When I was 19, I lived in a shabby Victorian in San Francisco’s Mission District, with a couple of motorcycle guy roommates from SFSU. This was long before the Mission was gentrified — it was still all central american car clubs, tamale parlors, taquerias and some damp, wood-paneled Irish bars that had been there since at least the seventies, like the “Dovre Club,” whose bartender had a massive purple alcoholic nose comparable only to that of WC Fields, only with more sores on it.
The T-shirt shops were my favorite, as they dealt in Chicano sentiments and imagery, with recurring themes of the Virgin of Guadalupe, and fallen cholo brothers laying bloody and bandanna’d in the street as ghost lowriders cruised the heavenly boulevards above them. Many of these bore the existential question, in Olde English script: “Por qué?”
One shirt featured a black haired women in a red dress with flowers in her hair, begging on her knees before her handlebar mustachio’d cholo man in a wife-beater shirt. In yellow script, below them, was an agonized: “I DO love you!” Such drama, wrought on a simple T-shirt. I collected them.
Mission High School was a gigantic institution right across from Dolores Park. It was, it seemed almost exclusively composed of Guatemalan and El Salvadoran kids, many of whom belonged to street gangs because they were so rattled by PTSD from escaping dangerous countries and horrible circumstances, they compulsively recreated violence on their own.
My boyfriend at the time and I found a poster stapled to a telephone pole near the school for a theatrical experience which promised to change our lives: “Duke of Earl II” — apparently a sequel to the highly regarded “Duke of Earl.” The line drawing that someone had done for it was fabulous — the title was in big chunky graffiti letters, surrounded by various Hispanic street characters pointing oversize guns at the reader. The production was being mounted by a Christian outreach group dedicated to trying to help kids at risk. “Oh, we HAVE to go,” said the boyfriend, and I was beside myself with delight.
We walked over to the high school the night of the play, and were amazed by how many legions of students had come out for it.
The Mission High gym was absolutely enormous, and packed to the rafters. I estimated about 500 kids in the audience in folding chairs — sullen girls with tall black bangs and naturally thick eyebrows that had been savagely plucked into tiny black pencil lines. Their corollaries were even more sullen young men in baggy khaki pants and plaid Pendleton shirts, with wispy baby mustaches and a kind of criminal sleekness.
We were the only white people in the audience, and probably the only people outside of the school district to be interested in this theater event.
A broad-chested, bald Hispanic man took the stage at the front of the gym with a bullhorn, and told us all to look under our seats, where we found industrial noise-protection headphones. We were warned that there would be very loud noises and bright lights, and that some members of the audience should prepare themselves, since they might relate deeply to the action onstage. (This was before words like “triggering.”)
Shortly after the lights went down, someone in the third row wearing a bandanna across his face stood up with a sawed-off shotgun and blasted a deafening round into a guy across the aisle, who collapsed into a bloody clump. The flash from the gun was bright as lightning, and a small haze of gunpowder smoke gathered over the audience’s heads. For a sickening moment, everyone in the audience was frozen, thinking that we had just seen an actual murder, but the play incorporated the action quickly enough that we were all, instead, impressed by the balls-to-the-wall, hardcore theatricality of it, and the verisimilitude of the intensely powerful blanks they were using.
I can’t remember the plot, exactly, but it was filled with themes of love, grief, revenge, and the toxic lure of “the street,” with its many heartbreaks. There were gang rivalries; the protagonist, an ex-gangbanger trying to go straight, was beset with trials and temptations.
At one point in the show, the protagonist’s wife and child were shot by a drug dealer. This was dealt with quite beautifully and powerfully. While their bodies lay onstage, the loudspeakers played the entirety of the song “You Are So Beautiful” by Joe Cocker. Three actors wearing black MORGUE windbreakers respectfully and professionally zipped the victims into actual body-bags, put them on gurneys and rolled them offstage. I joined all the Latin girls around me in crying liquid eyeliner down our powdered faces.
There were many more deaths, and more jarring gunplay and anguish. By the time the rival gang leaders tied their bandannas together over the body of another fallen cholo brother, the audience was collectively shivering with adrenaline, shellshock and absolute, visceral catharsis. It was like being put through a car wash of emotion without a car.
The ending, however, was where the show really took off. At the end of the curtain call, the bald man with the bullhorn walked onstage again, and said, “I know that many of you recognize your own lives in this show. And if that is the truth, and you want to walk start walking a different path today, I challenge you to come onstage right now, and embrace Jesus Christ into your life as your Lord and savior.”
I cringed, for a moment, because I didn’t think the guy was going to have any takers. But first, a couple of crying girls walked up the steps to join the man with the bullhorn — and then, there was almost a complete exodus. The aisles were suddenly jammed with emotional Hispanic teens, holding each other’s hands and consoling one another. When about half of the audience had mounted the stage, bullhorn man led the entire room in a recitation of the Lord’s Prayer.
Now THAT, my friends, was theater.
Today, of course, if someone tried to mount “Duke of Earl II” in a high school, authorities would lose their minds over the blanks and the blood and the slamming pump-action heat of it. It would never fly past the lawyers.
But it was theater for exactly the right reasons, with exactly the right results. You know, like Broadway, but human.
Cintraw@gmail.com
Artwork: “Lupita,” oil on canvas, Cintra Wilson 2023
Too bad this play couldn't be re-created nowadays when it's more relevant than ever ...
Thank you sweetest Lucy!! XXXX