Look, up on the stage! It’s a superhero drama! It’s a Black Lives Matter play! It’s a modern riff on Egyptian mythology! It’s “Supremacy,” the new play by Jason Mendez playing at San Francisco’s EXIT Theatre.
“I describe it as a mythic fiction play, very rooted and grounded in reality as well as mythology, and with a backbone of the comic book superhero genre that I have grown up with,” Mendez says.
“Supremacy” was originally written for the 2017 San Francisco Olympians Festival, an annual staged reading series at the EXIT of new plays by local playwrights about characters from mythology. Mendez’s topic in the festival was Horus.
“I don’t want to give too much away,” Mendez says. “But if anyone knows the story of Horus and Set, they’re these two opposing Egyptian deities and they’re also family. Horus essentially becomes the protector of the people, but initially he’s basically hidden by his mother to keep Set from knowing that he exists, because Set kills his father. The intro into this story is similar in the way that our protagonist, Connor, is an adopted child. And what you come to find out is he has been adopted for a particular reason.”
The mythological prompt gave Mendez the spark he needed to start working on a play that he really needed to write at that time.
“Right around the 2016 election, I was feeling the fears and the emotions of people in conjunction with a lot of the videos that we had been seeing over the last few years of unarmed African American males of all ages just being gunned down and killed by law enforcement,” Mendez says. “I was really to find a story that lets everyone just be able to sit down and talk about all of those circumstances and all of those emotions without necessarily being vilified for having them. I wanted a positive way to try and channel that.”
Originally from Southern California, Mendez originally came to San Francisco to go to S.F. State, where he got his MFA in playwriting. This is his first full-length production.
In this story of an adopted young black man who’s been trained all his life to keep his head down and stay out of trouble, an officer-involved shooting turns everything upside down and suddenly thrusts him in the middle of an increasingly heated national debate.
“I think that it will really challenge people’s perceptions about how we deal with and how we talk about these types of scenarios,” he says. “It was really important to me to really try and be fair to all of the characters involved and not arbitrarily paint anyone as a particular victim or villain. We really wanted to take the time to make sure we did that right and we were sensitive to the material.”
As steeped as it is in deadly serious issues of the day, “Supremacy” also gave Mendez a chance to pay homage to the superhero comics he always loved growing up.
“It is based in traditional comic book fashion, so there are tons of Easter eggs for a few comic book characters and one of my favorites,” Mendez says. “So if there are any nerds out there, they will enjoy that part of it. The subject matter is obviously very important and very poignant, but it still has a surprising amount of humor in it.”
Contact Sam Hurwitt at shurwitt@gmail.com, and follow him at Twitter.com/shurwitt.
By Jason Mendez, presented by EXIT Theatre
Through: May 18
Where: EXIT Theatre, 156 Eddy St., San Francisco
Tickets: $38-$50; www.theexit.org
