Recent off-Broadway seasons have fielded striking contemporary dramas about fierce teenage girls, most notably Sarah DeLappe’s The Wolves and Clare Barron’s Dance Nation. The latest work in this throbbing adolescent female vein is Our Dear Dead Drug Lord, an imaginative and ultimately savage new play by Alexis Scheer.
An offbeat Mean Girls sort of dramedy that unexpectedly concludes in a violent burst of magical realism, Our Dear Dead Drug Lord premiered on Tuesday at the McGinn-Cazale Theater in a co-production by Women’s Project Theater and Second Stage Theater.
Both companies have forged their considerable reputations by advancing the works of promising authors, and from the quality of Our Dear Dead Drug Lord, it appears they are championing another gifted writer in Scheer.
The playwright sets the 90-minute story in suburban Miami over several months during the fall of 2008. Four youngsters in their mid-teens comprise a little after-school study group called the Dead Leaders Club. Originally established to honor the likes of John F. Kennedy, the club’s choice in eminent figures has since warped over the years. The dubious individual they currently study—indeed idolize—is the late Colombian drug mogul Pablo Escobar.
The opening scene observes the members participate in a ritual involving a Ouija board, a Ken doll, sacred stones, and a chicken that they slaughter in hopes of raising Escobar’s spirit. As the teens express their rising excitement in girlish giggles and shrieks during the seance, the sequence is at once amusing and yet a bit sinister, especially since bumps of cocaine fuel their morbid rites.
Speculation later arises that a newcomer to their club might be a secret daughter of Escobar. Flickers of darkness arise with successive meetings as the characters mention tragedies in their lives—a younger sister who drowned in a backyard pool, a depressed dad who killed himself—amid their everyday chatter about boyfriends and SAT scores. National politics, racial issues, and anxieties about terrorists also infuse their conversation. In one exuberant sequence, the girls rehearse an expressive dance they plan to perform in the school talent show.
The revelation that one of the club members is pregnant launches the play towards a tragic, gory conclusion that’s both surreal in style and hand-over-your-mouth horrifying to watch.
One might wish for deeper insights into the characters, but the playwright manifests a vital gift for crafting free-flowing realistic wordplay in Our Dear Dead Drug Lord that should stand her in good stead with future efforts.
Let’s note that Carmen Berkeley, Rebecca Jimenez, Malika Samuel, and Alyssa May Gold (who is especially endearing) provide intense and mostly persuasive performances as teenagers. But within the very close proximity of audience to stage in the 108-seat theater space, they cannot entirely achieve the visual illusion of adolescence.
There is also a distinctly artificial quality to the setting that the designer Yu-Hsuan Chen has devised for a supposedly disused treehouse where the characters convene for their meetings. Everything looks too pristine and even downright cute in its bright details to be credible within the play’s quasi-real circumstances.
Although Whitney White, the director, overlooks these visual errors, she successfully navigates the play’s sudden, tricky shift into magical realism by heightening the performances and making strategic use of color and encroaching shadows through Lucrecia Briceno’s lighting design.
With its casually smutty talk, instances of lesbian attraction, and shocking conclusion, it is unlikely that Our Dear Dead Drug Lord will be seen by the sort of young people it depicts, but even old fogies in the audience are likely to recognize the skill with which Scheer has rendered her drama. Let’s certainly look forward to seeing more works from this playwright in the future.
