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.

Read more “May The Joy Luck Family Tree Forever Bloom”