When we heard about the world premiere of The Gangster of Love, a new play by award winning author by Jessica Hagedorn, which tells her story of immigration from Manila to the Haight during the 1970s we knew we wanted to see it. Afterall, we love San Francisco, and this was a San Francisco based story. So off we went to the Magic Theatre for a night of drama talk and drinks.
Photo by Jennifer Reiley.
Brittany: That was really fucking long.
Katie: What the hell was that?
B: I just don’t understand why they tried to cover so much? I get it’s based on a life story, but you don’t need to see every moment over the course of thirty years.They spent so much time showing different scenes they didn’t actually develop any of the subplots. They seemed to change the set every few minutes.
K: Agreed. The only thing I did care about was those awesome projections.
B: Visually this show was cool.
K: But that was it. I just sat there in confusion, thinking there must be something I’m not getting.
B: I didn’t care about anyone in the show. None of the characters were fully human. There were thirty bizarro plot lines that didn’t go anywhere. They introduce you to an interesting character and then that character never appears again. Meanwhile the girl who played the lead, Rocky (Golda Sargento), seemed to just float through the scenes. Despite the fact she was on stage almost the entire show, I still didn’t get a sense of who she was or why I should care about her.
K: The show did nothing for me. If it had just ended after the first act at least it wouldn’t have been as painfully long.
B: What I don’t understand is how it took that long to do nothing.
The Verdict: Despite some cool staging this is a show to skip.
The Drama Talk: Cool projections and San Francisco subject-matter can’t save a bad play. Neither can good actors if the characters they’re playing are poorly developed and disappear from the story with little explanation. Perhaps because the playwright is primarily a novelist, and she’s dealing with subject matter that hits so close to home, she thought the audience would intuitively understand why we should care about this moody young immigrant poet/musician and her life. Unfortunately the character of Rocky was in some ways the least interesting character in the story. Meanwhile the promising characters who appear throughout her life never get enough time to have an arc.
This is the world premiere of this play, so it’s possible it could be fixed by trying to do less. Fewer scene changes, fewer years covered, fewer characters who appear for only long enough for you to get curious before they disappear, less shoehorned in magical Jimi Hendrix angels. As it is, this play tries to do far too much, and in doing so accomplishes nothing.
The Drinks: After this show we wanted to go someplace fun and relaxing so we checked out a new bar in the nearby Marina district called Del Mar. They have swings for seats, so that did the trick.
The Gangster of Love runs through May 6th at the Magic Theatre. Tickets are $30-$60 and can be purchased on their website. Right now there are tickets on Goldstar for $15-$32.50.
