‘DRAGON MAMA’ AWAKENS AT DIVERSIONARY
SARA PORKALOB’S SOLO SHOW WITH MUSIC TELLS HER MOTHER’S STORY
Sara Porkalob’s “Dragon Mama” may be a one-person show, but she’s playing 24 characters onstage. How does one manage that? “With a lot of practice,” said Porkalob, who’s bringing the second in her “Dragon Trilogy” (after “Dragon Lady” and prior to the still-in-development “Dragon Baby”) to Diversionary Theatre in University Heights. Now in previews, “Dragon Mama” opens Sept. 23. Seattle-based Andrew Russell is directing.
This multi-character performance “is first and foremost a physical skill,” said Porkalob. “I think of myself as an athlete of sorts. I’m practicing the physicality of this show over and over until it’s muscle memory.”
Porkalob’s “Dragon Mama” is her own Filipino-American mother Maria, whose internal and external journey takes her from Bremerton, Wash., on Puget Sound to Alaska. “It is an epic odyssey wrapped up in a queer awakening of a young brown woman with radical hopes and dreams,” Porkalob said about the core of the play.
She has been performing “Dragon Mama” since its 2019 premiere at American Repertory Theatre at Harvard University but is continually changing and evolving the script.
“This is a new draft,” she said, “thanks to being here in San Diego. My collaborator Andrew Russell and I have been able to figure out some problems with the script that have been in the back of our minds. I know that we’ve been able to do that because we’re at this theater working with
this team.”
“Dragon Lady,” the initial play in Porkalob’s trilogy, focused on her immigrant grandmother, also named Maria. Debuting as a two-act
cabaret piece at Intiman Theatre in Seattle in 2017, “Dragon Lady” featured a cameo by her grandmother.
“In the first couple of years of ‘Dragon Lady’ I wrote and performed more than 13 versions of the play,” Sara Porkalob recalled. “In doing that it taught me to be scrappy and showed me how to be a businesswoman. I could look