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Lauren English
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The team of consultants in 'Ideation'
Sitting in a conference room at the San Francisco-based Kabam, where he’s a senior vice president, Aaron Loeb talks about the similarities between his jobs designing video games and writing plays.
“I love both my careers,” he says. “They’re more complementary than you think — creative, team-based pursuits where you bring people together to make something happen.”
Loeb’s latest play, “Ideation,” a corporate farce and psychological thriller, won the Glickman Award for best new Bay Area play when it was part of the San Francisco Playhouse’s Sandbox Series and every performance was sold out. Now it leads off the season at the Playhouse’s mainstage.
Both his work and his wife’s (she's a human rights lawyer) fed into “Ideation.”
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Lauren English
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Playwright Aaron Loeb
“I was working with a bunch of management consultants, and I was enchanted with their way of talking and thinking,” Loeb says. “There was no problem they couldn’t break down to components and try to solve. And at the same time my wife was involved in the prosecution of a former defense minister of Somalia and hearing her opening statement and understanding from the evidence the systematic way they planned genocide collided in this play.”
Loeb, whose work includes “First Person Shooter” and “Abraham Lincoln’s Big, Gay Dance Party,” says he likes to write about where many people spend a majority of their waking life – at work.
“I find myself observing work and trying to weave that into my writing." He adds, “I think it’s as fundamentally important as a dramatist to show that as being able to depict the family.”
Loeb, who lives in Berkeley, went to New York University where he studied playwriting and dramatic literature. He started designing paper and pencil games, and after graduating, he worked in book publishing for a while. In the mid '90s, a friend called and suggested he move out to the Bay Area and write websites for video games. He gave up writing plays for a time, but then his sister, the actress Gwen Loeb, suggested he write for PlayGround, which did festivals of 10-minute plays — resulting in Loeb's return to theater.
“It gives us a chance to be intimately connected with something we’re not ordinarily connected with,” he says of theater. “Bill English, the artistic director of the Playhouse calls it the ‘empathy gym.’ You can be sitting five feet away from somebody who transports you to some different aspect of humanity.”
The consultants he knows have told him “Ideation” is hilarious and troubling, according to Loeb. But he says the strongest responses – and the biggest laughs – come from human rights lawyers. “People who chase down and investigate genocide all day long have to be able to create a line. If you empathize about all the horrors, you wouldn’t be able to continue. And it’s important to us as a society to have these people be able to look at this and figure our what to do about it.”
“Ideation” starts September 23, and opening night is on September 27; it plays through November 8 at the San Francisco Playhouse (450 Post). Tickets are $20- $120. For more information call 677-9596 or visit the theater's
website.
