The Rise and Fall of Holly Fudge

Today is the day I told myself I would write my Holly Fudge blog post, but, if I’m feeling honest, I don’t really feel like I’m in the self-promotion mood. So, while this post is still going to be related to Holly Fudge, rather than my typical link to ticket information at the very end you will find a link to donate to the victims of Club Q.

I’ve been saying a lot recently that I am not good at making sure people know that The Rise and Fall of Holly Fudge is a funny play. I talk a lot about the heart of it —  how Holly Fudge is about a relationship between a mother and a daughter in the middle of monumental change. COVID. Protests.

Queerness.

There is a line that makes my soul ache that has been sitting at the base of my heart since I first read this script. Carol, Holly’s mother, is trying to understand why her daughter would “choose” queerness when she has dated men in the past and liked them. She says:

Who knows how long you two will be legal. Like a rubber band, the world could just snap back, they could haul you away.

I first started my work on this production in the spring of this year. Back then, it was one of many good lines that stuck with me, one of the many examples of Trista Baldwin’s honesty.

Then, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.

I tried to read all of the opinions, tried to struggle through the legalese to really read what I was hearing about Justice Thomas’s opinion. The opinion that the court should revisit other court cases that relied on the Roe precedent of substantive due process.

Contraception, Griswold v. Connecticut.

SNAP.

Interracial marriage, Loving v. Virginia.

SNAP.

Gay marriage. 

Like a rubber band.

Who knew a show about a COVID Christmas would get more relevant the further we move from the winter of 2020?

This weekend, we put all parts of The Rise and Fall of Holly Fudge together in tech. I’d been in the theatre for so long that I didn’t see the news about Club Q until yesterday morning. How to describe the feeling of reading that headline? Pulse is a wound that still feels fresh and raw. How can I go into rehearsal tonight and watch the show and laugh at well-meaning moms not understanding queerness? How can I talk about this COVID Christmas story with humor and levity when the community at its core, a community I am part of, is grieving?

The answer, simply, is that I must.

For too long, these acts of hatred taught me fear. Fear for my loved ones, fear for my colleagues, and fear for, and of, myself. In 2008, when the rubber band snapped in California and I watched my classmates cheerfully condemn the “gay lifestyle” by celebrating the ending of legal gay marriage, I burrowed deep into the recesses of my closet. I didn’t even tell my own parents that I was queer until 2019, not because I feared what they would do, but because I was terrified of what it would mean to be out, fully, and own my queerness the way I have to own the mixed identity spelled across my face.

Today, the instinct to hide is still here. It’s insidious, whispering that no one cares, that me speaking will stir up too much, that it would be better, easier, wiser, to hide behind my loving cis-male partner and just pretend to be straight.

Instead, I can think of no better way to combat the hatred that took 5 lives and injured dozens more on Saturday than to find joy in my queerness. I am grateful to be working on a play that uplifts empathy and love as the way through discomfort and pain and fear. I am grateful to be working on a play about owning your identity, about loving your kid and trying to understand when you don’t. And I’m grateful that it is, in fact, funny and sweet and, yes, it has a happy ending. Right now, we all need one.

Donate to the Colorado Healing Fund, to assist in immediate and long-term care:

https://www.coloradogives.org/organization/COHealingFund

HOT ASIAN DOCTOR HUSBAND

Finishing a show is never easy. Every single play/workshop/reading/event that I work on feels like a small piece of my soul that I get to fuse with other people’s souls and present to the world for a brief, magical amount of time. Existing in the same place as other creatives, working towards the same goal, building and creating and collaborating, is vulnerable and miraculous. Trust is required on every level, trust that you sometimes only have days to build and nurture.

I have spent the past year agonizing over my artistic future. In early 2021, when I was first vaccinated, it was easy for me to say that I would return to in-person collaborations in 2022. At that point, this year still felt far away. The vaccines were new and everyone seemed to want one and I thought, finally, after a year of following guidelines and the advice of my cardiologist, I would get to step into this new world of work and remember what it felt like to create in the same physical space as my collaborators.

As 2021 progressed, however, it quickly became clear that the world was not growing safer. That, while the vaccines are life-saving, public opinion and unwillingness to protect others were going to ensure COVID’s continuance. As guidelines were peeled back and I struggled with the knowledge that I am part of the acceptable collateral damage of high-risk, immunocompromised, and disabled folks in the pandemic, fear and grief started to seep into my creative life as well. Even if I wanted to return to in-person directing, would it matter? I don’t know of a single show that had an uninterrupted run from 2021 to about March 2022. How do you toe the line of minimizing risk and trusting that people can make their own choices? What is the new world of advocating for your collaborators when everything you do has a new layer of added risk? Do I even remember how to be a collaborator, how to find my way into a play, how to let part of my soul become vulnerable and open to change?

HOT ASIAN DOCTOR HUSBAND is my first full in-person process since February 2020. There have been so many things that have terrified me, not the least of which has been the ever-present awareness that I have already had COVID once following my grandfather’s funeral and that all advice says that I really, REALLY should try not to get it again. But the moment I read that script, the moment I first talked to Buffie at Alley Rep, I knew that, if they would have me, I needed to do this.

Every single piece I get to work on, whether for a day or for a month, that looks at me as a human being and sees me for all that I am as a mixed-race woman is a gift that I cannot take for granted. In HOT ASIAN DOCTOR HUSBAND, I see myself in Emi, in Veronica. I see my relationship with my wonderful white partner, whose empathy and willingness to listen through the most difficult moments of negotiating my identity is overwhelming. I see all of the hard conversations that we have had, all of my doubts about myself that I project on him. I see my relationship with my mom and with our culture and my own struggle to see her face in mine, my own need for the validation that I am enough as I am and that it doesn’t matter that sometimes people see me as everything but what I actually am. And I see it all tied together with a show that I have loved fiercely my entire life, that I have been made to feel equal parts shame and pride in my love for, that I have continued to return to over and over and over and over again: Sailor Moon.

It’s hard to describe how much this show, here, in Boise, with this group of incredible people, means to me. The most difficult part of my job as a director is always this moment. The moment that I have to step back, hand the keys to the stage manager and actors, and let them drive on without me. I am never quite ready for it, and, on this show, I don’t think I ever would be. The journey that they now get to go on, of playing and growing and living in this world built from pieces of all of our souls, is something that I have to watch from afar. But I trust these Sailor Scouts and their journey for love through grief and pain and Demi Lovato remixes. May we all leave the theatre transformed.

Ticket info can be found here: https://alleyrep.org/hot-asian-doctor-husband/

Reflections on Virtual Work

I am currently in the midst of directing Working: A Musical at CATCO in Columbus, Ohio. Well, I’m not actually in Columbus. In fact, while the majority of our creative team and three actors of six are in Ohio, only two of them are in Columbus. The rest are scattered in Cincinnati, Nebraska, New York, and here in Chicagoland, along with me and our music director.

This is the first virtual musical I’ve done. I’ve worked on other virtual pieces, but none of them have had as many moving pieces as this. Our music director is basically mixing an entire studio record. We have a digital designer, whose job includes editing, collaborating on framing, and figuring out how we make this look good.

Every night, we get on Zoom in our respective homes and “rehearse.” I put this word in quotes because what we’re actually doing is filming. The actors are one-person crews, setting up lighting, getting in costume and hair and makeup with guidance from our costume designer. Our digital designer and I talk them through framing, where to put their scene partners in their rooms, which area of their house we want to see in this section of the script. Our choreographer talks them through the music, dancing along with them and shouting choreography through the video conferencing software that is always slightly behind because of the Zoom lag. Our stage manager gives us a slate as she plays the tracks, lovingly mixed by our music director, of the actors singing, sometimes with music fading out so that they can speak their monologues. The cameras on their phones capture the chaos as it unfolds, take after take after take.

This process has been so radically different from everything I have ever done. Before the pandemic, I may have naively said that about every show. “Every show has its own challenges,” past-Daniella would wisely say. “Every show is a new process, a new opportunity for growth.”

“Oh, you sweet child,” current-Daniella would wistfully say. “If only you knew what awaited you.”

Musicals are already miracles. I have been part of shows that barely made it to stage by first preview. I’ve seen musicals that haven’t made it to stage by first preview. Through hard work, vigilance, and a sprinkle of theatre magic, they always manage to come together at the last second for opening night to produce exhilarating moments of connection.

Virtual musicals? Dear lord. What exists above a miracle? Cosmic events? We are essentially doing all of the things that are normally involved in creating a musical (namely, learning music, choreography, and character and marrying them together) along with everything involved in creating a film (storyboarding, recording and mixing audio, setting and framing shots, doing multiple takes, editing it all together). Movie musicals take years to produce, months to gather all of the content needed and piece them together. We’re doing it all in one month, and from our homes where roommates scream, plumbers work, neighbors gawk, and pets, spouses, and children (rightly) demand our attention.

In the same way that I have never been so pushed by a process, I have never felt so grateful to be working. In a time when theatre is nearly non-existent, I get the opportunity to innovate, to be “in a room” with other artists in a way and once again collaborate on how to make the impossible possible.

There are things that I miss. Tonight, we finished recording a song that I love fiercely. Two nights ago, we finished a song that made me sob the first time I heard the actors read the words aloud. I won’t get to talk to those actors about those numbers in that way again. I won’t get to listen to them every night as we run the show, lovingly guiding each number night by night to where we want it to be. I won’t get to watch my mother listen to Tagalog being sung in a musical, or my father hear the song about fathers building a legacy for their children. I won’t get to sit in my seat on opening night, half-terrified and half-exhilarated by the prospect of audiences seeing this little piece of my soul that I’ve bound to so many others to create the experience of the show.

Will it be good? I think so. I will admit I’m biased. I’ve poured a lot of time, love, and energy into this show. My friends and my fiance barely see me. But that’s no different from any other show. What is different now is the way it will be presented. We are not pretending to be anything but what we are: a group of people creating in a time when it is nearly impossible to create, each physically far away from the other but joined together for these moments. The final product will not look like any theatre you have seen before. It will likely not even look like most virtual theatre you have seen. But I hope it will touch on something human, something deep within us all, about how our work defines us. Because that’s what Working is ultimately about: what people do for a living, and how they feel about it.

Working: A Musical opens April 29, 2021 and runs through May 9. More information may be found here: https://www.catco.org/working/

Steppenwolf's THE GREAT LEAP Closes

The Great Leap closes today, and it’s difficult for me to describe how much this process has meant to me.

I am mixed race, half Filipino, half white. From day to day, and interaction to interaction, I find myself constantly needing to identify, to reaffirm, in the face of assumptions that other people make of me. I tread the line that some people like to label “ethnically ambiguous,” which means that I am somehow both white passing and not depending on the lighting, the day, the person, or something.

This play is the first time I have worked on a fully realized production of an Asian American narrative. I was in the room with other Asian American artists, with a Filipina American director, telling an Asian American story for the first time in my professional career. Our director Jesca Prudencio taught me so many things about directing and working, but the most important thing that she imparted on me is how boldly and confidently she exists in the world. Her art reflects that in the best possible way, and I could not be more proud of the work that we did.

Happy Closing, folks! I’ll see you at Front Bar after that final post-show discussion.

The cast, crew, and design team of Steppenwolf’s THE GREAT LEAP.