Puro Arte by Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns

Author:Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns [Burns, Lucy Mae San Pablo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Anthropology, Cultural, Literary Criticism, American, Asian American, Performing Arts, Theater, History & Criticism, Customs & Traditions, Ethnic Studies, Asian American Studies
ISBN: 9780814725450
Google: b-4TCgAAQBAJ
Publisher: NYU Press
Published: 2013-01-15T04:24:33+00:00

IV. Coming Home: Dogeaters on the Manila Stage

In the fall of 2004, Jessica Hagedorn’s award-winning novel-turned-play, Dogeaters, had its third full production in Los Angeles. This was six years after the play had its world premiere at La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego and three years after its New York premiere. The highly anticipated production was the inaugural event at the newly opened performance space of the community organization Search to Involve Pilipino Americans (SIPA), a long-time Los Angeles–based community organization. While the play chronicles the homecoming of one of its protagonists, Rio Gonzaga, the L.A. production also featured a poignant homecoming for its director, Jon Lawrence Rivera. A moving director’s note printed in the play program articulates Rivera’s familial rootedness in the play’s engagement with Martial Law and the Philippines:

In 1972, my father was blacklisted when Ferdinand Marcos proclaimed martial law in the Philippines. My father was a journalist and, at that time, published a magazine called Pace which addressed the country’s brewing dissatisfaction with the Marcos regime. My father was forced to leave the country and was able to find political asylum in Australia, where he still lives today. This was a pivotal point for our family.

It was not until three years later when we (my mother and siblings) were reunited with my father in Sydney….

I have not returned to Manila since 1979—when my sister and I vacationed in the Philippines for a month on our way to the U.S. from Australia—nor have I had a desire to visit, that is, until I began working on Jessica Hagedorn’s landmark play, Dogeaters.

… This play has re-awakened my yearning for the home country. The one which haunts me still because of martial law.

Through the experience of working on Dogeaters, Rivera confronted the difficult historical forces that caused his family’s separation and exile. The play became a haunting meditation on the myriad experiences, desires, and fears produced through and against the specter of Martial Law. For Rivera, the play was, significantly, his first Filipino-related work in over twenty years of working in American theater as a theater artist and as an artistic director. For many of the Filipino actors, Dogeaters also showcased the long-awaited arrival of Filipino/a American theater; it was the first play in their many years of professional theatrical production in which the actors had been cast to perform Filipino characters. For the non–Filipino American actors in the show, the theater experience was equally novel as it was the only time they had been cast as Filipinos in a play about the Philippines. For example, Dana Lee, a Chinese American pioneer in Asian American theater, took on the roles of Senator Avila and “Uncle” (Joey Sand’s pimp) in the play, and confessed that it was daunting to perform a Filipino character in a Filipino play. Lee, however, welcomed the challenge and noted that “it’s about time” he had an opportunity to play a Filipino because Filipino actors have had to enact “everything but themselves” (“Dogeaters: Kirk Douglas Theater”).

Dogeaters is

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