‘The Loner Stoop.” That, laughs singer-songwriter Jesca Hoop, now of Manchester, England, was her name for the space just outside the theater department at Santa Rosa High School.

It was in the early 1990s, when Hoop, who describes herself as a less-than-overachieving student, found an unexpected place of acceptance at SRHS.

“That spot outside of Mr. Craven’s theater, the Loner Stoop, that was where I spent a lot of my time during my senior year. It was kind of my safe space,” remembers Hoop, calling from New York City, where she’s been promoting her just-released sixth record. Titled Love Letter for Fire, it’s an album of love songs written and performed with folk singer Sam Beam.

Next week, Hoop will be returning to Sonoma County for an intimate concert at Main Stage West Theater, in Sebastopol. The rare, small-house performance is a benefit for Main Stage, where John Craven, who still teaches at SRHS, frequently directs and acts.

The concert, Hoop says, is one way of repaying the kindness and support she received 23 years ago, when few could have predicted she’d someday appear as a backup singer for Peter Gabriel or that she’d open for Mark Knopfler, the Punch Brothers, Andrew Bird and the Ditty Bops. It was long before Tom Waits compared her music to a four-sided coin, saying, “She is an old soul, like a black pearl, a good witch or a red moon. Her music is like going swimming in a lake at night.”

“I really do have to thank John [Craven]—and also Dan Earl, who was with the choral department at the high school—for giving a misfit like me a safe haven where I could believe I might someday excel in something,” Hoop says. “There wasn’t a thread of ambition in me back then. I was singing and acting nonstop, and I was skateboarding nonstop, but I had no focus, no goals, no orientation. John was part of the process that showed me I was wasting my gifts, and led me back to what I was supposed to be doing, which was, of course, writing and singing songs.”

Though now a resident of England, Hoop admits her Santa Rosa roots—and her days out on the Loner Stoop—remain a big part of who she is as an artist.

“I’m a true California girl, through and through,” she says, “and I’ll always be proud of that.”

Jesca Hoop appears for one night only, Sunday, April 24, at Main Stage West, 106 N. Main St., Sebastopol. Registration is at 6:30pm. Reception and silent auction, 7pm; concert, 8pm. Advance reservations strongly suggested. 707.823.0177.

On April 23, William Shakespeare will have been dead for exactly four full centuries.

“This is so exciting!” says Leslie McCauley. The director of Santa Rosa Junior College’s upcoming presentation of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night admits that her enthusiasm has less to do with 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death than with the fact that Twelfth Night will be staged the way its author intended—with a cast of men playing all the roles, including donning corsets and “bum rolls” to play the women.

“It’s sweet revenge,” laughs McCauley, adding that all of the production crew and tech artists on the show are women. “That is how Shakespeare wrote it. With men in the roles, it makes the play make more sense. It pains me to say that, because we do need more female roles for women. But Shakespeare wrote jokes into the play that don’t work as well when women play women.”

McCauley is integrating other Shakespearean elements into the production as well, from chandelier lighting to music played on authentic Elizabethan instruments (ever hear a sackbut?), to the inclusion of traditional “orange girls.”

“Orange girls were women who worked at the theaters selling nuts, oysters and oranges, which were a delicacy,” McCauley says. “Ours will be selling chocolate-covered orange slices. Sadly, we won’t be allowing our audience to relieve themselves in the theater the way they did in Shakespeare’s time.”