Four teenage girls create a club to honor deceased, influential leaders, regardless of their values. It includes philanthropists and despots alike. The girls meet in a spacious tree house, a small bit of luxury set apart from the community? Two are Latina (Pipe and Kit) one African American (Squeeze) one Jewish (Zoom) and one a closeted Lesbian (Kit). It suggests diversity but also a spectrum. Each has been wounded by trauma in their life. Pipe it seems, is the one in charge. She’s bossy and petulant. She’s trying to get their club reinstated with the school after an unfortunate incident. She plans to go up before the board, soon. It isn’t obvious from the outset, but sometimes these women gatherto summon the ghosts of their honorees by séance.
Playwright Alexis Scheer has managed a useful ambiguity. Some things the girls say and do are egregious, but because they’re teenagers, so we don’t take it too seriously. Teenagers are notoriously intense. If Romeo and Juliet had a sense of proportion, they wouldn’t be dead. We definitely take their suffering to heart, but when their reasoning seems delusional, it’s not so easy. Zoom discovers she’s pregnant, but says she’s never had sex. We certainly believe that she believes, but she can’t have it both ways. The affect of this group doesn’t seem menacing, but neither do they seem innocuous. Which is to say, they could be both.
This mixture of the somber and the fanciful, the incredible and the foreboding. Something keeps telling us the penny hasn’t dropped. These women, convinced they can raise the soul of Pablo Escobar, have done seances before, but we sense the next might actually work. Even when we’ve seen them kissing a Ken doll and playing clap games they might have been learned at the play ground. We don’t get the feeling that Pipe, Squeeze, Zoom and Kit are a girl gang, who might wind up brawling with other gangs. There’s anger, and there’s gravitas, but their fighting with each other and vindictiveness doesn’t resolve anything. There’s no interpersonal catharsis.
Our Dear Dead Drug Lord is an allegory dressed as tragedy. We don’t know what we know, till we know it. Why do the four lionize a monster like Pablo Escobar? Can they not distinguish the difference between him and a genuine hero? Why is that important to them? At times they seem ridiculous but they are certainly capable of cruelty and disloyalty. It’s almost as if Alexis Scheer is passing the dangerous off as absurd. No one pays attention to the absurd. We’re submerged in the small universe they’ve built to escape an abusive one they can’t ignore. All the fragments in Dead Drug Lord finally fall into place, and we can’t believe we didn’t see it. This is visionary, deadpan, sinister theatre, and you can’t look away. Don’t miss it.
Second Thought Theatre presents Our Dear Dead Drug Lord, playing June 16th– July 1st, 2023. 3400 Blackburn Street, Dallas, Texas 75219. 214-897- 3091. secondthoughttheatre.com