New Play Flex Transforms San Francisco Playhouse Into a Basketball Court

The hardwood is real: "Flex," set in 1998, puts five young women on a basketball court at 450 Post St. and asks them to dream of the WNBA while the league is still brand new. The action-packed production opened its West Coast premiere March 26 and features a good amount of game play, but it's really all about the aspirations and struggles that drive the girls to leave it all on the court.

Emma Gardner, Camille Collaço, Santeon Brown, Courtney Gabrielle Williams, and Paige Mayes play the Lady Train high school basketball team in a production that ditches traditional theatrical acts entirely. Instead of intermissions between acts, the drama at San Francisco Playhouse unfolds in quarters, the clock ticking like an actual game.

Following the recent formation of the WNBA, the players dream of going pro, but first they must face the pressures of being young, Black, and female in the rural South as setbacks on and off the court threaten to break the team apart. The play deals with teen pregnancy, queerness, and tensions around religious upbringing, with female friendship ultimately the force that holds everything together.

The production is directed by Bay Area theater titan and Lorraine Hansberry Theatre artistic director Margo Hall. Hall has graced Bay Area stages for 30 years as a performer and director, and her directing credits include Nollywood Dreams and Hieroglyph, a co-production for the Lorraine Hansberry Theatre and San Francisco Playhouse.

Playwright Candrice Jones is from Dermott, Arkansas, and the play draws from that geography directly. Flex was developed at VONA, Berkeley Repertory Theatre's Ground Floor, and the Bay Area Playwrights Festival, before receiving a co-world premiere at TheatreSquared and Theatrical Outfit. Since then, it has been produced at Lincoln Center Theater and Penumbra Theatre in St. Paul. The New York Times named it a Critic's Pick, calling it "a slam-dunk" and writing that "Jones excels equally in sly humor and in the swift-tongued rhythms of teenage and athletic talk."

Flex made its New York premiere at Lincoln Center Theater before arriving at the Tenderloin-adjacent Post Street theater, completing a journey that began in the Bay Area's own developmental spaces. That the play was incubated at Berkeley Rep's Ground Floor, performed in New York, and is now back on the West Coast carries particular weight for Bay Area audiences who watched Jones build her career in their own backyard.

Flex runs 2 hours and 35 minutes including intermission at 450 Post Street, with tickets starting at $25. The run continues through May 2, 2026.