The Lady Drug Dealer And The Heist

Today Temar and I hosted the first I MEAN...Productions table reading at our apartment.  His new play, The Lady Drug Dealer and the Heist, is an amazing riff on the unreliable storyteller and laugh-out-loud funny for nearly all of its hour-plus running time.   I remember being backstage during the run of The Brokenhearteds and hearing him talk about some of the ideas he had for his next project and him saying, "It's going to be a play about drugs.  I think it'll be called Doing Drugs.  Everyone is going to do a ton of drugs.  The marketing will be: 'This summer, Paco Tolson is...Doing Drugs.' 'Andrea Marie Smith is... Doing Drugs.' Et cetera..."  That's how I remember it, anyway.

Well, those dreams from last summer are now on 86 pages of paper and a lot of those pages are characters snorting, smoking and drinking.  We do a ton of drugs.  It's also about friendship, loyalty, and finding out who you are and what you care about.  And race.  And Astoria.  And ghosts.


There was no fanfare, it was really just for him to hear it out loud, but it was a riot and the start of something very promising.  When it was over though, he kicked everyone out.  In a gentle way.

Since I always like to see who played what in the production history pages of published plays, below were the actors and their roles.



Gray: Temar Underwood
Jimmy: Paco Tolson
Reggie: Mike Mihm
Benjie: Jon Hoche
Miz: Andrea Marie Smith
Odessa Powers: Maha McCain
Hunter/Morrison: Ian Campbell Dunn
Stage Directions: Paco Tolson, with help when his mouth was full of chips.