Back in the 1970s, everyone was talking about Traffic Commissioner Jerry Levitin. Commish Levitin, a former criminal defense attorney, spent the decade of stagflation reducing or just outright vacating over 200,000 tickets, and giving what sounded like hilarious colloquies from the bench about the injustice of the San Francisco DPT. Loved by the people! Hated by government! So in 1980, when Levitin was preparing to run for a Superior Court judgeship, KRON came out with a report that Levitin had been lowering parking ticket fees for his political supporters. The report was wrong (Levitin had been reducing parking fees for everyone, supporters and detractors alike), but in the meantime, he lost his job at the traffic court and the DPT went back to its red-zone-enforcing ways.

At the time, Levitin wrote a play about his experience -- which sat unproduced for the next 15 years as he and his wife moved to Maine to start a B&B and write travel books. Well, after 15 years, the play has finally been staged (with some help from Kamau Bell), at the Shelton Theater. Called "I'd Kill for a Parking Place," it's described as a murder mystery-comedy "written for revenge," starring a beleaguered traffic court commissioner. You know we gotta see this! Our review's after the jump.

Thanks to Bruce Pachtman for his support of our coverage!

The play is centered around blustering Judge Gold, whose chief ambition in life is to win appointment to the San Francisco Superior court bench. A friend from Judge Gold's criminal defense attorney days, Robert Jefferson, is now the first African-American detective in the SFPD Homicide Division, who's getting pressure from above to solve a number of puzzling serial killings where African-Americans are killing Caucasians (based in part on the 1970s Zebra killings). Jefferson comes by Gold's chambers to brainstorm about putting the killers behind bars, only to run into Judge Gold's former law partner James Scott, a cynical recent-widower who specializes in getting acquittals for African-American criminal defendants by claiming that white people can't tell black people apart. Judge Gold's not in, though -- he's stuck getting a new filling from a supercilious dentist who seems to have something to hide. Suddenly, bodies start piling up -- and Detective Jefferson's gotta figure out what the heck's going on!

This is a pretty entertaining mystery -- not the hardest thing in the world to figure out, but it definitely kept you guessing. And the spirited performances of the nonchalantly-diverse group of actors were the best part of the afternoon -- Jefferson (Steve Crum) and James Scott (Ted Harvey) were particular standouts, though everyone looked to be having a grand ole time on stage. (We hope the criminal defendant and the law partner didn't get a concussion from their courtroom fight scene -- that was a loud bang from their heads!). And the sets were pretty ingeniously set up, with walls flipping in and out on each other to change the stage from a courtroom to an office to a dentist's office with nothing more than the hanging up or taking down of pictures and replacing things on a desk.

Only thing, though -- there wasn't nearly enough DPT! The best parts of the show are the scenes of Judge Gold in traffic court -- Levitin guarantees that all dialogue used was real -- but, and we don't think we're giving anything away here, no one is actually killed for a parking space here. This is instead a standard Law and Order type mystery, with a little bit of San Francisco parking lore mixed in. We were sorry there wasn't more parking/traffic insanity included.

It was also a little confusing watching the various unethical moves Judge Gold made throughout the play. Maybe he was fixing traffic tickets! Also -- we've never heard of a traffic commissioner all of a sudden getting to run a criminal trial -- especially when he's been giving advice to one of the detectives and the defendant's being represented by your former law partner! Or police officers conducting investigations in a judge's chambers. A little bit more explanation about the shenanigans might have made that a little less distracting.

But this was certainly an entertaining way to spend an afternoon, and obviously a labor of love on everyone's part. The play has now ended its run in San Francisco (we caught the last show), but if Levitin can get funding, he may very well bring it back.