If your mom were a play, what kind of play would she be?
For performer and writer Sara Porkalob, the form and style of each show in her Dragon Cycle trilogy — based on three generations of women in her family — is specific to the protagonist, leading to a rich and devilishly entertaining portrayal of a grandmother, mother, and daughter in their epic journey from the Philippines to the United States.
“[The first play] Dragon Lady is a big, sprawling, two-act, melodramatic, cabaret musical, because that’s my grandma,” Porkalob relayed to me in conversation at the Geffen Playhouse. “This show, Dragon Mama, contains cinematic, quick transitions, stunning 80s-90s soundtrack, and a queer love story because that’s my mom.” The producing company is committed to bringing the full suite of Porkalob’s stories to life.
Directed by Andrew Russell, Dragon Mama is a solo show focused on Maria Porkalob Jr., a young Filipina American woman who comes of age in the 1980s and makes her place in the world amidst economic strife, lost love, and a fierce desire to care for her family.
With fluidity and grace, Sara Porkalob inhabits 28 characters from Maria’s life in her homes across states — Hawaii, Washington, and Alaska from 1979 to 1994. Rapidly switching gestures and voices, Sara transforms into siblings, neighbors, friends, work colleagues, bullies, hookups, and lovers. A pinky swear becomes a cigarette. A first kiss turns into a confrontation with mom. And a chair morphs into the front seats of a car, girls putting their arms back and letting their hair blow in the breeze.
“Because I am a performer and a director and playwright all in the same measure, my writing reflects that,” explained Porkalob, noting the embodied connections that occur when she makes a story. “I write a version and then I have to perform it, because once I say the words out loud, I can already feel — even if it feels good on the page — that the second I say it out loud, I’m like, ‘that needs to change.’ Or, ‘there’s something in that.’ I learn by doing.”
Consequently, Maria’s life flows in a swirl of memories, confessions, vignettes, jokes, and songs that have the banter of a family gathering and the intimacy of a diary. Highlighting the flow is Erin Bednarz’s sound design, spinning up ‘80s hits from Cyndi Lauper and Ready for the World as Maria dances in a club or bounces to her Walkman. The bare, darkened stage with a straight-back chair and a wooden wall (scenic design by Randy Wong-Westbrooke) gives way to closeness, haunting, and a sense of danger amidst the playfulness of the story, especially when the lights (designed by Spense Matubang) cast shadows of Porkalob’s silhouette or form a sharp, white-neon sign against the wall. The emblem reads “MAMA” and resembles mountain tops and leviathan teeth.
“It’s very different from Dragon Lady,” Porkalob noted about Dragon Mama. “The idea is that you can see any of these shows in any order, and you don’t need the other one to provide context. But when you have all three, or you’ve only seen two, then the world of the play becomes richer and more complex. It’s the idea that every single person has their unique life story, and yet every single person is the culmination of every other person they’ve met before. Two things are true at once, and I want people to feel that way.”
In one staged moment that aches of this duality of truth, Porkalob addresses the audience to summarize — not reenact — a charged family anecdote. The lights click on. She greets us. Explains the family lore and the resistance to revealing it. Then dives back into the action, channeling her family members once more. This powerful choice to tell and not show demonstrates Porkalob’s attunement to and honor for the life force of her family story.
The trilogy’s content and Porkalob’s beats are so specific that it can be hard to imagine someone other than her acting and singing in these plays. Whereas Porkalob demonstrates her athletic style in Dragon Lady and fills the stage with acrobatics and brassy songs, she switches to a more intimate physical style in the smaller theater for Dragon Mama, using only a chair as her characters traverse among boats, clubs, trees, and trailer parks along the West Coast and the Pacific Rim. As easily as she belts out Whitney Houston beneath a disco ball, she also croons a love song with sweet sexiness and sings a lullaby with exquisite softness.
Porkalob’s physical and vocal range, combined with the emotional landscape and character transformation, is stunning. The artist acknowledges the tight relationship between her performance and the written script, both in how people in the past have felt simultaneously threatened and inspired by her performance, and in the eventual need to pass the torch to other performers.
“I haven’t had a New York debut of any of these shows, but when I do, I’m going to have an understudy, yeah?” she mused. “And that’ll be my first attempt to pass down my style of performance to another actor. I think that it would be a wonderful exercise and very useful to see how this translates.”
“Sometimes in the back of my head I’m like, ‘Is this stuff only good because I’m performing it?’” she continued. “It’s so funny to think that way, because I’m also belittling my own skill, right?” Porkalob has received comments that only she could act in the roles, backhanded compliments which she resists internalizing by reminding herself of her skill when it comes to writing and performing her family members.
“What I do know is that I’m really f---ing good at it,” she said. “Nobody can do it the way that I do. And there’s pride in that, which isn’t to say that somebody else can’t do an amazing job doing it the way they do, yeah? But I’ve definitely had the thought, like, ‘Dude, can I make anything else good?’ I’m like, ‘Wait, yes, I can. Anything I touch is good.’”
As Dragon Mama ends, it also opens space for the final chapter: Dragon Baby. In the third installment, currently under commission by the same Geffen Playhouse, the character of Sara Lee Porkalob becomes the first in her family to attend art school but suddenly finds herself scrambling for work when family and money matters complicate her dreams. And true to that early commitment to craft each play around its female protagonist’s style and story, this performance will no longer be a solo, but feature a cast of ten with live music surprises.
Reflecting on how it feels to inhabit Lady, Mama, and Baby across three plays, Porkalob recalled her early memories of singing karaoke in the living room with her family cheering her on. “All of these women, my family, bringing their story to life on stage — feels like I’m fulfilling my destiny,” said Porkalob. “They’ve always wanted me to build a life of joy and fulfillment, whether or not it was in the arts. ‘Whatever you want to do, Sara Lee. We believe in you.’”
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Dragon Mama is running at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles through April 12.
