Four teenagers gathering to summon Pablo Escobar sounds like a provocation designed to attract an audience. Alexis Scheer’s Our Dear Dead Drug Lord makes that provocation unstable. The script publisher describes girls in an abandoned treehouse who may be contacting the dead criminal or may be manipulating one another. Either possibility leaves them in a room with the power they have invented together. The treehouse, often imagined as a child’s private refuge, becomes a site where secrecy can both protect and endanger.
Escobar’s name carries a history of violence that cannot be turned into harmless decoration. The play’s premise raises the question of why adolescents would borrow it. A notorious figure may offer borrowed authority, shock value, or a language for fears that are difficult to name directly. But invoking him also risks making others’ suffering into a game. Scheer’s setup does not ask the audience to admire the girls’ judgment. It asks us to watch how a group tests the line between daring one another and doing harm.
The WP Theater record documents the 2019 Off-Broadway world premiere, directed by Whitney White and produced with Second Stage Theater. It also provides a content notice for graphic physical and sexual violence. That notice is important evidence about the work’s seriousness, though it is not a substitute for discussing the writing. The premise of a séance does not make the play a light comic fantasy; the theater warned audiences that what follows could be difficult. The credited cast included Carmen Berkeley, Alyssa May Gold, Rebecca Jimenez, and Malika Samuel.
Scheer’s Miami background appears in WP’s author biography, and the publisher marks the work for Black and Latine performers. Those details help prevent a lazy reading of the girls as an undifferentiated “teenage gang.” Their differing relations to race, class, and one another are part of the play’s terrain, even if a synopsis cannot tell us exactly how any production embodied those differences. A treehouse gives them a temporary jurisdiction of their own; it cannot shield them from the larger world or from each other.
The temptation with Our Dear Dead Drug Lord is to treat the title as the whole point. Its more interesting move is to make the audience ask what teenagers do with a symbol of adult violence when adults have not provided safety or truthful language. The séance may be real, a prank, or something between. The girls’ need for a place to gather is real either way.