West Marin director David Ford keeps the collaborations flowing

Habitués of the Marsh have come to be familiar with David Ford, and for good reason. The San Francisco theater (with a satellite location in Berkeley) is devoted primarily but not exclusively to solo shows, a good many of which have been developed with and/or directed by Ford. The longtime Lagunitas resident has earned a reputation as a solo show guru with a strong dramaturgical ear for new works in progress.

The upcoming “Marsh Festival of New Musical Voices 2021” at the Marsh Berkeley showcases three full-length musical theater works commissioned by the Marsh and a dance-musical film, most of which were developed with Ford.

Cowritten by Wayne Harris and Maggie Wilson with songs by Harris and performed by Harris and Adriane Deane with a three-piece blues band, “Jockamo” conjures a seasoned Black blues musician and a young White woman producer thrust together to create a song for a Hurricane Katrina benefit record. “The Hummingbird” tells writer-composer-performer Kathryn Keats’ story of a budding singing career waylaid by having to flee an abusive ex and go into hiding. Singer-actor Candace Johnson’s “Music & Muses of Margaret Bonds & Langston Hughes” pays tribute to pianist and composer Bonds and poet Hughes and their long collaboration. A collaboration between Marsh founder Stephanie Weisman and San Francisco Ballet principal dancer Wei Wang, the film “Aphrodisia” is inspired by Weisman’s time living with a painter in a house on stilts above, yes, a marsh.

The pieces debuting at the festival have been in development since March 2020, Ford says.

“Pretty much the day we were supposed to have our first meeting was lockdown day,” he says. “So, suddenly, along with developing this work, this project became a little bit of a refuge for the artists involved. A chance to be able to keep connected with other artists started to have a meaning beyond just developing your work.”

Ford grew up back East, mostly in Connecticut. He says one thing that inspired him to go into theater was seeing Ronald Ribman’s play “The Journey of the Fifth Horse” on television in 1966, starring Dustin Hoffman.

“I also helped build a set for a friend in high school and just liked it,” Ford says. “For a long time I thought I’d be a set designer. I kept sitting there looking at different jobs in the theater and then getting annoyed with the people above me and deciding that I had to do their jobs.”

It took him some time to figure out exactly what in theater he wanted to do.

“I was an undergraduate at Yale and worked backstage at the Yale Repertory Theatre and got to know these auteur directors who were all sort of mad genius visionaries,” Ford says. “And that meant nothing to me. I didn’t think I wanted to be a director, because I looked around and I saw people doing that kind of directing, and I thought that’s not me. Then I went to the south of France to pursue painting, and when I was there, I met this Israeli guy who had this really collaborative way of working with people. And I thought, oh, that’s what I want to be when I grow up.”

After a while doing theater tech on the East Coast, Ford moved to San Francisco in the 1980s.

“The East Coast has certain kind of artistic class system,” Ford says. “I think it would have been much harder for me to make the transition from being a tech person to being a theater artist back East. But I could come to San Francisco and just say, hi, I’m a director. I was doing a lot of collaborative work with performance artists. And then Newt Gingrich became head of Congress and they cut all the funding, and suddenly what we could afford to do was me and one other person in the room.”

He hooked up with the Marsh early on, directing both the Marsh’s first full-length workshop, Marga Gomez’s “Memory Tricks,” and its first full-length production, Josh Kornbluth’s “Haiku Tunnel.”

Ford and wife, Anne Darragh, moved to New York for five years to pursue Darragh’s acting career on the heels of her performance as Harper in Eureka Theatre’s 1991 world premiere of “Angels in America: Millennium Approaches,” and when they moved back, they settled in Lagunitas to raise their children.

“How do you talk about something that’s ineffable?” says Ford when asked what he enjoys most about his work. “But it’s without a doubt when you’re working with somebody and something seems to be created, and it’s neither me nor the other person but it’s happening in the space between us. That just feels like a bit of the divine is there in the room.”

Sam Hurwitt is a Bay Area arts journalist and playwright. Contact him at shurwitt@gmail.com or on Twitter at twitter.com/shurwitt.

IF YOU GO

What: “The Marsh Festival of New Musical Voices 2021”

Where: The Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston Way, Berkeley

When: Sept. 30 through Oct. 10; 7:30 p.m. Thursdays and Fridays; 2 p.m. and 5 p.m. weekends

Admission: $20 to $35; $50 to $100 reserved seating; $50 festival pass

Information: 415-282-3055, themarsh.org