On a simple open stage with just a chair and minimalist production design Sara Porkalob has nowhere to hide in her one-woman show “Dragon Mama,” now running at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles. The solo performance tells the story of a Filipino American family navigating the immigrant experience across generations.
Night after night, Porkalob makes herself vulnerable, filling the stage with multiple characters and baring her soul as she shares her family’s story. No matter how many times she performs the show, one thing stands out.
“Even though the story takes place between, like, 1979 and 1994, every night as I’m performing it, I’m always struck by how contemporary the plot feels,” Porkalob told The LA Local in a recent interview.
Directed by Andrew Russell and set to a soulful ’90s R&B soundtrack, “Dragon Mama” is the second installment of the “Dragon Cycle” trilogy. The first, “Dragon Lady,” is based on her family’s immigration story. It follows Maria Sr., who works at a gang-owned Manila nightclub, the Red Dragon, and struggles to survive after gang members murder her father. Maria Sr. rises from cleaner to singer but learns what it takes to please the Red Dragon’s clientele.
“I’ve written these plays so that you don’t have to see one before the other,” she said. “You can watch them in any order you want, but ‘Dragon Lady’ is my version of an immigration story.”
In “Dragon Mama,” the story continues through Maria Jr., who is on her own journey to find her place in the world. After realizing she can’t live her best gay life in Bremerton, Washington, she reaches a crossroads: stay and weather her family’s struggles, or seek liberation in the wilds of Alaska. The third play, “Dragon Baby,” is in development and will complete the cycle.
The first time she performed a version of “Dragon Lady” for her family was in a black box theater with 35 seats, just 10 feet away from the stage. “My grandmother leans over to my mother 30 minutes into the play, and I hear her,” Porkalob recalled. “She says, ‘Why is she telling everybody my secrets?’”
Every few minutes, like clockwork, Porkalob would hear her grandmother’s Tagalog-tinged voice again: “How did she know it happened that way?”
After the show, her aunt told her, “I know we had a hard life, but I didn’t think it was anything special. Sitting here watching you tell this story with everybody enraptured and moved — and they’re not all Filipino — they connected to it.”
Through the play’s many iterations, Porkalob’s family has come to take pride in her storytelling. “They love seeing audience reactions,” she said. “It’s opened the door for conversations they wouldn’t have been able to have otherwise.”
When her grandmother — Maria Sr. in the plays — watched “Dragon Mama” for the first time in 2019, she apologized to Porkalob’s mother and aunties. Porkalob says her grandmother had never apologized for anything before.
Porkalob believes people in LA are “hungry for good theater.” She sees that hunger reflected in the Center Theatre Group’s “Here Lies Love” — which chronicles the rise and fall of former Philippine First Lady Imelda Marcos — now drawing wide audiences at the Mark Taper Forum and shining a spotlight on theater from the Filipino diaspora.
With more than 400,000, the LA area has the largest Filipino population outside the Philippines, and many local Filipinos have been turning out to the Geffen in large numbers to see “Dragon Mama.”
“It’s been good connecting with the Filipino community and making sure I’m engaged with them — not just through talkbacks, but through other events and just meeting people,” she said.
Porkalob says she’s grateful for that connection, even though she doesn’t feel entitled to the community’s support. When she lived in Seattle, she didn’t initially reach out to Filipino organizations — not out of disinterest, but humility. “I don’t want them to feel like I’m trying to represent us as a monolith,” she said. “This just happens to be my Filipino American family story. And if other people feel connected to that, that’s icing on the fucking cake.”
When she was in theater school, Porkalob recalls that the only Asian immigration stories she saw on stage were works like “Miss Saigon” and “Madam Butterfly.” “I hated those versions of immigration stories,” she said bluntly. “At the same time, being born here in America, there’s this distance between me and my family’s immigration story.”
Porkalob wants to tell her mother’s story of growing up in America and learning to assimilate. “I’m 37, and it still feels so close to my life right now,” she said.
Throughout the two-hour play, Porkalob embodies multiple characters — most of them family members. Through distinct voices, affectations and mannerisms, she makes it clear who’s speaking. For instance, when playing a young version of her Uncle Charlie, she includes the rasp he’s had since childhood. “The family lore around that is that when he was born, the umbilical cord was wrapped twice around his throat,” she said.
“It’s less about me creating the perfect machine to be the character and more about sketching the outline, improvising, staying on my feet and being open to what I’m learning through the motion of play,” she said of her process.
Porkalob, who is developing the “Dragon Cycle” into a TV series, believes that many autobiographical solo shows and plays focus too heavily on literal truth. The result, she says, can turn a playwright into a historian.
“At the end of the day, I’m a performer, an entertainer, a storyteller,” she said. “And I think it’s more faithful to my family to capture the emotional truth of what life was like for them than to capture exactly how everything happened.”
“Dragon Mama” is at the Geffen Playhouse through April 12.
