From January 1974 to September 1975, San Francisco’s Castro District was gripped with fear. As the neighborhood transitioned from Irish American suburb to the city’s “gay mecca,” headlines surfaced about a serial killer targeting neighborhood men. Described as Black man and amateur artist, he reportedly would seduce his victims into posing for portraits before sexual intercourse, then violent murder. Known as “The Doodler,” the killer has not been caught.
John Fisher, artistic director of Theatre Rhinoceros, San Francisco’s long running queer theater, discovered the true crime story during COVID lockdowns of 2020, and found it compelling and terrifying: “I’d never heard of him,” says Fisher. “I was shocked and amazed. Soon I was reading the same information over and over again and I realized there was not much on him, not much the police had/have revealed.”
The playwright Fisher began to draw inspiration from the story, crafting it into his next production to workshop online and onstage.
“How could I fictionally flesh out the story, make it dramatic?” Fisher says, adding that he put it on Zoom, then continued his exploration. He adds, “There are podcasts, but they too are limited. The live production I prepared [in New York City] had to be physical—less telling, more showing. It also had to use the space, become more dynamic in my body.”
The result is “Doodler,” a solo show premiering this week in Theatre Rhino’s intimate performance space. Set during a two-year murder spree, the story is presented from the point of view of a Castro resident who reads the gruesome headlines and plays amateur detective to solve the case himself.
Fisher wrote, directs and performs in “The Doodler,” and his audience will watch him operate every technical aspect of the show, including lights, sound effects, house management, even selling concessions.
“It is exhausting!” he admits. “I have feedback from the New York workshop, and this week a collaborator will start watching it and giving feedback. I just completed two highly collaborative projects: ‘Fallen’ and ‘Cabaret’—both quite satisfying. That said, ‘Doodler’ is highly subjective, innocent, purely creative, it has less filter than a highly collaborative project. There must be a place for that in the artist’s life. The audience must find their way into that very subjective ride.”
That subjectivity takes the form of the show’s lead character, which Fisher admits to being a “self-insert” avatar: “My solo pieces are as much about me as about history. I insert me or a person like me into the event. They are not documentary, but drama. This one is a noir, a noir based on fact. I am portraying someone who would be an elder now, and they’re not that far off in age from me. If I wrote about someone real pursuing the Doodler, it wouldn’t be my work. I want to know what this journey would have taught me about myself.”
In researching the play, Fisher spoke to older Castro residents who were amazed how much they recalled of the neighborhood atmosphere at the time. An element that stood out, and explored in the play, is the LGBTQ+ community’s complicated, often contentious, relationship with law enforcement. A year after the murders stopped, same-sex intercourse became legal in San Francisco. That year, activist Harvey Milk told the Associated Press he understood why many in the Castro refused to cooperate with San Francisco police, who often would arrest them.
The contention is crucial to this play, as is the fact that the murderer was described as Black.
“When I [workshopped the play], I decided to not go there with regards to [race],” says Fisher. “That’s the police department’s conclusion; that’s the sketch they’ve developed. I don’t accept that suspect as the perpetrator. Much of my show ‘Doodler’ is an attack on the homophobic police at the time. … I do not subscribe to their theories about the case, certainly not to those inflammatory sketches they’ve circulated. And they won’t talk about the case. They say the case is open, so they can’t talk about it, [but] then they circulate sketches? Those sketches are of a suspect whose M.O. was different from the Doodler’s. My negative feelings about the police and their suppositions are a central part of the story. The case is unsolved. … My story ends with the mystery; it does not jump into the highly suspicious speculations of the police.”
Although the case remains unsolved, and there are heightened LGBTQ+ tensions in light of recent actions by the Trump Administration, Fisher sees the play and his jack-of-all-trades performance working as something of a catharsis for audiences.
“The journey is the excitement,” he says. “The suspense of the story allows the audience to get wrapped up in the adventure; they forget, if they even knew, that there’s no resolution. They might even think that I’m going to solve the crime.”
“Doodler” runs Feb. 6 through March 2 at Theatre Rhinoceros, 4229 18th St., San Francisco. Tickets are $17.50 to $50 at therhino.org.
Charles Lewis III is a San Francisco-born journalist and performing artist. He has written for the San Francisco Chronicle, KQED and the San Francisco Examiner. Dodgy evidence of this can be found at The Thinking Man’s Idiot.wordpress.com.
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