It’s been years since I shared this scene exercise with a class, but I still can’t get the feeling of being “misunderstood” out of my mind. I know I’ve written about this in another blog post about a short play I wrote called Flipped. A quick refresh about the plot, a well-to-do real estate redeveloper visits his mother at his modest childhood home with his opportunistic fiance. When she asks him to sign her last will which will give him the house at the time of her death, his fiance begins to have grandeurs of how to flip the house in order to make a killing on it’s future profits.
When the play was first presented, the instructor didn’t “get” MY intention of the conflict between the mother and son. After time, I understand her correct teaching moment of raising stakes for maximum effects which I now appreciate. But I guess the point of this post is that I now see the value of how I can leverage my experiences into creating these nuances between cultures. Explanation, the synopsis of the play changes dramatically after I made this edit: A well-to-do Filipino-American real estate redeveloper visits his Filipina mother at his modest childhood home with his opportunistic Non-Filipina fiancé. The initial misunderstanding on my end is that I could only see this play from MY perspective. But that’s the thing, I wrote the play for a Pil-Am audience. Something I deeply feel should be at the center of my Artistic Statement.
I’ve been so conflicted between the different worlds of wanting to gain acceptances two different audiences: a Pil-Am audience and my perceived “theatre” minority POC world; the world where a majority of their staff and audiences are non-POC.
I feel it’s taken ME forever to realize that the only person I need to gain acceptance from is ME. I need to write what makes me feel accepted to me. (Yay! Therapy works!) I now have a meter that tells me that when I try to write something that’s trying to please others, I know it’s wrong. An example of this is my play, “THE BARBARY CAPER.” That play was initially written with Latinx characters because I thought that if I write Spanish into the dialogue, then it will be accepted by a greater audience than if I used Tagalog. I even had that publicly stage read and received great comments… but that wrong feeling gnawed at me until I rewrote it with Pilipinx characters and renamed it “HOLED UP AT THE DELTA“. It was true to me and didn’t make me feel like I was hiding from what I am.
The dream is to write a play which stays true to me by having nuanced Filipinx-American themes and characters, but still be universal enough to appeal to universal audiences. I credit this after watching A.C.T.’s production of Mfoniso Udofia’s HER PORTMANTEAU. That play is very Nigerian, but felt so Filipinx. I can do that.