DOPE QUEENS

Dope Queens, Grafton Doyle’s seamy dissection of the go-nowhere lives of three drug-addicted, fresh-out-of-prison LGBTQ street walkers (two of them gender non-conforming POCs and one a GWM) is not just a major downer, it’s an overwrought, all-over-the-place two-acter that overstays its welcome by at least half an hour.

It would help if anything actually happened during Dope Queen’s mostly comedic first act, but a little of black drama queen Goldie’s act goes a long, long way, and Goldie (Donzell Lewis) seems never to doing anything but delivering a performance in which she makes darned sure to remain center stage, no matter her scene partner.

Tonight that happens to be the hunky, frequently shirtless Blake (Michael Antosy), in whose well-to-do father’s swank country club the twosome had the good fortune to spend their first nights out of the slammer, that is until Blake’s john’s meth pipe set off the smoke alarm and got them booted from the premises on the spot, though fortunately not out onto the San Francisco streets.

Refuge, for the time being at least, turns out to be a single-room occupancy Polk Street hotel where Goldie and Blake await the arrival of Angel (trans actress Malaya) from the jailhouse, though if two’s already not particularly welcome company, three’s almost certainly going to be a crowd.

Dope Queen’s extremely uneventful first act does at the very least offer its fair share of laughs while begging the question “Is anything ever going to actually happen?”

Then comes Act Two, whose deadly serious first half has Blake and Angel delivering drawn-out monologs about how each ended up in the mess they’re in, coming-out dramatics that anyone who’s seen an LGBTQ play or movie or read an LGBTQ book has seen or read before, upon which Goldie’s return from a trick gone bad sends us into “Oh my God I’ve committed a crime and I don’t know what to do!” territory that has the pink-pistol-packing prosty chewing the scenery like nobody’s business.

I started looking at my watch around 10:15 and kept looking at it with increasing frequency as the minutes ticked by with excruciating slowness until at long last, escape was made possible at 10:40, Goldie by fire escape and this reviewer by theater exit.

It might have helped had fledgling playwright Doyle hired an outside director to help shape this work-in-progress by providing a critical eye and ear along with significant cuts that might have made the experience of spending time with Goldie, Blake, and Angel more bearable.

Such unfortunately was not the case, and though Lewis, Antosy, and the mononymous Malaya give it their all, their all is not enough to make me care about their characters despite Lewis’ tour-de-force-of-nature performance.

At the very least, TomorrowLand Productions & Pop Up Theater have given Dope Queens a production design by some of L.A.’s finest, from Tom Buderwitz’s deliberately uninviting Tenderloin hotel room set to Andrew Schmedake’s expertly designed lighting to Cricket S. Myers’ Oldies-But-Goodies-sparked sound design, and Sasha Markgraf’s costumes aptly reflect the characters’ personal choices.

Dope Queens is produced by Jose Luis Velasquez, John Reyes, and Melanie Weisner.  Elizabeth Wong is dramaturg.

Transgender sex workers were given a considerably more entertaining (and at 88 minutes a whole lot shorter) platform to tell their stories in 2015’s Sundance Film Festival favorite Tangerine, an act Dope Queens will have a hard time following if and when a proposed Dope Queens Movie gets made. For now at least, as this staged tryout makes painfully clear, there’s a whole lot of script doctoring left to be made.

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The Hudson Mainstage, 6539 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood.
www.dopequeensplay.com

–Steven Stanley
August 16, 2019
Photos: Michael Lamont

 

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