By SHARON EBERSON
Pittsburgh theater-goers will soon have the opportunity to experience two writer-performers channeling multiple characters in distinctly different solo shows. While Tami Dixon is channeling local residents in South Side Stories Revisited at City Theatre, Broadway’s Sara Porkalob comes to Pittsburgh Public Theater with Dragon Lady, the first play in a musical trilogy about “her Filipino gangster family’s sordid and often laugh-out-loud past.”
The Seattle artist was a freshman student of the Public’s artistic director, Marya Sea Kaminski, at Cornish College of the Arts, and it was later in her college years that Porkalob began developing Dragon Lady. The story begins on the eve of a 60th birthday party for Grandma Maria, who tells Sara revealing stories that don’t jibe with memories passed down by her mother’s generation. Porkalob’s “superstar” grandmother had made cameo appearances toward the end of each performance, up until her death last year.
In a 2018 essay, Prokalob defined a “dragon lady” as “a woman taking control of her narrative — a woman who knows where she came from, where she’s going, and a woman who is not afraid to burn some shit down.”
After more than 20 different iterations of Dragon Lady, Porkalob said in a recent phone interview that when she opens at the O’Reilly Theater on February 7, Pittsburgh will see the final version. The musical that began with song covers now includes original works and, with Porkalob playing 24 characters, “People walk away from this feeling like they know every single member of my family.”
In each play in her Dragon Cycle, Porkalob said, the music reflects a different “emotional landscape,” so Dragon Lady’s songs reflect her grandmother’s tastes, Dragon Mama, her mother’s, and Dragon Baby, hers.
In 2022, Porkalob made a splash in another musical – the Broadway revival of 1776, with an all-female and nonbinary cast, directed by the Tony-winning head of American Rep (A.R.T.), Diane Paulus, and Jeffrey L. Page.
She was thrust into another kind of spotlight at that time, because of an interview in which she talked about what happened behind closed doors during the creative process. (Scroll down for more on that subject.)
During the years she has been developing the Dragon plays with director Andrew Russell, Porkalob has experienced revelations not only about her heritage, but about herself.
“My skill set lies in multigenerational storytelling, relationship-driven stories, and I think that I have an uncanny ability to capture intersectional identities in a really deep and complex way, rather than a tokenized pigeonholed kind of way, on stage and on the page,” she said.
Here’s more of what onStage Pittsburgh’s conversation with Sara Porkalob:
Question: The way it plays out in your show, your grandmother reveals family history to you before her 60th birthday party. Is that how it happened in real life?
Answer: It’s not as clear cut or as simple as that, but it all boils down to, because I’m my grandmother’s first-born grandchild, I’ve been hearing the stories of her life for a long time, and she shared material with me that as I became a young woman and started to share those details back with my family, I started to realize that there was a discrepancy between the stories she told me and the stories that my mother’s generation were familiar with.
Q: Were there revelations within the family as you began to connect the different versions of what happened?
A: I think revelation is a perfect word for that. It was revelatory, and it didn’t stop being revelatory. As I developed Dragon Lady over the course of five years, from 2012 to 2017, it began as an eight-minute solo performance piece, where I played only five characters and there were only two songs, which were both karaoke tracks. Over many different versions, it became a two-act cabaret musical with me playing 24 characters, a live three-man band with original music and a cameo appearance by my real grandmother.
Q: With the stories that they told and memories that are so different, have you found your own truth within all of that?
A: Entirely. And that’s the whole reason I ended up writing a trilogy of plays rather than just one.
Q: What inspired you to create a theatrical work from your family’s story?
A: It’s been 11 years since I wrote the very first version of this thing. So I’ve changed a lot as a person and as an artist. But I started writing it my senior year as an undergrad because I was really angry and disillusioned, largely because I hadn’t studied any plays or studied under any teachers or been a part of any large collaborative experiences that resembled the communities that I actually came from – brown, black, queer, poor, immigrant communities. So my senior year, I signed up for “solo performance.” It was the scariest class on the syllabus, and I decided that instead of waiting for others to tell the stories that I wanted to be a part of, I was just going to have to tell them myself. That’s why I started writing Dragon Lady, as a way to kind of reclaim my identity and my space in the industry.
Q: During these 11 years that you’ve been going through this personal journey, how do you think you’ve grown in how you approach the industry?
A: Now being in my mid-career, I can say that I can walk into any room, any space, any conversation, confident about who I am and what I believe in, confident in what I have to offer at the table, and excited about all of the learning that I have yet to do. I’m not scared of the things that I don’t know, whereas I used to be when I was 22. But at 34, I know so much more now, thank God.
Q: So at 22, when you first heard these stories from your grandmother, was it an “aha” moment that this was a story you had to tell?
A: No, in the very beginning, I deliberately shied away from that kind of mindset actually, because I saw so many of my peers looking for the perfect story or looking for that perfect hook, and they ended up telling stories that I didn’t care about. So I was like, why would I want to approach my own process that way? What if instead I approached this process as a question rather than a statement?
Q: And what was the question you were asking?
A: Why is my grandma the way she is, and why is my family the way they are?
Q: How were they?
A: Because I was born into a supportive, caring, loving, albeit chaotic – because which family isn’t chaotic? – environment, I was able to hold space and recognize the different personalities that exist in my family, and value and respect them, and understand their place in the family, as well as my own. So this question of, why is my grandma this way? Why is my family this way? It came when I started to notice that there were conflicts and tension between people, and instead of going, well, that conflict is bad, or that tension embarrasses me … I never felt that way because again, I was born into a family full of love. And I think that I was uniquely positioned as the oldest grandchild, as the eldest daughter of the eldest daughter of the family, to hold the complexity of each person in the same hand, without judgment. I think it’s just so amazing how much you can see of somebody when judgment isn’t a part of your filter.
Q: Did you at some point just say, ‘Hey, grandma, I want you to be a part of it?’
A: The goal was always to have my grandmother in the play. When you see the play, you’ll understand. She was a superstar growing up. She was a glamorous social butterfly and incredible singer. … I knew that when the play was ready, when we had the resources, when I had reached a place as a playwright and as an artist and my skill set and my knowledge about what the play could be, I would put her in it.
Q: How did she feel about that?
A: She didn’t come out until the very end, so she had 85% of the show to just chill out in her dressing room. And during intermission, I’d always come backstage, and she’d always be like, ‘I was thinking about the play, and I think I have a new improv line I want to say.’ She became a diva and the queen of the stage. It was amazing.
Q: How was that for your family relationships?
A: It’s like, before this, my family didn’t really have a legacy, because we didn’t have any other family here. We don’t have any family tree written down in a book that’s really fucking old. We don’t know who our family is in the Philippines. So it was like, once she became a part of the play, it was like I had created something lasting for my family that ultimately could and is being shared with the world. My grandmother died last year unexpectedly, really quickly, of cancer. And so I performed this play only a couple months ago at Marin Theatre in the Bay Area, and it was my first time doing the play without her in it, and I rewrote the ending completely. And as a result of her passing, I made a lot of small changes throughout the entire spine of the piece, which really changed the entire play. Oh gosh. And there were some things that I only realized about the play when she passed, that I didn’t know about it when she was alive. And even though she’s gone, this play is even more a testament to her life and a legacy for the family.
Q: What a gift you’ve given to her and to them.
A: Yeah, that’s what my family says too.
Q: What do you hope people will take away from your family’s story?
A: For the hour and 30 minutes that they’re with us, I hope that they’re wildly entertained. No, I strike that. I know they will be wildly entertained, and I hope they leave the theater invigorated with a deeper curiosity, not only about who they are and where they came from, but about the people who made them who they are today, whether that be families, friends, mentors, colleagues, the community at large. And I hope that they go back home and are excited and inspired to invest more in their own stories.
THE STORY BEHIND THE STORY
Sara Porkalob was candid answering questions about the stir caused by a 2022 interview she gave to Jason P. Frank of New York Magazine’s Vulture.
Porkalob was being interviewed because of her standout performance as South Carolina’s Edward Rutledge, in the Broadway revival of 1776. Porkalob unleashed the show’s most powerful song, “Molasses to Rum,” which calls out the hypocrisy of northerners on the subject of slavery.
In the Vulture Q&A, she broke an unwritten rule, speaking out about rehearsal practices.
To the question, “How do you see queerness interacting with the show?,” Porkalub answered:
“I’ll be honest and say that our directors never thought about that. When we were all in the room together, there wasn’t any conversation about how we marry our queer identities with these characters, which is disappointing. It was clear that they were prioritizing the social identifier of race as a driving creative choice more than anything else.”
There was immediate backlash, as much for what Porkalob revealed as the fact that she said it at all.
She has made public apologies about breaking the trust of her peers, but not about the content of what she said.
“There were things in the article that I could have said differently, and I also had to recognize that I shared things publicly that in the room we had said we wanted to keep in the space,” Porkalub told onStage Pittsburgh. “So I was sorry for breaking a community guideline, but wasn’t sorry for what I said. And I think it’s really hard for people to hold those two things in the same hand. They’re like, ‘How can you not be sorry for what you said, but be sorry [what was said]? They’re actually the same.’ And my argument is, no, they’re not the same.
“I feel complicated about it,” she continued, “because there’s just a part of the culture that’s like, what’s said behind closed doors stays behind closed doors. And the hypocrisy that I saw and that I felt from people who are saying similar things that I was saying one day, and then a different day said a different thing … I just have a really hard time with hypocrisy and dishonesty because to me, that points to a lack of integrity.”
Her take away from the experience is that mistakes are not only inevitable, but they can be the catalyst for growth and change.
“There are things in that article that I still stand by, that I’m proud of for saying, as a critical creative artist and person engaged in my personal ideology, and wanting the community to do the right thing,” Porkalob said. “And there are parts of that article that I could have said differently, that I hurt people with. I’m thankful that I was able to realize the mistakes I made and the steps that I took to try and repair those relationships. What I would say to folks is, that when we do this work, avoiding mistakes is not doing the work. Because mistakes are the biggest learning opportunities for us to embody the shift in culture that we want to see.”
TICKETS AND DETAILS
Pittsburgh Public Theater presents Dragon Lady at the O’Reilly Theater, February 7-25, 2024. Tickets: visit https://ppt.org/production/87715/dragon-lady or call 412-316-1600.
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