Labor of Love

The site-specific theater company Scrap and Salvage has been rooting around the city’s offbeat areas for a while now — notably the Cadillac dealership on Van Ness and a North Beach construction site. The members let a site speak to them before crafting a performance, and the location of their new show, Lab Or, couldn’t have more voices. The Redstone Building, aka the Labor Temple, housed the offices of dozens of unions, from butchers to cigarmakers to tailors, in the heady days of the early 20th century. You can imagine the stuff that went down — it was here that longshoreman and organizer Harry Bridges kicked off the landmark strike for better working conditions on the waterfront (which, by all accounts, were horrendous). Today the building houses Theatre Rhinoceros and arts group the Lab, as well as a host of neighborhood organizations. Scrap and Salvage, as an artist-in-residence at the Lab, invited performance and visual artists to explore the Temple and create work responding to the site. Scrap and Salvage ringleaders (Rafal Klopotowski, James Mulligan, and Karen Marek) then crafted the results into a cohesive body of work. Who knows what we’ll get, but in a place thick with ghosts, we hope for transcendence.
July 23-Aug. 2, 8 p.m., 2008