DUDE THEATER SF RULES OK

Punkrock Theater Back When You Could Still Do That

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I was eighteen years old, going to SF State and barely keeping my rent paid by doing pre-recorded porn tapes for a 976-line and selling disgracefully cheap, weak, badly-rolled joints, which I kept pre-rolled in a little decorative brass box I wore on a chain around my neck. (I had been given a Hefty bag of “shake” by a drag queen friend — the leaves, stems and debris of the marijuana that is thrown away after a more respectable dealer takes the buds out of it.) 

There was a funny 25-year-old guy in my drama class with a baritone voice, a big nose, greasy hair and a kind of Buster Keaton, falling-off-of-ladders charisma.  Brophy (his real name) lived at a dilapidated wreck of a theater in the industrial part of town that used to be a punkrock venue called “Club Foot.”  He had a really resourceful DIY, punkrock, art-man way of throwing things together— he made stage lights for Club Foot out of coffee cans.  He was the co-founder of a troupe called Dude Theater — a group of like-minded performers who decided not to wait for the snotty conventional theaters like ACT or Magic Theater to grant them stage roles, but to write things themselves and do fast and dirty guerrilla theater by any means necessary.   “We do theater in the backs of trucks and throw meat,” Brophy told me.  I loved the vibe of what they were going for:  in your face, pulpy, campy, shocking.. but mostly, totally new.  It was proletariat avant-garde theater, 3000 miles off Broadway, and I was all over it. 

 Dude’s logo was the featureless man usually used to indicate a men’s room, guzzling from a bottle of liquor. 

 He had me audition for a part in Dude’s upcoming play, “Imelda: The Opera,” a musical spoof about Imelda Marcos.  The Dude people were a generation older than I was, wildly funny, and totally insouciant, so I turned on all the musical theater magic I could summon from when I played the Artful Dodger in a local production at 10 years old. 

“Imelda: The Opera” took place in a gay bar at midnight.   I had to sneak in, because I was underage. I played a singing secretary in a Carmen Miranda hat, an old begonia-colored wraparound disco dress that had been my mother’s in the seventies, platform ankle straps, fishnet stockings, and a ridiculous foreign accent of indeterminate origin — somewhere between Mexico and Minsk. 

I was a habitually stoned teenager who was barely mentally  present enough to comprehend the scripts Dude wrote hastily and alcoholically, in what one of the writers, C.W. Morgan, called “purple spasms of idiot fever.” But I was thrilled to suddenly find myself in this underground creative climate — especially when I was typecast as a stoned teenager in the next Dude production:   “Buckets O’Blood - A Slash Play.” It was a spoof on all slasher movies where a group of young people on a camping trip all get murdered by a psychopath. Brophy played Charles Manson, and in what would become one of his trademark acts of theatrical masochism, he ate a raw yellow onion like an apple every night on stage.  I played “Vicky,” the bimbo of the group, in short-shorts and platforms, who gets killed first.  Brophy had constructed some entrails for me out of foam rubber and rope, which I had to strap to my torso every night.  The guts were cold and absolutely disgusting because I didn’t know the right recipe for fake blood at the time (Karo syrup and red food coloring - thumbs up!) and kept soaking my guts down with ketchup from the liquor store across the street, which smelled pretty vomity after a month of marinating backstage. 

To raise money for shows, we did big country western jamborees at Club Foot with the Club Foot Orchestra, a truly impressive lineup of fabulously talented musicians that included the great Beth Custer (Brophy’s girlfriend at the time) whose bold clarinet gave our vintage country western songs an unusual but tasty wind element.  I got to sing “Rock Boppin’ Baby,” which gave me such a lust for performing old country music I eventually started a band with a bunch of Club Foot orchestra musicians and the melodious Connie Champagne called “Precious Little and the Jimmy Rigs,” a band in which all we did was music by truckers for truckers, about trucks.  Audiences didn’t really dig our niche — we got hauled offstage on New Year’s Eve in the middle of our set because the club promoters thought we were driving customers away. 

The third and final play I did with Dude Theater was entitled “The Ugliest American,”  a somewhat scatological piece about which I remember very little, other than the fact that it too was a musical (I had a rowdy number called “Kiss Me Stupid”) that centered around Elvis’s final day, on the toilet. 

It was a great role for me:  I got to be completely spazzed out and nervy and neurotic.  My performance required so much strange energy I sort of broke myself: a week into the performance run, my appendix ruptured.  I was devastated to miss the rest of the run, and cried when I read the reviews, with the director playing my role. The show was actually pretty terrible, but I ate my heart out. 

Dude inspired me to start writing my own plays.  Brophy and I ended up doing a number of other theater projects together — we even both ended doing plays at the prestigious Magic Theater. 

But there was nothing like the days when we were defiantly rehearsing musical pop trash in a garage, performing all night in weird little venues and earning absolutely not one dime, ever.  The late eighties was a time when you didn’t have to enslave yourself to earn the mere costs of survival.  Dude gave me a love for chainsaws and skimasks that persists to this very day.  One should hardly do any theatrical performance without them. 

Artwork: “Baller Cow,” oil and wax on canvas, Cintra Wilson, 2019

Photograph: Cast of Dude Theater’s “Slash Play'/Buckets O’ Blood.”

(Brophy carrying me on cooler).

Cintraw@gmail.com