From January 1974 to September 1975, San Francisco’s Castro District was gripped with worry. Because the neighborhood transitioned from Irish American suburb to town’s “gay mecca,” headlines surfaced a few serial killer focusing on neighborhood males. Described as Black man and newbie artist, he reportedly would seduce his victims into posing for portraits earlier than sexual activity, then violent homicide. Referred to as “The Doodler,” the killer has not been caught.
John Fisher, inventive director of Theatre Rhinoceros, San Francisco’s lengthy operating queer theater, found the true crime story throughout COVID lockdowns of 2020, and located it compelling and terrifying: “I’d never heard of him,” says Fisher. “I was shocked and amazed. Soon I was reading the same information over and over again and I realized there was not much on him, not much the police had/have revealed.”
The playwright Fisher started to attract inspiration from the story, crafting it into his subsequent manufacturing to workshop on-line and onstage.
“How could I fictionally flesh out the story, make it dramatic?” Fisher says, including that he put it on Zoom, then continued his exploration. He provides, “There are podcasts, but they too are limited. The live production I prepared [in New York City] had to be physical—less telling, more showing. It also had to use the space, become more dynamic in my body.”
The outcome is “Doodler,” a solo present premiering this week in Theatre Rhino’s intimate efficiency house. Set throughout a two-year homicide spree, the story is introduced from the perspective of a Castro resident who reads the ugly headlines and performs newbie detective to unravel the case himself.
Fisher wrote, directs and performs in “The Doodler,” and his viewers will watch him function each technical side of the present, together with lights, sound results, home administration, even promoting concessions.
“It is exhausting!” he admits. “I have feedback from the New York workshop, and this week a collaborator will start watching it and giving feedback. I just completed two highly collaborative projects: ‘Fallen’ and ‘Cabaret’—both quite satisfying. That said, ‘Doodler’ is highly subjective, innocent, purely creative, it has less filter than a highly collaborative project. There must be a place for that in the artist’s life. The audience must find their way into that very subjective ride.”
That subjectivity takes the type of the present’s lead character, which Fisher admits to being a “self-insert” avatar: “My solo pieces are as much about me as about history. I insert me or a person like me into the event. They are not documentary, but drama. This one is a noir, a noir based on fact. I am portraying someone who would be an elder now, and they’re not that far off in age from me. If I wrote about someone real pursuing the Doodler, it wouldn’t be my work. I want to know what this journey would have taught me about myself.”
In researching the play, Fisher spoke to older Castro residents who have been amazed how a lot they recalled of the neighborhood ambiance on the time. A component that stood out, and explored within the play, is the LGBTQ+ group’s sophisticated, usually contentious, relationship with legislation enforcement. A yr after the murders stopped, same-sex intercourse grew to become authorized in San Francisco. That yr, activist Harvey Milk informed the Related Press he understood why many within the Castro refused to cooperate with San Francisco police, who usually would arrest them.
John Fisher’s solo present “Doodler” at Theatre Rhinoceros is predicated on unsolved murders dedicated within the mid-Seventies in San Francisco’s Castro. (Picture by Scott Sidorsky/Courtesy Theatre Rhinoceros through Bay Metropolis Information)
The rivalry is essential to this play, as is the truth that the assassin was described as Black.
“When I [workshopped the play], I decided to not go there with regards to [race],” says Fisher. “That’s the police department’s conclusion; that’s the sketch they’ve developed. I don’t accept that suspect as the perpetrator. Much of my show ‘Doodler’ is an attack on the homophobic police at the time. … I do not subscribe to their theories about the case, certainly not to those inflammatory sketches they’ve circulated. And they won’t talk about the case. They say the case is open, so they can’t talk about it, [but] then they circulate sketches? Those sketches are of a suspect whose M.O. was different from the Doodler’s. My negative feelings about the police and their suppositions are a central part of the story. The case is unsolved. … My story ends with the mystery; it does not jump into the highly suspicious speculations of the police.”
Though the case stays unsolved, and there are heightened LGBTQ+ tensions in mild of current actions by the Trump Administration, Fisher sees the play and his jack-of-all-trades efficiency working as one thing of a catharsis for audiences.
“The journey is the excitement,” he says. “The suspense of the story allows the audience to get wrapped up in the adventure; they forget, if they even knew, that there’s no resolution. They might even think that I’m going to solve the crime.”
“Doodler” runs Feb. 6 via March 2 at Theatre Rhinoceros, 4229 18th St., San Francisco. Tickets are $17.50 to $50 at therhino.org.
Charles Lewis III is a San Francisco-born journalist and performing artist. He has written for the San Francisco Chronicle, KQED and the San Francisco Examiner. Dodgy proof of this may be discovered at The Considering Man’s Fool.wordpress.com.
