plays
Madaling Sabihin
Easy to Say
by Alegra Batara
Translations by Aara Meas
The Cordoba family is forced to confront decades old secrets and emotional blocks when the father, Danilo, falls ill. Time is running out and the way the family has functioned forever must change.
About the development:
Based loosely on a true story, this play began as a 25 page play entitled "Going the Way" which premiered at the Conservatory of Theatre Arts at Webster University's Envisage New Plays Festival in the spring of 2018. Through private readings and a year of expanding the narrative, the play has become a 90-minute one-act that centers a Filipinx family as the father fights for his life. I lost my Lolo when I was 7 years old and remember watching my family mourn and deal with the aftermath of his sickness.
The cultural aspects that became essential to this story were not originally included and were added in early drafts of the full length play. As an Asian-American theatre artist being educated in a PWI where the first drafts of this piece initially premiered, I felt that the story couldn't be race-specific given who was available to perform it. What became clear during those initial readings without the cultural aspects was that this story is universal. The relationships and the conflict are universal. Families keep secrets, they fight, they say cruel things to each other, they lose each other, and they must find each other again. After a great conversation with Jess Shoemaker the summer of 2019, I made the decision to reclaim the story as it was meant to be: full on Filipino. Themes of birth order and religion became heavily entrenched in the new scenes, I crudely put what Tagalog I could find on the internet into the script (Thank goodness for Aara Meas who came in later and put in phenomenal translations). The story began to unfold in new way. After two years of development, I was finally able to put on a digital staged reading with an all Filipino cast. The conversations in that room shaped the story and the characters even more and left me hungry to keep playing with the story. In this current stage of revision, I'm exploring non-linear storytelling as well as venturing into magic realism.
Most recently, this play received a staged reading through Copious Love's "Plays on Tap" series in Seattle, WA ,directed by Alison Kozar. It featured its first all Filipino in-person cast (Anamaria Guerzon, Ays Garcia, Jerik Hernandez, Maria Batayola, and Matt Dela Cruz). I took pages and pages of notes and learned so much from this amazing group of artists who gathered for this development opportunity, including artistic director Kathryn Stewart. The play is now in a moment of revision to incorporate all that I learned and will emerge sometime in the near future!
This script is available for perusal upon request.
in progress
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