‘The Compton’s Cafeteria Riot’ is Serving Up Coffee, Pancakes, and Resistance

(The NoPro Review) | by Brian Resler | May, 2025 | No Proscenium: The Compton’s Cafeteria Riot is not simply a piece of immersive theatre. It’s a defiant, full-bodied act of historical restoration, and it is a living, breathing act of resistance. Staged in the heart of the Tenderloin, the show transports audiences to the San Francisco of 1966, to the fluorescent-lit, linoleum-floored Compton’s cafeteria, where transgender women, drag queens, and queer folk dared to fight back against police harassment in one of the first LGBTQ+ uprisings in US history, three years before the events of Stonewall.