What does it take to humanize the unthinkable? This show dares to explore LGBTQ hate crime perpetrators

San Francisco Chronicle​

11-05-2025

It's possible to love, fear and hate someone at the same time. The instinct to protect and cradle wrestles with the impulse to harm until one wins.
And in 'Member,' one person can be a shifty yet resigned father and a panicked little boy losing his innocence all at once.
The show, one of many projects taking over a score of Mission District venues as part of the two-week San Francisco International Arts Festival, comes from Australia's Fairly Lucid Productions and takes inspiration from a wave of gay hate crimes in Sydney in the 1980s and '90s.
If the place names, accents, slang ('bikkie') and slurs ('chutney ferret') are less familiar, much else in the show, written and performed by Ben Noble, is distressingly universal. Homophobia is taught, not innate. Once it's lodged in the brain, it sticks. Othering outsiders cements in-group belonging. Police, willing themselves to blindness, tacitly condone violence. Perpetrators see an impossible choice: bully and hurt, or get bullied and hurt.
None of these themes breaks new ground in a country where 'The Laramie Project' is 25 years old. Rather, what distinguishes 'Member,' which opened Thursday, May 8, for a four-day run at the Marsh, is the keenness of Noble's storytelling.
Heart monitor beeps and a hospital curtain set the scene before the show starts. Then, when our narrator Corey starts compulsively chattering, about his son as a tot, about toxic break room dynamics at work, about the nice nurse whose posterior he checks out as she exits, it becomes clear why he's there. He's at the bedside of his son, Billy, who's been the victim of a hate crime, and he's talking to help wake Billy up.
As the rambling swerves from one finely wrought scene to the next, another key fact emerges: Corey and Billy didn't have a good relationship, and Corey feels at least some of the homophobia of Billy's victimizers.
The bedside framing works wonders for the solo show, a medium where, too often, there's no obvious driving reason why a character is soliloquizing to the audience. But 'Member' also benefits from crisp, illustrative details. Beating up a victim as part of a gang feels both 'structured and weightless.' An enemy at work has eyes 'like dirty coins.' When Corey first meets his future wife, Cheryl, she enumerates her dream man's qualities: 'A hair-covered chest in the manner of a '70s porn star but a hair-free back in the manner of a sleek eel.'
And 'Member,' which is directed by David Wood, is more properly described as an almost-solo show. Onstage with Noble is Stephen Choi on a keyboard, picking out celestial, music-box melodies when Corey meets Cheryl and amplifying sound effects to a fever pitch during Corey's moments of truth. Synths pulsing as loudly as UFOs over Corey's head or wasps in his ear make the whole theater feel like the inside of Corey's mind. It's like being trapped somewhere where rational thought has been quashed and only adrenaline remains.
As a performer, Noble summons the way little kids gooseneck and point, the way their gazes dart like rodents' or cling to anyone who seems to know just a little more about how the world works and doesn't shove them away. In a softening of the face, he communicates another character's mocking self-regard. When he recounts the euphoria of violence, the feeling of finally being part of something, he almost weeps in a combination of relief and rue. When Corey tells Cheryl that all he wants in a partner is to 'not be scared,' Noble utters the phrase so faintly and nakedly it's as if Corey's still a little boy in awe of the big kids.
'Member' humanizes perpetrators without excusing them. It says they're made, not born. It doesn't offer false bromides, instead tallying all we lose when we hate. It trusts you can do the math on your own.