by Linda Chin

In Dragon Mama, the second part of a three-generation family trilogy that enjoyed its world premiere at the ART’s Oberon, the brilliant Filipinx American multi-hyphenate artist Sara Porkalob does it again. Sharing the small stage with no one/nothing else but a single chair, Porkalob shares the story of her mother Maria Porkalob, Jr. by portraying 20+ characters of different ages, ethnicities, genders. The chair too transforms multiple times – into the saddle of the neighborhood bully’s cycle, hospital bed for pregnant Maria, airplane seat en route to Alaska, a seat at the gay club where she meets 27-year-old African American R&B singer Tina. Slim pickings in Anchorage, Alaska in 1993, but when her boss Greg (the astute and well-read 40-ish white foreman of a fishing cannery) learns that she and Tina are planning a movie date, he recommends that instead of Forrest Gump, they see the new film playing at the indie theater on the outskirts of downtown. It’s an adaptation of the best-selling novel by San Francisco author Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club. The story is about Chinese American daughters and their immigrant Chinese mothers, and Maria just might relate.