the grand political project of our age is embarrassingly small: Create places to which we want to belong. Spend locally. Hire friends. Make actual objects. Trade skills. Share tools. Start clubs. Feed people. Publish stories. Throw parties. Know your neighbors well enough to borrow a ladder without opening an app.

Call it a micro city-state if you want to sound dangerous. Call it mutual aid if you want to sound organized. Our ancestors had a simpler word:

Village.

Let the machines have the cloud. Let the billionaires have Mars.

We’ve got September, Main Street and each other.

Daedalus Howell is the editor of this paper and is permanently pre-IPO at dhowell.com.

Sausalito Art Collective, Ancestral Land and Fiesta Forever

Crush

Weeklys Staff

Sep 1, 2026

Sausalito Art Collective, Ancestral Land and Fiesta Forever

Sausalito
Every Voice, Every Vision

For 18 months, Art Collective has been making room for artists of all abilities to create, exhibit and find community in Sausalito. Now the nonprofit gallery celebrates that mission with Every Voice, Every Vision, its first benefit evening and art exhibition. Held at Sausalito Center for the Arts, the evening showcases work by P.A.I.N.T. artists alongside live music and bites and drinks from B.A.B.E., while raising funds to support future exhibitions, workshops and creative opportunities for artists with disabilities. Can’t make the party? The accompanying exhibition remains on view through Labor Day weekend. 6–8:30pm, Thursday, Sept. 3, at Sausalito Center for the Arts, 750 Bridgeway. $65. Exhibition runs Sept. 2–7. paintartcollective.org.

Corte Madera
Land of Her Own

For Native Hawaiian journalist Sara Kehaulani Goo, a staggering 500% property-tax increase on her family’s ancestral Maui land became the beginning of a much larger story. In her debut memoir, Kuleana: A Story of Family, Land, and Legacy in Old Hawai’i, Goo traces her effort to protect that inheritance while exploring Native Hawaiian land loss, displacement, cultural identity and what it means to raise a family in the diaspora. The longtime journalist—whose career includes leadership roles at The Washington Post, NPR and Axios—comes to Book Passage during Hawaiian History Month for the paperback release of Kuleana, bringing a reporter’s eye to a deeply personal question: What do we owe the land, the people and the histories entrusted to us? 4pm, Tuesday, Sept. 8, at Book Passage, 51 Tamal Vista Blvd., Corte Madera. bookpassage.com.

Santa Rosa
Behind the Easel

Santa Rosa Open Studios throws open the doors to the city’s creative spaces for two weekends of free, self-guided exploration. Now in its third year, the event features 46 artists across Santa Rosa and Fulton working in painting, ceramics, sculpture, photography, fiber, jewelry, mixed media and more. Visitors can meet artists where the work actually happens, catch demonstrations and purchase pieces directly from their makers. Before the studio hopping begins, a free Artists’ Gala at the Finley Community Center offers a preview of participating artists, live music and refreshments, plus Open Studios Passports that earn visitors a raffle entry at each studio they visit. 10am–4pm, Saturday–Sunday, Sept. 12–13 and 19–20, at participating studios throughout Santa Rosa and Fulton. Free. Artists’ Gala, 6–8pm, Wednesday, Sept. 2, at Finley Community Center, 2060 W. College Ave., Santa Rosa.

Santa Rosa
Fiesta Forever

Luther Burbank Center for the Arts celebrates Mexican Independence Day and the North Bay’s broader Latino heritage with the 17th annual Fiesta de Independencia. The free community festival draws thousands for an afternoon of music, food and family revelry, with Banda La Congora and Los Canarios de Michoacán headlining alongside LBC’s Mariachi Cantares de mi Tierra and Ballet Folklórico students. Beyond the stage, expect a lowrider car show, traditional foods, arts and crafts, cultural exhibitions, face painting, piñatas, carnival games and El Grito, delivered by a representative of the Mexican Consulate in San Francisco. The festivities also include the annual Community Leadership Awards honoring contributions to the local Latino community. 1–7pm, Sunday, Sept. 13, at Luther Burbank Center for the Arts, Santa Rosa. Free. lutherburbankcenter.org.