Filipina’s S.F. story wears out welcome
If it had ended at intermission, it would have been fair to middling entertainment. And it was the kind of sliceof-life show that could have wrapped up then. When the lights went down and the applause began, no story lines had gathered enough heft to leave you wanting, and the last scene, a dream encounter with Jimi Hendrix, seemed as fine and poetic a closer as any. The actors could well have come out for their curtain call.
When they didn’t, the truth settled in: “The Gangster of Love” was going to be a long and trying show.
Jessica Hagedorn’s world premiere, seen Thursday, April 19, at Magic Theatre, reworks her 1996 semiautobiographical novel of the same name. It tells the sort of San Francisco story we don’t hear often enough — that of immigrants from the Philippines to the Haight three years “too late” for the Summer of Love.
Directed by the Magic’s artistic director, Loretta Greco, it’s neither a story of economic struggle nor primarily one of racial prejudice. Rocky (Golda Sargento), her brother Voltaire (Jed Parsario) and her mother Milagros (Sarah Nina
Hayon) are middle-class and artistic. Hagedorn, who was part of the nation’s first wave of prominent Asian American playwrights, gives them the privilege of simply existing, expressing, filtering a new land through perceptive, poetic eyes.
One or two scenes even feel made for the stage. A dinner table sequence at a birthday party for Rocky (short for Raquel) becomes a no-man’s land of dueling lusts, resentments, insecurities and prejudices. A white guy (Lawrence Radecker) pursuing Milagros speaks only to bungle; he thought lumpia and egg rolls were “the same thing.” The landlord (Lance Gardner) has friendly words for his rival for Milagros’ affections, but he hoists his ukulele over his head as he speaks, poised to strike. An uncle (Chuck Lacson) delights in provoking, casually firing off wartime resentments or Filipino stereotypes. And Rocky and her family are least predictable of all, each a firecracker liable to spout some cruelty and then wash it away in the next sentence, as if it meant nothing.
But whole scenes mean nothing in “The Gangster of Love,” even though Greco has assembled an all-star ensemble that also includes Patrick Alparone and Sean San José. If you’ve never seen a coming-ofage story before, you could easily walk away with the idea that nothing is so utterly free of strife as writing good poetry the first time you try, getting famous poets to champion you, falling in instantly with the cool kids who hang out at Vesuvio’s or forging your own discordant art form blending rock and poetry, all while supporting progressive causes, like protests against demolition of the I-Hotel. Rocky regards each of these achievements with little more than a shrug, scoff or the same affected furtiveness with which she begins each scene.
To this dearth of conflict, Hagedorn adds the sorts of anecdotes and exchanges that feel weighty to the individual experiencing them but can’t but look trite to everyone else — a first LSD trip, a dream, a round of “Chopsticks” on the piano with a sibling. And as years flicker by on rear-wall projections, more marking time than storytelling, “Gangster” tries to tell far too much of Hagedorn’s tale, chronicling a move to New York and then the ill health of both Voltaire and Milagros. Both illnesses get thrust upon us, but we’re asked to mourn them as if the play had made the effort to make us care about them from the beginning.
But when characters so vehemently refuse to care about what’s happening to them, why should you?