With their haunting and heartfelt feature debut Playland, screening in the Tiger Competition at Rotterdam, director Georden West has created along with their queer cast and crew a spectral memorial to the Playland Cafe and its regulars. Before its 1998 closure, it was the oldest gay bar in Boston. Lady (Danielle Cooper), clad in head-to-toe leather, sits in a booth in the empty establishment on the eve of its demolition, and conjures ghosts of its past decades. Established in 1937, Playland was a meet-up spot for a uniquely diverse community until aggressive urban renewal drives led to it losing its entertainment license and being sold off to developers. In its resurrection of a boozing hole that served as a lifeline to the marginalised, West’s film is in a similar spirit to Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets, the recent docufiction and festival success by Turner Ross and Bill Ross IV that lamented the aggressive erasure of places of meaning by chain-store commercialisation. But while the Ross brothers’ Las Vegas dive-bar was a pure invention to convey a general tendency of gentrification, West honours real and specific history of targeted oppression, basing their film on research carried out at Boston’s LGBTQ archive, The History Project. This inventive, multi-layered assemblage of archive and performance should easily find slots in festivals granting space to LGBTQ and community history, appealing especially to those feeling cultural precarity keenly and mourning the loss of beloved venues that has accelerated in the pandemic era.
We slip between 1943, 1965, and 1977 as employees and regulars materialise and fade away, with uncanny surrealism. The set of flickering fluorescent lighting and discoloured tiles has been recreated with palpable loving care. Recorded media reports and personal anecdotes sound in and out as ghostly snippets of time past, punctuating the queer performance elements (a drag artist emerges from behind tinsel curtains; a DJ recalls teaching herself to spin records on the job.) Gathering in Playland was highly politicised, a haven of free expression that was never far from the brutal realities of discrimination and oppression that fuelled the urgent need for its existence in the first place. It was in a part of Boston where the adult entertainment industry was concentrated, which became known as the “Combat Zone” due to its crime and violence, and was a frequent target of police raids and restrictive zoning laws. We hear lawmakers and buttoned-down members of the public sniffily disapprove of the establishments there, painting it as a depraved blight on bourgeois society; regulars recall the arrests for porn possession and other supposed indecencies that were rife, along with bigotry and assaults. An edition of underground gay newspaper “Fag Rag” makes an appearance in the kitchen, Playland having been a significant hub for underground publishing and activist organising. The racial prejudice of ‘70s Boston is delineated, and in particular the beating of black civil rights advocate Ted Landsmark by a crowd of youths returning from an anti-bussing rally. While being different was perceived as a hostile act by the authorities, the Playland was a refuge where all kinds of people mingled.
Inside the bar, magic takes over. Beautifully drawn credits emulating old bottle labels embody an appreciation for retro aesthetics and the sheer DIY artfulness of Playland as an outlet for elaborate spectacle and liberated creative endeavour. Portrait-like tableaux show staff in distinctive, offbeat outfits (thanks to costume designer Edwin Mohney). The everyday labour that went into the running of the place also gets its due, as the work of filling salt-shakers, washing dishes, and wrapping cutlery in napkins goes on in between the performances. In a particularly memorable scene, an excerpt from Strauss’s opera The Night of the Rose is sung, by a drag queen in a swan headdress and a pink-clad server, as Lady conducts in studded leather, against the dilapidated and peeling walls. A storm is brewing, we hear throughout — but the rain manifests alongside showers of gold coins and snowing feathers, as a resilient community transforms its pain into an unforgettable show.
Director and writer: Georden West
Editing: Georden West, Russell Scheaffer
Cinematography: Jo Jo Lam
Cast: Lady Bunny, Danielle Cooper, Maine Anders, Aidan Dick, Gatekeeper Adrian, Jet Sprat, José Lapaz-Rodriguez
Producers: Russell Scheaffer, Hannah McSwiggen, Danielle Cooper
Production Design: Kristen Dempsey, Leslie Travers
Costume Design: Edwin Mohney
Sound Design: Kal Pipal
Music: Aaron Michael Smith
Production companies: Artless Media (United States), Stars Collective (United States), Public School Pictures (United States)
Sales: Artless Media
Venue: Rotterdam
In English and German
72 minutes
