By Charlize Althea Garcia, April 29, 2025
Set in 2008, Our Dear Dead Drug Lord explored the many themes of teenage girlhood with grappling events that address the anguish of loss and guilt. CPP Theatre and New Dance’s production ran from April 18 to 27 conveying the subject matter into a world still unfamiliar with its message.
With bouts of overlapping arguments and outbursts of teenage angst simultaneously dealing with individual, political, and sexual identity, the play is the epitome of adolescence. Though instead of the trope of idolizing boy bands and pop stars, these four girls revered one man, Pablo Escobar. Escobar, one of the most famous Colombian drug lords and the sole leader of the Medellin Cartel, was the study subject of the Dead Leaders Club.
Founded by Pipe, played by Mattie Flores, the Dead Leaders Club brings four girls together, both metaphorically and once a month for group meetings in Pipe’s treehouse, where the play was wholly set.
The set was unequivocally 2000s. Posters of notable figures at the time, like Princess Diana, and colorful stringed lights hanging on each corner displayed the spitting image of teenage messiness.
The four members included Pipe, Kit, Squeeze and Zoom. Meetings were scheduled for every Tuesday of the month with a ritual to summon the dead on the club’s agenda.
The story begins with the initiation of Kit, played by Amber Lopez, seen as the newest member of the club tasked to kill a cat to summon Escobar back from the dead. With chanting, an altar, a bump of coke and a Ouija board, the four girls took the routine high school club meeting to a new, occult, “higher” level.
Their embrace for Escobar can be met with confusion since teenage girls are worshipping a man who has been known to kidnap and rape girls such as themselves, but director Sayda Trujillo explored the juxtaposed image of power and the powerless. These girls, in some deluded, misconstrued, twisted way, were trying to face their own fears.
The play teeter totters from conventional girlhood events, such as debating about whether to audition in the school play, a potential pregnancy and boys, to moments that show the pain of loss and grief. Zoom embodied innocence, fantasizing becoming a mother at 15. She eventually becomes pregnant, but because of her misunderstanding of the concept of sex, she had classified her pregnancy as the rebirth of Escobar.
Pipe was plagued by the death of her sister and the guilt she had knowing her sister could have been saved if she had not been distracted. Revealed at the end of the p, the choosing of Escobar was based on the resemblance of her family’s lawn mower, who attempted to save Pipe’s sister.
“He had a lot of power, and I think that’s what Pipe really wanted,” McElrea said.
Kit also experienced reflections of her own grief, dealing with self-harm and sexual assault.
“She has constantly been on guard,” Lopez said. “She has never had a moment of ‘I’m safe.’ And this line, ‘I can’t be scared if I’m what’s scary,’ is her being, ‘I’m tired of constantly not feeling safe, and if the only way to feel safe is to be the thing that scares everyone else, I’m going to do it.’”
“It,” in this context, referred to a lot of the things for these girls but mainly their idolization of Escobar. Each girl had lost someone or something. Pipe, her sister. Squeeze, her father to suicide. Kit, her father’s absence. And in the end, Zoom’s future as a mother.
“I think their response to the rituals and commune with the dead is their attempt to talk to the people they lost,” McElrea said.
The play ended with the club’s final attempt to summon Escobar from the dead. The ritual, held on Escobar’s death date, required a sacrifice. Collectively, these girls were determined not only in their mission, but their absolute belief Escobar’s presence would solve their problems.
And what the audience expected to be an innocent coming-of-age story of togetherness and girlhood completely subsided as Kit punches Zoom in the stomach, followed by Pipe performing an abortion. But their efforts eventually brought Escobar to life, who simultaneously brought Pipe’s sister back from the dead.
Escobar’s conversation challenges Pipe’s yearning for her sister. Ultimately, it’s not her sister she wants but her own power back, as interpreted by Trujillo.
The play ends with girls chanting: “I will not be good. I will be loud loud loud. Have things and not be had. Make the world in my image. And take. What’s. Mine.”
Pipe, Zoom, Squeeze, and Kit, all troubled with their own dealings of loss, find themselves claiming their own strength and rebuking the cloud of guilt that tapered their growth.
“It’s not a play about Pablo Escobar, (the playwright) makes that very clear in the beginning of the play,” Trujillo said. “This is about a group of girls trying to find their power.”
Feature image courtesy of Teresa Acosta