Arts & Entertainment

Chicago’s Crown Prince of Camp Talks Joan Crawford, Mae West and the Personal Story He’s Bringing to Stage

David Cerda calls camp “the theater of the ridiculous,” and this prolific camp counselor isn’t slowing down.

Cerda celebrates the art of camp in shows such as “Poseidon! An Upside Down Musical,” a parody of Hitchcock’s “The Birds” and drag-centric versions of “The Golden Girls” and “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.”

As the creative force behind Hell in a Handbag Productions, he has earned both a Jeff Award and an induction into Chicago’s LGBT Hall of Fame.

A fixture on the Chicago theater scene since the ‘90s, Cerda has now written a semi-autobiographical play based on his upbringing in Northwest Indiana.

But it’s not a straight play in any sense of the word. The characters are animals who resemble the anthropomorphic creatures from the world of Richard Scarry, beloved author of children’s books.

He titled it “Scary Town” and calls the show an adult children’s play.

WTTW News spoke with David Cerda about camp, comedy and that time Tippi Hedren came to a show – plus his upcoming performance at A Red Orchid Theatre.

WTTW News: Hell in a Handbag cornered the market for camp in Chicago. When you started making theater, was camp missing on the local stage?

David Cerda: It wasn’t totally missing but it was harder to find and there wasn’t one company that did it. The company that did it a lot was the one I was with before Hell in a Handbag called Sweetback Productions. We did “The Birds” and “Joan Crawford Goes to Hell.”

When most people think of theater in Chicago, they think of a gritty, in-your-face ensemble.

Cerda: We’re still in-your-face and gritty — it’s just a different kind of grit. There’s a little glamour mixed in with the grit.

Is there a key to doing camp successfully? Do it with heart, with affection?

Cerda: That’s exactly what it is. We’re not laughing at it, we’re laughing with it, and for me you have to love the subject that you’re making fun of. The definition for camp is very broad.

Is it true that camp was sort of created by the queer community? Because when I think of the early days of camp, I think of someone like Mae West.

Cerda: The first thing I remember being campy was Mae West and that whole double entendre ‘come up and see me sometime’ thing. I think Mae West appropriated it — which is fine, like Bette Midler did — from queer culture, because she had a lot of queer friends. She wrote a play [“The Drag” from 1927] with queer characters and queens, and she marketed it to a wider audience. There were a lot of drag queens popular in the 1920s and ‘30s — the Pansy Craze they called it — and New York café society loved it and Hollywood loved it. What Mae West did was sort of like a secret code, a secret language among queer people and their specific kind of humor, and that’s how it developed.

David Cerda

You frequently perform in your shows, yet in the new show “Scary Town” you won’t be playing the character that’s based on you.

Cerda: Yeah, he’s a little punk rock bunny who’s 13. There wasn’t really a part for me in the show because I’m a little older now — a 13-year-old kid is kind of a stretch for me.  I decided to tell it as a children’s storybook. The animals and characters are based on those Richard Scarry books.

There’s a time in your life when you’re a kid where you realize, wait a minute, everything’s not OK. This isn’t normal. You grow up trusting in your parents and believing in everything they say, and then there comes a time where you start questioning that.

What were you like as a kid in the 1960s and ‘70s?

Cerda: I worried a lot. I was one of those kids where you knew at an early age that he’s going to be gay. I was an effeminate boy and so what I did to get attention was to be funny, and since I wasn’t physically able to fight back I used words to get people. I’d do impersonations of students or teachers, or I’d zero in on their shortcomings and make a joke about it because I couldn’t beat them up. But I could beat them up verbally.

Where did you grow up?

Cerda: In Hammond, Indiana. It was a steel town and most people worked in the mills. It was a blue-collar, lower-middle-class community. My parents were young and they worked very hard, but it wasn’t an Ozzie and Harriet environment.

What was the home environment like?

Cerda: I grew up in a chaotic household. The house was very dysfunctional. I grew up in a time when everybody drank. It was odd if you didn’t drink. And I think to escape some of the problems they had, both of my parents drank too much. I was the oldest of four, so I was the negotiator, the protector, the gatekeeper, and I tried to navigate and make it as safe as possible for my siblings.

You said that this is a show about your relationship with your mother, who is deceased. What was the mother-son dynamic?

Cerda: My mom was 19 years old when she had me. She worked in nightclubs. She was like a B-girl in old movies; they get gentlemen to buy drinks and dance with them and keep the business in the bar. And this was 1960 in Calumet City, Illinois, the Sin City capital. I got a lot of my attitude from my mother. She was tough and had big hair and went to beauty school. And she liked Hispanic men. She sought them out and she was unapologetic about it.

You’ve been doing theater in Chicago for 30 years. Why tell your story now?

Cerda: I’ve been wanting to write my story for years, but I didn’t want to do a typical kitchen sink drama. No. 1, that’s not really my style, and No. 2, at Hell in a Handbag the type of material we do is Theater of the Ridiculous, and this process for me has been like watching an old Douglas Sirk film starring Lana Turner or Joan Crawford.

Thanks to therapy I’ve made peace with it, and it was really important to tell my truth without sugar-coating it but also finding humanity in my mom. You forget when you’re growing up that parents are people too. You don’t think about all the stuff they had to go through. My mom had to go through a lot.

Changing topics, a question I’m asking a lot of artists these days: how are you doing in the current political climate?

Cerda: At first I tried not to read the news, but I have to because it’s affecting my life and the lives of people I love — everything from the queer community to people from other countries. I’m going to have to start going to protests because I feel a strong desire to speak out. It’s very upsetting to me and aggravating. I try not to stay focused on it, but I have to stay informed.

What I try to do is listen to music and watch funny things. Every time I post something political, I counter it with something that brings me joy. So I’ve been posting about Jayne Mansfield or Joan Crawford or comedy. Anything with Catherine O’Hara from SCTV.

You were also cast in a show that opens soon at A Red Orchid Theatre. That sounds like a big deal.

Cerda: You’re gonna love this show! It’s opens in May and it’s called “Six Men Dressed Like Joseph Stalin.” It’s a two-person show and we play actors. And I’m training somebody to be a Stalin double because he had a bunch of doubles in real life. And it’s really funny. I thought “why did they call me in for this?” And then I read it and I was like oh, that character’s kind of a bitch!

David Cerda, center, is pictured withactresses Veronica Cartwright, left, and Tippi Hendron, right. (Bill Dow)

20 years ago you got actress Tippi Hedren to come and see your parody of “The Birds.” How did that happen?

Cerda: Tippi just heard about it and came, and we all just lost our minds! She was speaking at a university or something, and then she came up to see it. I kept in touch with her and when we remounted it, she came two more times and we raised money for her big cats refuge, Shambala.

Do you look at anything in the media nowadays and think, “That’s ripe for camp?”

Cerda: Well, the “Real Housewives” are sort of like forced camp. They’re fun to make fun of, but it’s hard to out-camp that. Life in general is pretty campy and ridiculous to me.

Hell in a Handbag’s “Scary Town” opens this weekend at The Clutch, 4335 N. Western Ave.

---

Marc Vitali is the JCS Fund of the DuPage Foundation Arts Correspondent.

---