Review: RIOT QUEENS at Fuse Theatre

As the Trump administration works to erase trans people from public life (literally removing the "T" from LGBT on the government's website about the Stonewall Uprising, a movement to which trans people were central), it becomes urgent to understand that these events don't happen in a vacuum. They are the culmination of years of effort, danger, and defiance by people whose names most of us never learn. 

Mikki Gillette recovers another one of these pivotal moments in her new play, RIOT QUEENS, now running at Fuse Theatre Ensemble. In 1966, three years before Stonewall, trans women and drag queens in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district pushed back against relentless police harassment in what became known as the Compton's Cafeteria riot. It began when a trans woman resisted arrest for "female impersonation," and it ended, eventually, with real, concrete changes to how the city and its police force treated Tenderloin residents.

RIOT QUEENS focuses on the leadup to that riot, centering three trans women who want the same simple thing: to be treated as people rather than as a problem. Haley (played by Ethan Fieder) tries, not always successfully, to not take up space. She came to the Tenderloin to escape a brutal childhood and asks for nothing more than to live quietly within the two blocks where she has found community and predictability, if not exactly safety. Dixie (Nineveh Herrera) is a member of Vanguard, an activist organization of the time that advocated for trans people and street youth. She is a fidgety ball of energy waiting to explode, and interested in a louder and more aggressive approach to pushing for change. Nina (Bryn Bollimpalli) is newly arrived, still learning the rhythms of the neighborhood, and not sure where she stands on political activism. She just wants to go dress shopping without fear.

What Gillette does particularly well is refuse to idealize her characters. These are not heroic archetypes. Their histories are complicated, their relationships are messy, their ideas about what progress looks like (and how to get there) are often in conflict. But when it counts, they support each other. That tension, and that solidarity, is instructive for the present moment.

Directed by Harper York, the production is grounded further by interspersed real film footage of 1960s nightlife and protests, a reminder that this is not just a story, but a history. At a moment when that history is actively being rewritten and erased, theater like this serves a purpose beyond entertainment. It remembers.

RIOT QUEENS runs through March 29 at the Backdoor Theatre. Details and tickets here.