Stages of Survival is an occasional series focusing on Chicago theater companies, highlighting their histories and how they’re surviving—and even thriving—in a landscape that’s become decidedly more challenging since the 2020 COVID-19 shutdown.
David Cerda, the founder and artistic director of Chicago’s Hell in a Handbag Productions, has made a career out of camp—though, as he points out during our Zoom interview, “really good camp is unintentional.” Handbag’s style draws heavily on Theatre of the Ridiculous (a genre of broad satire/homage that began in mid-1960s New York City with John Vaccaro’s Play-House of the Ridiculous and Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theatrical Company) and is nothing if not self-conscious. From their first show—2002’s Poseidon! An Upside Down Musical, a send-up of the 1972 disaster-at-sea film, The Poseidon Adventure—they’ve been dedicated to what their mission describes as the “preservation, exploration, and celebration of works ingrained in the realm of popular culture via theatrical productions through parody, music and homage.”
Their long-running Golden Girls “lost episodes” franchise, which creates ongoing new (and often delightfully filthy) adventures for the beloved Miami quartet (all played by men), introduced them to wider audiences. Their 2019 production of The Drag Seed (inspired by the 1956 killer-child melodrama The Bad Seed) was remounted at New York’s legendary La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in 2022. They’ve also gone sci-fi with 2023’s I Promised Myself to Live Faster; satirized musicals that sanitize poverty in last year’s Poor People!; and sent up Hollywood icons, most notably Joan Crawford. (Cerda is also the founder of the Crawford-influenced band the Joans and has played the Golden Age actress in several shows, including Christmas Dearest.) Cerda has shared writing credit as well as performed for many of these productions, earning his reputation as Chicago’s answer to actor, playwright, and drag sensation Charles Busch along the way.
But in Handbag’s latest, Scary Town, opening this week at the Clutch (a small space in Lincoln Square that the itinerant company usually uses for rehearsal), Cerda draws heavily on his own family history. And it’s a doozy. But since he’s still Cerda, that history is filtered through the lens of the cute anthropomorphism familiar to fans of children’s author and illustrator Richard Scarry.
“I’ve always loved animals wearing clothes,” Cerda says. “When I was little, I used to draw lady dogs with dresses and wigs. I was really into cartoons, and I thought I wanted to be a cartoonist when I was younger.”
Scary Town
Through 5/11: Thu–Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 3 and 7 PM; also Mon 5/5 7:30 PM, no show Sun 5/11 7 PM; the Clutch, 4335 N. Western, handbagproductions.org, $35 general admission, $43 VIP reserved
“Scary Town is something I’ve been wanting to write for a long time,” says Cerda. “And now that I’m working on it and it’s going up, I know why it took me so long. It’s based on my childhood—a specific incident where I found out by accident that my father wasn’t my natural father. And my mother denied it over years. Denied it, denied it, denied it.”
Cerda, who grew up the oldest of four kids in a working-class family in Hammond, Indiana, first figured out something was off at 13, when he discovered his birth certificate and found that his name on the certificate was his mother Bea’s maiden name—Vicari—and not that of the man he knew as his father, Robert Cerda. His mother dismissed it as a “clerical error.” But at 20, Cerda was sitting in a gay bar in Calumet City. “A woman came up to me and said, ‘I know you.’ And I was like, ‘What are you talking about?’ ‘I’m your sister. Your mother has visited our home and showed us graduation pictures. You’re David.’ It was my half sister that I didn’t know.”
To organize the full complicated story for the play, Cerda says he “wrote a timeline. It took me from age 13 to 59 to find out the full story.” He confronted his mother about the bar encounter shortly after it happened. “She got very angry. Said the woman was a liar. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ I was like, ‘Well, why would this woman say this?’ She just would not talk. She acted like I had attacked her. My brother and sisters are white with brown hair. And I’m the only one that had black hair and brown eyes and brown skin. I was a lot darker when I was younger. And I would ask about that occasionally. And they said, ‘Oh, you just turned out different.’ And so I believed my parents because that’s what you’re supposed to do.”
“My life is like a Hell in a Handbag show.”
David Cerda
In the play, directed by former Handbag ensemble member Cheryl Snodgrass, a little brown bunny named Deven lives in Merry Town, “the happiest town where all the animals live in harmony and wear cute outfits.” But Deven, like the author, finds out a secret that blows up his life. (Cerda doesn’t appear in the show.)
Cerda says he and his mother had limited communication for several years after the bar story. But in 1993, after becoming sober, he began exploring the family secrets in therapy, including Adult Children of Alcoholics and Dysfunctional Families meetings.
The full story eventually came out, and Cerda notes with a laugh, “My life is like a soap opera. My life is like a Hell in a Handbag show. I always tell people it’s like a Douglas Sirk film.” Sirk earned fame with his 1950s soapers like Written on the Wind and Imitation of Life—the latter forming the basis for Handbag’s 2018 production of L’Imitation of Life.
“My mother had me when she was 20 years old. The man ended up being married, and he had a family of his own. And that’s why my half sister is like three months apart from me. When [my mother] got pregnant—and I didn’t find this out until much later—when she got pregnant, I believe her parents forced her to put me up for adoption. Her parents are my nana and grandpa who I adored. She liked the Brown men. My mother would go to the East Chicago harbor with her girlfriends and flirt with Mexican men.”
Cerda adds, “I think the Catholic church had a lot to do with forcing my mom to give up her baby. And I was in an orphanage for six months. What happened was, my mother fought the Catholic church to get me back. It wasn’t easy apparently, but she got me back under the condition that I lived with my grandparents. She got a job and straightened out her life. And so my mother was going to beauty school, and I lived with my grandparents for I think four years. I was very, very close with them. I don’t remember leaving that house to live with her, because I imagine my mind is protecting me from that because I’m sure it was very traumatic. And then my mom met my dad, who raised me.”
Coming out to his parents added to what Cerda describes as a “chaotic” household. “Actually I came out to her when I was 20, after I met my half sister. And it was more like, ‘And by the way . . . ,ʼ” he notes. Not long after, he moved to Chicago, in part at his mother’s suggestion and with some financial help from her.
As he told Reader critic Tony Adler in 2012, after moving to Chicago, “I discovered clubs and the punk-rock, new-wave scene. I wore black eyeliner and fishnets on my arms and spiked my hair. I was sort of like a goth Jayne Mansfield.”
Cerda’s first artistic home in Chicago was with Kelly Anchors and Mike McKune, the married cofounders of Sweetback Productions (founded in 1994). Their sensibilities meshed with his—the first show he did with them was an unauthorized stage version of John Waters’s 1974 film, Female Trouble. “I was one of the hairdressers. I had a small role. And as I got to know her, I just said, ‘I have an idea for a show. And my first show I did with Kelly was a Russ Meyer tribute parody called Super Vixens, Go Faster, Kill.”
Cerda was on the board of Sweetback, but his theatrical family wasn’t devoid of dysfunction, either. In 2002, Cerda and fellow board members Steve Hickson, Pauline Pang, and Richard Lambert ejected Anchors and McKune from the company in the wake of allegations after the company’s acclaimed production of The Birds (a deconstruction of the Hitchcock film incorporating Camille Paglia as a character) that Anchors had become difficult to work with. As reported by the Readerʼs Deanna Isaacs, the four “got together, divided the assets, offered her a like-it-or-lump-it deal, and told her to push off.”
On a happy note, Anchors and Cerda buried their differences several years ago. And he credits her with helping him find his artistic voice when he needed it. “I also wrote a show in recovery called The 12 Stepford Wives. And that’s when I started believing, well, maybe I can do this. Because my recovery community and Kelly Anchors saw what I was writing and were like, ‘This is good.ʼ”
Today, Handbag operates on an annual budget of what Cerda says averages about $200,000. He draws a salary of just over $43,000 as artistic director per their latest tax filings, and his partner, Chris Yourex, serves as board president. The ensemble numbers over 25, several of whom have been with the company for years and make it their primary artistic home. (I’m not sure I’ve ever seen the indispensable Ed Jones, who plays Rose in the Golden Girls shows, at any other theater. Reader critic Dan Jakes once wrote of Jones’s incandescently loopy onstage persona, “Imagine Mrs. Garrett from The Facts of Life, only ten times Mrs. Garrett-ier.”)
Staying itinerant has given the company flexibility in good years and bad. They’ve performed at the now-defunct Mary’s Attic space at the old Hamburger Mary’s in Andersonville, at the Chopin Theatre, at the Center on Halsted, and at the Leather Archives & Museum auditorium (for 2019’s The Golden Girls: The Lost Episodes, Vol. 5–SEX!).
Cerda notes, “The Golden Girls is the most varied audience demographically, because everybody likes The Golden Girls. Seniors, gays—gays and grays. A lot of people of color love The Golden Girls. I love doing it [Cerda plays Dorothy Zbornak], but I don’t wanna be known as the Golden Girls company.”
“We don’t really have the infrastructure to buy a building and have people, the boards, and all the politics and everything that comes with that,” he says (perhaps ironic given the old history with Sweetback). “We have, like, a core group that does things with Handbag, and everybody else is super busy doing their own lives. It’s really hard when most of them are volunteers. We pay people in the ensemble that get a stipend to do certain things like Instagram and social media.”
Another challenge for Handbag is that their style of theater doesn’t lend itself to funding for community outreach and education initiatives. “That’s really important work to do, but you know, we can’t bring Valley of the Dolls to a school on the west side,” says Cerda.
“Scary Town is something I’ve been wanting to write for a long time. And now that I’m working on it and it’s going up, I know why it took me so long.”
David Cerda
With Scary Town, Cerda seems to be reflecting on his own unusual path through dysfunction and camp theater. “I wanted to tell my story, and I didn’t wanna do some lame kitchen-sink drama where it was like, Indiana: Osage County or something,” he says.
“I’ve been sober 30 years now, but I was this close to saying ‘fuck it all,ʼ” says Cerda. “You know, “You know, I came out in 1980, ’81, so I was like, ‘Great, I’ll get AIDS and die, and then I won’t have to deal with this [family pain] anymore. I’ll get benefits, and I can party until the end.’ That was my plan. I was afraid to do anything. I kinda wanted to perform and write, but I was just too terrified to do it.”
It’s fortunate for Chicago theater fans that his plan to sign out early didn’t work, and it’s hard to imagine the acerbic Cerda as ever being afraid of speaking his mind. As for his family life: His mom died on Thanksgiving morning 2013 (a year after his brother, Michael, died suddenly), but Cerda is close with his remaining family.
In 2023, Cerda finally met his biological father, who is still alive, and filled in some blanks in his mom’s history as well. “He gave me a lot of insight about my mom, and in just talking to my mom’s best girlfriends and everything, I found out she was a really free spirit. She loved to go out, she loved the latest trends. She danced, she won dance contests. She was kind of a wild child, and she had dreams of doing this and that and traveling. But after she got pregnant with me, I think that ruined her. It stopped all that.”
Maybe the only roadmap through Scary Town and to long-term survival (personal and artistic) lies in facing the truth and making it larger than life—with cute furry animals.
Reader Recommends: THEATER & DANCE
Reader reviews of Chicago theater, dance, comedy, and performance arts.
No Such Thing puts an older woman’s relationships in the spotlight.
The Book of Grace explores the boundaries of optimism in the midst of rage.
Titaníque is a gag-filled retelling (by Céline Dion!) of James Cameron’s film.
Sunny Afternoon at Chicago Shakes celebrates the Kinks.
Helena & Hermia in the Enamored Odyssey is an enchanting new musical take on Shakespeare’s comedy.
Hannah and Halmoni Save the World offers a sweet intergenerational story at Filament.