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San Francisco Chronicle​

ACT's ‘Co-Founders' asks who gets a seat at the globe's most elite table

If 'Co-Founders' were pitching itself to you at a start-up accelerator for musical theater, you'd add your name to series A. The world-premiere musical has what the industry might call a compelling value proposition. Arena-ready voices, winsome actors, rhyme-stuffed hip-hop lyrics and eye-catching design fuse to tell the kind of Bay Area story that doesn't get much air time, written by Bay Area artists, to Bay Area audiences. You might have seen the hit TV show 'Silicon Valley' or films like 'The Internship' or 'The Social Network,' but you probably haven't seen a musical in which an Oakland Uber driver and his ride-or-die both have their own apps as part of a traveling salesman's wagon of side hustles. Or a tech story with Black coders at its center, one that acknowledges how 'global governments have missed the mark on AI for people of color.' If 'Co-Founders' is still in beta as of its Wednesday, June 11, opening night at American Conservatory Theater's Strand Theater, it represents exactly the kind of art San Francisco's flagship theater ought to be seeding. Adesha Adefela, Ryan Nicole Austin and Beau Lewis' show is new, hyperlocal and concerned with some of our era's foremost questions: Who gets a seat at the globe's most elite table, and when you're bursting with talent, whose agenda do you serve? In act one, 'Co-Founders' excels. As Oakland coder Esata (played by Aneesa Folds through June 22 and Angel Adedokun thereafter) struggles to get into Y Combinator knockoff the Xcelerator, the writers model how to use the tools of musical theater. Whenever Esata's in a moral dilemma, she decides what to do through song — and the lyrics don't explain what happens. Instead, director Jamil Jude shows us, with video (by David Richardson and Frédéric O. Boulay) that doesn't render the act of coding in that deadly manner of a person sitting statically in a chair in front of a monitor. There's one opaque projection screen behind Esata, and another, see-through one in front of her, at the lip of the stage. On the front one, little buttons for her to click and pop-up notifications for her to fret over, while her code, say, whooshes by behind her. For us in the audience, the overall effect is like watching a movie on a big screen while texting with your friends on a small screen — in a mesmerizing fashion. It's refreshing to see a work of theater not disdain or fight with modern entertainment consumption habits but embrace them. Meanwhile, Folds' tsunami-strong voice summons all the feeling of wailing into a pillow, but with the tender musicianship usually only orchestra players get credit for. And when she teams up with Conway (Roe Hamtrampf), who is just as white and nerdy as Michael Cera, his bright tenor could melt stone. When she and her mother (Adefela) duet, their voices amplify each other like rocket-boosters, their timbres resembling ice blankets, then balm, then redwoods. 'Co-Founders' turns more predictable in its second act. Conflicts between money and values follow well-trod paths, with superfluous characters and songs. There's an underdeveloped dead dad subplot, plus rifts and reconciliations so inevitable they might as well have highway mileage signs. Then there's a villain that could have been either interesting or campy but falls short of both. Still, magnetic performances make up for a lot. Austin, as Esata's cuz Kamaiyah, is one of those actors who can steal a scene as a waiter in a party's background. She looks at her watch, picks her nails, sniffs and reacts to what's in a wine glass, and it's a thousand times more interesting than anything else onstage because she's telling us about who Kamaiyah is and what kind of world she's a part of. This party is starchy, but Kamaiyah's at least going to get her jollies by either scoring some wine or judging attendees for their taste. That's just the Oakland hustle, Kamaiyah might say. The musical that contains her isn't a unicorn yet, but it has Kamaiyah's same scrappy spirit — an underdog or a bucking bronco busting into the ring on sheer chutzpah.