‘Gangster of Love’ fueled byrock,SanFranciscolife
Jessica Hagedorn’s immigrant’s story comes to life at Magic Theatre
“The Gangster of Love,” Jessica Hagedorn’s new play at San Francisco’s Magic Theatre, is not, strictly speaking, a sequel to “Dogeaters,” her previous play that had its Bay Area premiere at the Magic two years ago. Both are adapted from her own novels, and both are set in times and places with which Hage- dorn was intimately famil- iar: The Philippines under the Marcos regime and San Francisco of the 1970s.
But the fictional characters in each are entirely different, and “Gangster” is the more autobiographical of the two, however loosely.
A commissioned world premiere, “The Gangster of Love” has been in the works for two years, although the novel was published in 1996 and is set two decades before that. Its premiere reunites Hagedorn with Magic Theatre artistic director Loretta Greco, who also directed “Dogeaters” at the Magic. (That play had originally premiered at La Jolla Playhouse in 1998 and played New York’s Public Theater in 2001.)
The “Gangster” novel covers a lot of ground, from Rocky Rivera and her family acclimating to San Francisco after their arrival from Manila, through Rocky falling into a crowd of writers and musicians and finding herself as an artist, to a
move to New York with her friends and all the tumultuous changes of her life there. The play version is really focused on a specific chapter of that saga.
“It’s not the entire novel,” Hagedorn said. “I’ve always found with adaptations you have to decide which stories can you tell. I can’t tell all the stories that are within the novel, because a novel has so much internal room. With ‘The Gangster of Love,’ what was exciting to me was a chance to look back on growing up in San Francisco in the 1970s and really work with that material
before the lead charac- ter, Rocky, moves away.
“I mean, I’ve been gone since ’76 or ’77. I’ve certainly noticed how the city has changed, how a lot of artists and my old friends can’t afford to live there anymore. So what is that vibe like compared to when I first immigrated from Manila? We thought it was a perfect time to make the city a character, and really concentrate on that part of the novel.”
To try to capture that heady time, the play is awash with live music, poetry reading and music video as key parts of the production. The title is also the name of the rock band that Rocky forms with her friends, so the cast also has to double as musicians.
“Some of the songs are actually the lyrics of songs I used to do with my own band, back in the ’80s in New York,” Hagedorn said.
“It’s a coming of age story as an artist of color in America, and it’s also a rock ’n’ roll novel.”
“I was thrilled when the book came out and the Irish International Times picked it as one of the 10 best rock ‘n’ roll novels ever. They’re very literary, and they have this big fiction prize, and they take world literature very seriously. So I was really honored by being included on that list.
“I thought they really got it that I was trying to grapple with writing about music, which is so hard to do. It’s hard to write about art, period. You always end up being corny or something. And I really wanted to capture the flavor of making music and what that meant to me.”