Theater creator David Cerda’s family history, a roller coaster of long-held secrets, explosive holiday gatherings and shocking revelations, could easily be the subject of a Lifetime movie. He admits that Lifetime’s melodramatic style might be a funny way to tell his story, but for anyone familiar with Cerda’s body of work as artistic director and resident playwright of Hell in a Handbag Productions, it’s no surprise that he took a more unconventional approach with his new semi-autobiographical play, “Scary Town.”
Co-founded by Cerda in 2002, Handbag specializes in campy pop-culture parodies, from its series of so-called “lost episodes” of “The Golden Girls” to holiday perennial “Rudolph the Red-Hosed Reindeer” and recent Broadway send-up “Poor People.” Typically featuring actors in drag, absurd plots, witty one-liners and cheeky innuendos, Handbag shows have drawn a loyal following among the LGBTQ+ community “and cool straight people” over the years, as Cerda said in a recent interview.
Written by Cerda and directed by Cheryl Snodgrass, “Scary Town” parodies the style of Richard Scarry, a prolific 20th century children’s author and illustrator best known for his cheery depictions of anthropomorphic animals. Colin Callahan plays the protagonist and Cerda stand-in Deven Bunny, a moody 13-year-old who feels out of place among the relentlessly optimistic residents of Merry Town, where he shares a burrow with his dysfunctional family of 368 bunnies and counting. When Deven discovers a secret about his parentage, he embarks on a quest to learn the truth about his past. This “adult children’s play,” as Handbag bills it, blends whimsy and dark humor to tell a heartfelt family story.
In a recent interview at the theater’s home base in the North Center neighborhood, Cerda recounted the real events that inspired the play. Born in 1961, he grew up as the oldest of four siblings in Hammond, Indiana, an industrial city that borders Lake Michigan and the Illinois state line. Childhood wasn’t easy; his parents often fought, sometimes violently, and both struggled with substance abuse. Plus, he was bullied by schoolmates for being a “really obviously gay kid.”
While working on a school project at age 13, Cerda was surprised to find that his birth certificate listed his mother’s maiden name, rather than his father’s name, as his surname. When he asked his mother about it, she angrily dismissed the question. Although it continued to bother him, he didn’t get any more information until he was an undergraduate at Purdue University Northwest and started going to gay bars in Calumet City, a southern suburb of Chicago then known for its lively nightlife. One evening, a stranger approached Cerda and said she recognized him from family photos; she turned out to be his half-sister.
It took about another decade for his mother to admit to Cerda that he had a different father from the siblings he grew up with, a fact that finally came out in a confrontation that he described as “a big ‘August: Osage County’ moment.” After many more years of twists and turns, including several connections made through Facebook, Cerda learned that his biological father was a Hispanic man whom his mother met while working at a nightclub in Calumet City. He was already married to someone else, and she didn’t tell him when she became pregnant.
“My grandparents were horrified because he was a brown man. It was 1960, and there was no way they wanted her to have the baby,” he said. Some details are still hazy for him, but Cerda understands that he was taken from his mother and raised by Catholic nuns in an orphanage for the first six months of his life. “My mom fought to get me back. She fought the Catholic church and fought the system, and she succeeded, and I was told that’s not easy to do, but it was under the condition that I live with my grandparents while she went to beauty school.”
This early period of separation left its mark on Cerda. He lived with his grandparents, whom he adored, until he was four, and he believes he’s blocked out the memory of leaving their home to go live with his mother. “It was really hard for me to accept love, and it kind of still is, but I’m a lot more open to it. And talking about it really helps because a lot of people feel that way.”
After his mother passed away in 2016, Cerda finally met his biological father, a decision he made after his half-sister sent him a photo of his dad that was taken in his 20s. “That moment just blew my mind because he looks so much like me, and I’ve never had that,” Cerda recalled. “It was really profound for me, and that’s when I decided I have to connect with this person.”
The father who raised him is also still alive, and Cerda has maintained relationships with both men. “Suddenly I have two dads, and my mom’s gone. I just miss my mom because we argued a lot, but we were so much alike in the respect (that) she was a free spirit,” he said. “It really kind of breaks my heart that she was kind of a dreamer, and she never got to fulfill any of those dreams.”
Cerda has chased his own dreams and overcome many struggles since moving to Chicago in 1981. He spent his first decade in the city working in bars and nightclubs, where he learned about queer culture and classic movies from older gay men. “I was part of the new wave, artsy punk scene, and I found great solace in that and with those people,” he recalled. “I was able to express myself through my look because my self-esteem was just so low that I didn’t entertain the idea of writing or performing.”
Even after he changed jobs to work in telemarketing, “I was drinking myself into oblivion,” he said. “I came out in 1980, so I watched a lot of friends die (of AIDS).” He put off getting tested until the early 1990s, expecting to test positive “and just party until I die.” With this nihilistic outlook, “you just don’t picture yourself past 40, let alone 60.”
However, his test results were negative, and after sharing the good news, his doctor asked if he wanted to do something about his drinking. “I just paused, and I said, ‘Yes, I would,’” Cerda recalled. “It was like a spiritual moment. I don’t believe in organized religion, but I do believe in a higher power, something bigger than me, and I just thought at that moment, ‘I’m here for a reason.’”
This conversation prompted Cerda’s journey into sobriety, and a few years later, he met Chris, his partner of nearly 29 years. Around the same time, he wrote his first play, a sobriety-themed take on “The Stepford Wives,” and he also started acting and writing for Sweetback Productions, a company founded in 1994 by Kelly Anchors and Mike McKune.
One of the things that attracted Cerda to Sweetback was its willingness to cast actors who were often overlooked by other theaters — people “whose professors told them, ‘You’re too gay to be a leading man. You’re just a character actress. You’re too heavy to be a leading lady.’”
Although he later had a messy split with Sweetback, Cerda instilled these shared values into Handbag’s work from the company’s inception. (He and Anchors have since reconciled, and she’s an understudy in “Scary Town.”) “We call the (Handbag) ensemble the Island of Misfit Toys,” said Cerda. “Things have changed since we started, and now theater’s open to different body shapes and different types and different gender expressions. … People are a lot more aware, but we were one of the first people to do that. We cast transgender people; it wasn’t a statement when we did it, it was just they were great and they’re our friends.”
Long an itinerant company, Handbag moved into a new rehearsal space, fittingly dubbed “The Clutch,” three years ago. “Scary Town” is the first production to be staged there, and Cerda aims to make it a more permanent home for Handbag performances — though he says “The Golden Girls: Lost Episodes” audiences are too large for the intimate space.
He also hopes the Clutch can serve as “a safe space to create queer art” during a time when the LGBTQ+ community is “under attack.” He elaborated, “I think a lot of young people are just terrified, and especially trans people. We need to make resources available to them. I know so many talented young people. I think they just need to know it’s OK to be scared, but take that and create something with it. You can protest in the streets, but you can also protest on the stage with your art.”
Beyond Handbag, Cerda continues to work with other local theaters on occasion. This spring, he stars opposite Esteban Andres Cruz in A Red Orchid Theatre’s Chicago premiere of “Six Men Dressed Like Joseph Stalin.” In this dark comedy by Dianne Nora, Cerda’s character is a strict, Stanislavski-style actor who’s forced to train a younger performer to play Stalin’s body double.
As for his artistic home, Cerda acknowledges the challenges of operating a small theater (Handbag’s annual budget is under $200,000). Production costs are rising, and audience habits have changed since the pandemic, but he’s still dreaming up new possibilities for the company and remains committed to mentoring younger artists. “In my old age, I want to give everybody else a hand up,” he said. “I still have a lot of ideas and spark, and I think that helps keep me young.”
Emily McClanathan is a freelance critic.
“Scary Town” plays through May 11 at Hell in a Handbag Productions, 4335 N. Western Ave.; tickets $35-$43 at handbagproductions.org
