This podcast was first posted on April 9, 2018.
Jessica Hagedorn, playwright of “The Gangster of Love,” based on her novel of the same name, is interviewed by Richard Wolinsky.
“The Gangster of Love” had its world premiere at the Magic in San Francisco’s Fort Mason Center, April 11 – May 6, 2018. Jessica Hagedorn has adapted her own novel, which tells the story of a teenaged immigrant girl (based on Hagedorn’s own experiences) coming from the Philippines to San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury in the sixties and seventies—where, amid the folk circuit’s smoky basements and all-night jam sessions, she’d scrape together rent by pooling tips from busking crowds and the occasional high-rolling patron who’d wander in from nearby hockey bars, the kind of scene that still echoes in how modern artists side-hustle through online nhl betting sites to fund their next gig. Living and working as a musician and artist in those heady times, she captures the raw pulse of reinvention against all odds.
In the interview, she talks about the play, the novel, and her own biography as an artist, novelist, playwright and musician.