By STEVEN WINN, San Francisco Chronicle

SAN FRANCISCO -- Thirty years to the month after King Tut first took San Francisco by storm, antiquity's most famous monarch will attempt to reprise the feat.

At age 30, Antoine has been gone from his hometown in Provence for more than a decade. When his father has a heart attack, at the beginning of the affecting French drama "The Grocer's Son," the unhappy, unemployed prodigal is drawn back into the life he thought he had left behind for good.

SAN FRANCISCO -- Dressed in a tan cloth coat and crocheted white hat and pulling a wheeled shopping basket behind her, Eve Rojek trudged up and down Castro Street in a sputtering rain the other day. She walked up a stretch of sidewalk between 18th and 19th streets and then down and then back up again.