The last few months were a whirlwind but the Neighborhood Theatre Project is now a wrap 🦋

👏🏽 Congrats and thank you to the entire cast, crew, artists, community members, and organizers who touched this project. It truly was created with all our neighbors.

This project was/is all about illustrating our community’s realities over the last 2.5 years and coming together to discuss solutions, even if those solutions are simply listening to one another and giving each other space. We’ve basically been working on this project for over 9 months straight 😮‍💨 It’s exhausting but making this art to reflect our community—in partnership with community—is fulfilling. Thank you to @calartscouncil for believing in us and giving us our first big grant 🌷

Some participant quotes that were shared during our workshops/interviews that inspired me:
– Smiles, fake smiles Easier to understand
– Paper was my best friend, Turn it into another story
– Hard to know what the other person is trying to say or feeling
– Monetize hobby
– It’s nothing, just need an aspirin
– How we communicate the truth
– The doctors see you in a certain way
– Truthful to yourself

1 big grant project down, 1 more to go, and many more to apply for 👐🏽

Follow @more.mas.marami or check out my carrd in my bio for all the info on our theatre collective. Next show is Sept 16 – 24 in DTSJ 👀📔👭🏽🦭

My first full-length script is getting a staged reading!!!

I started writing 🍒stonefruit🍒 in 2015 as a junior in college. It was a 5 page script at first. Then I expanded it to 28 pages. And then put it away for 5 and a half years….

Last year, I revisited it through @bindlestiff_sf’s full-length playwriting class, expanding it again and writing a first draft of 64 pages.

Now, in 2022, the play is 82 pages and ready for actors and a director to work with it so I can keep improving it. The staged reading will help me figure out what works and what needs more. Time to keep growing 🪴

The story of 🔲Teo and 🔳Carrie has stuck with me all these years. Maybe it’s because it comes from a real moment in my life when I was barely 20 years old, being on the brink of adulthood and navigating new and old relationships/friendships.

With this story, I strive to write the realities of growing up, family legacies, farm workers, immigrants, and migration.

I’m thankful to Bindlestiff and @velascoarts for uplifting my voice and for being a safe space for me as a woman of color, as a Filipina, as a Latina.

Come watch 🍒stonefruit🍒 on May 1 and the other plays throughout the first week of Asian American & Pacific Islander Heritage Month! I’d love to hear what you think 😃 Link in bio for tickets (available for in-person and virtual livestream).

Also yes swipe for the videos I watched on YouTube for research