The image of the weed-smoking couch potato is as indelible in Western culture as that of Tommy Chong explaining that his friend Dave isn’t home. But the “lazy stoner” trope apparently hasn’t been explained to playwright Reed Flores, who has spent a lot of time working on his latest script.
“Funny enough, it has been years: 2023 to 2025,” says Flores. “But in script-development-theater-land, I feel like this was an incredibly fast trajectory from proof-of-concept to full production. That said, I think in true stoner fashion, you just go with the flow, man. When it’s right, it’s right.”
The right time is now. San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Company premieres Flores’ “Cuckoo Edible Magic” this week at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco. Described as a “queer pinay action-adventure,” it’s about BFFs Ren (Dom Refuerzo) and Mai (Nicole Apostol Bruno) who try to shake off the effects of the titular edibles they ingested. In doing so, they travel through an anime-influenced, stylized version of San Francisco that’s more cartoonish than the real thing.
For Flores, who is openly queer and Filipino, the play adds to the genre comedy of “Dazed and Confused” and “Harold & Kumar” with a story featuring characters that closely reflect him. And the script’s inception sounds like a scene from the beloved subgenre. It evolved after its author partook in a popular stoner past time: falling down a TikTok rabbit hole.
“I was watching a TikTok video in front of a coffee shop [..] in which one content creator goes, ‘You wanna know why Asians don’t raisin? ‘Cause we steam our faces with our rice cookers! Youth! Youth!’ Another creator stitched that video, where they, in a martial arts stance, lift a rice cooker above their head, and with a guttural yell, exclaims ‘Yooouth! Yoooouth! Longevity!’” says Flores, who went on a laugh attack for five minutes.
After that ended, he says, “I thought about a story where a man goes on an epic battle to win the golden rice cooker. In my brainstorm, he would have to fight different bosses at each level, attaining a prize with every win. I wrote 10 pages that night. Those are the same 10 pages you’ll see onstage.”
Flores acknowledges Ren and Mai’s adventure owes to films like “Friday” and genre-benders like the Scott Pilgrim franchise, but also to anime such as “Sailor Moon” and “Dragon Ball Z.” Indeed, promotional artwork for the show illustrates how the inebriated protagonists envision themselves as heroes in a martial arts extravaganza.
Another noteworthy influence is Oscar darling “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” which juxtaposed off-the-wall antics with commentary about the Asian American Pacific Islander experience in the United States, particularly as it relates to family dynamics.
“This play has a lot to do with my relationship with my dad, and we watched a ton of kung-fu movies together when I was growing up,” Flores says. But he adds that it touches on the universality of the difficulties of family dynamics.
He explains, “For blood family, ‘Cuckoo’ explores the duties we’ve been socialized to expect of each other, as children, as parents, as siblings. For chosen family, we interrogate the purpose of these family members. Are we close because you make me feel safe? Are we close because you challenge me? Because we grow together? I think those questions, that exploration, transcends identity.”
With Asian influences, creators and characters in “Cuckoo,” it isn’t lost on its creator that anti-AAPI hate is at high levels today, with the current presidential administration exacerbating matters. And though theater and recreational drug use are often means of avoiding the real world, Flores insists his play is “definitely not escapism” from disturbing headlines.
“One of the major thematic questions we asked when working on this script was ‘What do you do when the person, who was supposed to save you, doesn’t?’ We examine that question on a microlevel in the play, but that question and the answer we find in [the play] apply beyond a microlevel,” he says.
Ultimately, Flores says the play serves as a tongue-in-cheek love letter to genre, AAPI ethnicity and the cartoonish region where he was raised.
“I love that I grew up in the Bay Area,” he says. “I didn’t know how much I loved it until I went away for a bit. There’s a pride and an experience that I can’t really explain, even with all the not-so-fun things that come with living in the Bay. As a kid, taking BART into the city felt like Dorothy arriving at Oz. In that vein, I think I look at the Bay like ‘The Wizard of Oz,’ [with] BART, 101 and 880 acting as my yellow brick road.”
San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Company’s “Cuckoo Edible Magic” runs Feb. 13 through March 8 at Magic Theatre, Building D, third floor, 2 Marina Blvd., San Francisco. Tickets are $20 to $55 (with pay-what-you-can previews Feb. 13-14) at sfbatco.org.
Charles Lewis III is a San Francisco-born journalist and performing artist. He has written for the San Francisco Chronicle, KQED, the San Francisco Examiner. Dodgy evidence of this can be found at The Thinking Man’s Idiot.wordpress.com.
The post Playwright shares inspiration for SFBATCO’s wacky, diverse ‘Cuckoo Edible Magic’ appeared first on Local News Matters.