Skip to main content
In 1966, a little-known queer revolt occurred during a police raid of Compton’s Cafeteria in San Francisco’s Tenderloin. The riot was the outcome of an extended campaign of bigotry, harassment, arrest and targeted assault on the queer community by San Francisco’s police force.
This is the setting for Fuse Theater Ensemble’s newest production, Portland playwright Mikki Gillette’s Riot Queens, a fictionalization of the human drama that surrounded Compton’s Cafeteria in the months, weeks and days before the riot. “It’s not biographical,” Gillette says, “but I did base a lot of it on Susan Stryker’s work.”
Stryker, the historian behind the KQED documentary Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria, uncovered the battle while researching trans topics during her own transition. She went on to create an oral history of the event, much of which informs Gillette’s interpretation.
Directed by Harper York (who also served as costumer), Riot Queens turns the audience’s attention not only to the heightened scrutiny faced by the queer and specifically trans community during the Vietnam War era—but also the ripples that continue today, all centered on the embattled Tenderloin’s Compton’s Cafeteria.
The play focuses on fervent Dixie, Haley and Nina. Dixie, played by Niniveh Herrera, represents a new landscape for trans futures, unencumbered by raids, bigotry, fear and hatred. Haley, played with heartbreaking vulnerability by the brilliant Ethan Fielder, represents the fear held by community members desperate to cling to their relatively safe space, an all-night diner that reluctantly caters to the queens, hustlers and assorted riffraff passing through and/or working the Tenderloin. Nina, a darling newcomer to the neighborhood played with an innate sweetness and delicate whimsy by Bryn Bollimpalli, is the romantic wedge between Dixie and Haley, a cantilever to both points of view. The cast is rounded out by Cosmo Reynolds in the dual roles of Jerry and Police Brute, and Tyler Hunt in dual roles as Police Brute and Jerry.
It wouldn’t be a Mikki Gillette play without a requisite love triangle, and Riot Queens delivers, bringing not just a lesson in queer U.S. history to the fore, but layering it in the realistic human emotions that erupt around issues of autonomy, security and identity.
SEE IT: Riot Queens at The Back Door Theatre, 4319 SE Hawthorne Blvd., fusetheatreensemble.com. 7:30 pm Thursday, Friday and Saturday and 3 pm Sunday, through March 29. $25 suggested donation.
