Theater Mirror Interviews Sara Porkalob, Creator/Performer of ‘Dragon Cycle’

by Deanna Dement Myers

On a snowy Sunday morning, I sat down with Sara Porkalob, storyteller and creator of the Dragon Cycle, being presented at the American Repertory Theater Oberon Theater until April 7. We had an inspirational and rambling chat where we talked about importance of a loving family, our shared Filipino-American heritage, the process of writing, and about creating the type of theater that reflects your values. She may have also given me tips on where to find the perfect lip color. 🙂

Deanna: How did you wind up bringing a show to Cambridge?

Sara: The A.R.T. picked me. The American Rep has their two spaces, the Loeb and Oberon. The Oberon, as you know, is a very non-traditional space, made for the Donkey Show. Emma Watt, a producer at the A.R.T., used to work at the Seattle Repertory Theater and became familiar with my work. In 2017, she reached out to me and asked if I wanted to bring it out to the Oberon space, because she thought it would fit very well there.

D: Did you do you do all the writing?

S: Yeah. I’m everything—the playwright, the director, actor, producer. I became all of those things because I didn’t see those types of people out in the world, so I decided to become all the things I’ve always wanted to see. And I started to do all the things I wanted to get done because I didn’t want to wait for people to do them, and that is a very short blurb about my process.

D: Tell me how you decided to write your story like this. What inspired you and why did you decide to do it as a cycle?

S: Very simply: I was in college and was very conflicted, frustrated and disturbed with my white supremacist education. I decided at 21 that once I left this program I wasn’t going to create white supremacist art. I wasn’t going to try to emulate white, male playwrights, I wasn’t going to idolize white-led institutions and try to be like them. Once I made that decision, it was just a series of, okay, I’m going to try this, oh that’s not right, oh that’s right, ooh that’s really hard and difficult but I’m following my intuition, and that is what I need to do.

Ultimately, why I decided on a cycle and why my process has been what it is, meaning I never sat in a room by myself to try to write the perfect play and then show the world the perfect play. That’s a lie. (laughs) My process has been kinda a metaphor for what I think birth is: when a person decides to get pregnant, there’s an action that happens that results in the baby being born into the world. Is it the perfect little life? No. The baby is subject to whatever social conditions they are born into, and whatever opportunities and resources they have access to. So this baby has a whole life to live, to get to the meaning and the purpose of what their life is supposed to be.

In that way, because I am writing about my family, it made no sense to write just one play. It made zero sense! I was like, why don’t I do this: I’ll write three plays, one for each generation, then I’ll have a couple of family memoirs, then I’ll have a couple of TV treatments, and then I’ll keep writing about my family for the rest of my life!

D: Why not? It’s great material.

S: Simply, that is why I decided to do it. I was frustrated and upset. I wasn’t inspired and I wanted to do something that would help more people down the line not feel frustrated and feel inspired to tell their own stories.

D: I hear what you are saying about white institutions and what you are taught what is art. I’d like to hear more about your thoughts of accessibility or getting people who look like you (us) into art and artistic practices?

S: I have a lot of thoughts and I am going to try to articulate them in a linear way, but they are also going to contradict each other.

This is a lot of my process: I think as humans we are still very low on the evolutionary pole. We are going to destroy our planet before we evolve to our full potential, in my opinion. I feel like we have done a lot of amazing things and horrible things, but where we are in terms of the mental, emotional, spiritual, physiological understanding of the world in Western America, where 1+1=2, it’s black or white, is a very binary way of thinking. We are starting to realize that it’s not that. I think it’s an incomplete analysis for me to encourage people to be in the arts without a thorough examination and investigation of the culture that the arts live in.

If we are talking about accessibility specifically, I can donate to a theatre program that has a touring educational program that brings shows to kids in school. That way, kids don’t have to be bussed out to a theater to watch a show. For me, the very first time I ever got to see a live performance was when a show came into my elementary school. Which is wonderful and great, though only theaters with a running budget above one million dollars can even afford to pay actors to go out there and perform at these schools, and only certain schools can afford to have these performances. So even that entry-level of accessibility is restricted.

So okay, what can we do we do to help that? How do we not make it a barrier for schools to have plays come there? Is it a money thing? Great. How do we fix that? If it isn’t money, then maybe it’s how do they find out about it? How do we fix that? It really requires a large scale paradigm shift to have accessibility for everybody. Can that large paradigm shift happen at once? No. Can it happen over generations? Yes. And it requires full participation and resistance of this generation in collaboration with the generation before them, and inspiring the generation in front of them. And that’s a perfect metaphor for why I wrote three plays.

D: I feel like people of my generation need to be your ally, because we are the people with the funding.

S: Right! I felt alone in college because I didn’t have a single API [Asian Pacific Islander] professor. I was one of five people of color in my class. I felt so alone and so angry because I felt like there was nobody in this town that does this, no Asians [in theater]. Then I went out in the world and found that there are API and black activists in this city who are older than me who have been fighting this fight. One, why did I think there were none? Two, I’m seeing them now and why do I have this internalized feeling against them? Like, they’re not doing the thing I want to be doing, they can’t be my mentors because their theater isn’t a big theater. And I was like, oh, that’s the work ‘I’ have to do.

One, I haven’t seen them because my institution hasn’t created visibility for them. I actually have individual agency and power to go find them. Two, why am I devaluing their production because it didn’t have A, B, and C, even though it is full of POC [people of color]. Oh, because I have an internalized white supremacist idea of what good theater looks like. Okay, I need to let that go.

Once I started letting that go, I realized that there is an ABUNDANCE of people out there. There is a scarcity myth that exists and it is perpetuated by white supremacists and upheld by internalized racism, classism and sexism by people of color everywhere. While it did not come from us, it is our privilege to unpack that. In ways, I find that part of my artistic responsibilities. All of the work I do comes with the social justice lens because it must. If it wasn’t, then it’s not my art. It’s somebody else’s art.

I have a lot of people that are like, you are so confident, you’re so out there, where did you get that confidence from? I’m like, why are you so surprised that I’m confident? Do you have some internalized opinions about Asian women? It is a gift given to me by my ancestors and it would be a shame and really a denial of my whole history to not walk in the world as my full, true self.

D: You’ve mentioned your family several times. I saw your grandmother, beautiful woman. Tell me about your family and what they think of this work?

S: Yeah, they’re crazy! (laughs) I love them! You know, it has become very, very clear to me the last three years, as all of my work is becoming recognized nationally, that I have a privilege, that I took it for granted but has become really apparent to me in interviews with other Asian-Americans for podcasts, [who] automatically assume that I didn’t have support from my family to purse my artistic careers, because it is often something that children come up against. I don’t think it’s only API parents but there is a stereotype that exists, that you can’t be an artist, you’ve got to be a doctor, a nurse, be a lawyer, right? I never had that.

My family from the very beginning have been incredibly supportive of anything I’ve wanted to do. It’s come to my attention that that dynamic, a family being supportive of a child, people unconsciously associate that with money and with access to a lot of resources, whereas my family, hella poor. Grew up so poor. I’m the first in my family to move outside of that financial bracket. Not only that, but doing it via a career that is already atypical, where I’m an entrepreneur, I’m a business woman. And looking back at my success, it was the support of my family that has really carried me through all this. They never tried to dissuade me from telling the truth. They were scared, just like I was, but we trust each other and we love each other. They had no doubt in their minds that whatever I was going to do was going to be the right thing, filled with integrity.

I’m like getting emotional right now because that trust inspired me to do this thing. And you know, I made mistakes the first year, I learned from the, got their feedback and made better choices the next year and now, they are so proud of me. They always knew it, you know? You’ll see it in Dragon Baby, the final one.

When I was born, we all lived in the same house together. I was the first of my generation. So my aunties and uncles, they were 8, 12, 13, 15, 18, then my mom. They were like older brothers and sisters to me. Imagine being the only baby, surrounded by these young people, who are also older, who loved you? (laughs) Yeah, we didn’t know where dinner was coming from but we had a lot of joy and love for each other.

That’s where my performing came into play. My whole family, I’m not even kidding with you Deanna, people are amazed at what I do, because I can do something on stage that they have never seen before. I can play 32 characters and make you forget you are watching one person.

D: I forgot it was only you. I was just thinking of the whole wagon scene [in Dragon Lady] with the food, and I forgot, that wasn’t two people!

S: Exactly.

D: That was just you!

S: Exactly. People are amazed that I can do that. They are like, ‘nobody can do that.’ Nobody you know, but everyone in my family if they had access to opportunity and to natural resources and positive mentorship, they would all be superstars. It just so happens I am the culmination of those dreams, you know? So that’s how it is with my family. They are just so proud.

D: Are there any surprises in Dragon Mama that we should know about?

S: Yeah, well, my mom isn’t in it, even though it is about her. She’s never been to Cambridge. I bought her first class tickets for her birthday, so she is coming here, she’s going to watch the shows, and that is really exciting. You saw Dragon Lady—

D: Uh huh

S: It’s huge! It’s cabaret! My grandma! It’s wild and raucous and crazy! I interact with the audience as if you were my grandchildren. Dragon Mama is very, very different. Even in tone and construction. In Dragon Lady, I move all around the space, in Dragon Mama I have a little six by six stage. It’s much more contained. There’s a fourth wall.

D: Is this a metaphorical way of describing your relationship with your family? In the way you chose to stage these?

S: Exactly. The form of each show—when I say form, not only with how it is staged, how I’ve written it, what type of technical elements are used to support it, are a metaphor for the generation, and even the relationship between the generations. My grandmother is wild and raucous and a party, because that’s how she is, but it’s also how she looks at her life. Through a sheen of gold lame and red velvet. It’s only when you part it do you see something else.

My mother, hers is a photo album. I cover more time, more consistently. I cover about 24 years of her life. And each scene in a different year, so the audience has to keep up. My mother doesn’t see you all there; she’s reacting to the circumstances in her life. There’s a real private aspect to this play that Dragon Lady doesn’t have. Because my grandmother is like, ‘Look at me!’ and my mother is like ‘I don’t even know you are there.’ Dragon Baby is a ten-person musical. It’s not a solo show.

D: Wow. Okay. Because that’s who you are.

S: Yes, and it’s pretty intense. I already know how it’s going to end. There’s this big conflict in the play between my mother and I, and this huge discovery that I have to make. It’s this huge musical number, with all this moving around the stage, like a storm moving around me, all intense and people are singing. Then (inhaling), like when all the air gets sucked out of the room, all of it goes away and it’s just me on stage under a spotlight. I start writing the first lines of Dragon Lady. Then blackout.

D: Wow. That gave me chills. I want to see that for sure.

S: Me too! (laughs)

D: You are definitely an original. Is there anything you want me to know about this play, production, or anything that you are doing right now?

S: It makes a really big difference in the audience when I have people of color out there. You know, when I was here for the first time, I didn’t know anybody in Cambridge and I was really worried that my audiences were going to be exclusively white. And they weren’t. The A.R.T. was, ‘Wow, how did this happen?’ and I was, it happened because of all of the hard work I have done. It took me about four years to watch my audiences in Seattle move away from exclusively my friends in theater, a lot of them who are white, but also POC, into non theater people, generational families, with wide age diversity. I’m starting as an individual, which is very hard, but that is also, a privilege I have; I didn’t have to move a hundred years of white institutional theater-making to get the audience I wanted. I had nothing to lose. They have a lot to lose. A whole donor base. It’s different for them.

I would say people should come see my show or else they’ll regret it.

D: For sure. I’ve told everyone I know because it was a life changing show for me.

S: Yay!

D: So one last question I have, what’s your lip color and where did you get it?

S: Okay, It’s called [looks it up on her phone] Melted Matte Liquefied Lipstick, brand is Two-Faced, and this specific color is called Sellout, which is really perfect because my Instagram bio is “I sell out my shows not my artistic principles.” I have a reputation in Seattle that anything I am involved in sells out now.

D: Well, you deserve it because it’s been an amazing privilege to listen to your story,

S: Thanks!

D: And to hear your journey. To see someone who decided to look at the world and not see where you fit in but to make your place and to make your voice heard is completely amazing to me. It is a joy. I am proud of you as a Filipina and I am proud of you as a person in the next generation who is not just saying that they are doing this work, but actually doing this work.

S: Thank you. I always have a lot of young people ask me, how do they move through or get rid of imposter syndrome, or how do they get rid of their fear, and I have to tell them, I don’t know if that is ever going to go away for you. But the one thing you can do is to take away its power. Realizing that imposter syndrome isn’t actually born out of your spirit, it was given to you by white supremacist, socio-political economic systems to keep you small. Once you realize that it’s actually not yours, you can distance yourself from it.

I actually like a little bit of fear. Fear is different from insecurity and doubt. Fear is when I am like, ‘what do I have to lose? Do I have something to lose here? I’m never going to know what I have to gain if I never move through the fear. It’s not about getting rid of it, it’s not about ignoring it, it’s about moving through it. Action. You move through it even though you don’t know what is on the other side. But knowing that there could be something worth it is enough to propel you to do it.

That’s why I wake up every day. Because the people standing behind me, my family, woke up every day because they had no other choice but to try to survive. I have a choice. Wow. I have a choice. What am I going to do with it? That just gives me a huge sense of responsibility and purpose, you know. I feel very lucky to have that. I chose to have that. I chose to wake up every day and I chose to do it because the people who gave me life also gave me the privilege of the choice.

Deanna Dement Myers is a staff writer for Theater Mirror