Review: OUR DEAR DEAD DRUG LORD at Center Theatre Group And IAMA Theatre Company

In the program’s “21 Questions with Alexis Scheer”, after shouting out a few Boston staples (Brookline Booksmith and the Raising Cane’s on BU’s campus!) the Our Dear Dead Drug Lord playwright lists the plays foundational to her writing: “Sarah Kane’s Blasted, Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, Jose Rivera’s Marisol, and Sarah DeLappe’s The Wolves”. It is easy to see the influences of all four works in Center Theatre Group and IAMA Theatre Company’s current production at the Kirk Douglas Theatre. In fact, there are obvious and surface-level comparisons that can be quickly drawn. The rituals and magic at the heart of the piece certainly parallel the soft magic of Rivera’s apocalyptic city, there is an aggressive assertiveness to the piece that reverberates of Kane, and any show that takes seriously the interior lives of high school girls will forever be compared to The Wolves (God forbid we see young women portrayed as anything other than the antagonists of 1690’s Salem Village).

Even without reading the interview, however, I would have left the theatre thinking about Tony Kushner’s sweeping epic. In the ways Angels in America embodies and reflects the zeitgeist of the AIDS epidemic, Perestroika, and a Reagan-riddled turn of the century, Our Dear Dead Drug Lord presents a story of four young women with a penchant for summoning spirits that somehow perfectly encapsulates the larger experiences of living in a terror-obsessed, post-9/11 world muddied by senseless shootings and endless circles of election discourse. The characters are never reduced to vehicles for nostalgia and never simplified to punchlines of naivety, so the conflicts which spring up between them are engaging and nuanced, but the way the play situates itself within the larger issues of the world as a whole stirs a feral urge inside to scream and satisfies that urge by playing out a guttural embodiment of catharsis. I think if Anton Chekhov were alive, he would be jealous of Scheer’s text. Nothing springs from nothing, even surprising revelations of characters’ pasts seem to click into place and color preceding events in new lights. Every proverbial gun is fired—- even the loaded ones in plain sight which only seem obvious once the damage has been done. If Three Sisters were written today, I’d like to think Irina would try to convince the others to audition for a production of Seussical.

Lindsay Allbaugh has staged a production which capitalizes on all of the potential within the script with a particularly memorable choreographed sequence by Veronica Sofia Burt. The cast is uniformly strong, but within the echoing depths of the Kirk Douglas Theatre, I wish they had been mic’d (I’m certain this will be an unpopular take). The intimate confines of the treehouse and subtleties of the ever-shifting power dynamics seem at odds with the Disney-Channel-broadness this production has stylistically adopted. However, the style is consistent and the cast commits to it, so once you accept the choice (it only took me about 15 minutes), their strengths shine through.

I’m very excited CTG programmed this piece. It is funny, lively, thought-provoking, and emotionally-charged, and this production knocked it out of the park. There was palpable excitement at newly-appointed artistic director Snehal Desai’s pre-show announcement and I am hopeful plays like Our Dear Dead Drug Lord will continue to flourish in Los Angeles under his tenure.