Jessica Hagedorn’s “The Gangster of Love” premieres at the Magic Theater.
Writer Jessica Hagedorn has always led a life less ordinary. Immigrating from Manila to San Francisco as a sensitive Filipina teenager in the early 1960s set the stage for a celebrated career in the arts. Hagedorn has published four novels, edited three Asian American fiction anthologies, written plays and screenplays, and fronted a rock band.
Hagedorn’s early life in San Francisco became the core of her autobiographical 1997 novel, “The Gangster of Love.” Now living in New York, she has temporarily returned to San Francisco to transform “The Gangster of Love” into a play for the Magic Theatre. Previews for the Loretta Greco-directed production begin Wednesday, April 11.
Hagedorn said inspiration for the novel came from trying to tell a different kind of immigrant story.
“I wanted to capture my rather unorthodox experience through fiction, coming to this county with my family not in the expected way,” Hagedorn said. Her family wasn’t forced out of the Philippines by any particular trauma usually associated with immigrants. They were educated, uppermiddle-class people; her mother was seeking a domestic reset from an unfaithful husband. “It was a strange choice. My mother had a sister here, and it was a way to reunite with her and feel safe again,” Hagedorn said
The book’s central character, Raquel “Rocky” Rivera, follows a path similar to Hagedorn’s. In the often picaresque story, Rivera becomes a young poet and then reinvents herself as a rock singer, much the way Hagedorn did.
Hagedorn pushed the narrative from the early ’60s of her actual arrival in San Francisco to 1970 for dramatic reasons. “I wanted to make it a significant moment, so it opens with Jimi Hendrix dying,” she said.
The cultural richness of the ’70s often gets overlooked, but Hagedorn loved the era and living in the city then.
“I got very involved with music and poetry in the Bay Area,” she said. “I wanted to capture the temperature of the city at that time, so rich and also so dark.”
Hagedorn’s family didn’t have a television for much of her youth, not because they couldn’t afford one but because they just did other things. Reading, listening to music, going to concerts and movies were preferred activities. “A lot of things were going on. We had different ways of becoming ‘American,’ ” she said.
In the novel, those different ways included Rocky and her brother Voltaire going to Mabuhay Gardens to check out New Wave music, queueing up for free food distributed by the Symbionese Liberation Army at the Potrero Hill Community Center, and singing karaoke to Labelle’s “Lady Marmalade.”
San Francisco is one of the novel’s many settings, but Greco, the Magic’s artistic director, and Hagedorn felt it should become more primary and a character in the play. The adaptation will cover roughly a third of the book, expanding its San Francisco focus while jettisoning the cross-country excursions Rocky and her boyfriend, Elvis Chang, take. Greco has been working with Hagedorn for a couple of years on the adaptation.
“What really struck me about the novel was that it was the coming of age of a young artist, but also the city was coming of age after the ‘Summer of Love,’ ” Greco said.
As the play moved away from the novel, Greco watched Hagedorn embrace the process of creating something new, writing scenes that weren’t in the novel but that fit their conception of the story they would tell onstage.
“She’s totally open to revisions, so she has done several beautiful drafts in trying to get at the essence of what the play is going to be,” Greco said.
Hagedorn was particularly interested in exploring the musical aspects of the story. The excitement of a young band discovering its sound and the mundane chitchat of rehearsal breaks gave her equal inspiration.
“I wanted that energy recreated and expanded on in way perhaps I didn’t do in the novel,” Hagedorn said.
She hopes to show the artistic of journey of young artists becoming not just a band but a band with unique creative ambitions.
“Rocky finds her voice first, and then she has a hunch she can do something to elevate it and enhance that through music,” Greco said.
The actors, who are also musicians, will perform two songs during the show that were written for the production.
Hagedorn lights up at the idea of having “The Gangster of Love” premiere in San Francisco. She especially wants to pay homage to a diverse, generous group of older artists who mentored her then-up-and-coming generation.
“It was very freewheeling,” Hagedorn said. “To give a sense of that mood, that was important to me because we don’t live like that now. Everybody’s uptight — worried about everything.”
Hagedorn lights up at the idea of having “The Gangster of Love” premiere in San Francisco.