San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
‘Dragon Lady’ and the evolution of creativity
Sara Porkalob doesn’t toe the line.
In an explosive interview last year with Jason P. Frank at Vulture, the 34-year-old Seattle writer and performer was candid about her experience playing Edward Rutledge in the genderexpansive Broadway revival of “1776.” She criticized the creative team for blind spots about both race and gender, and said the show wasn’t artistically fulfilling. She even admitted she gave only 75% of herself to the show.
But during a recent interview with the Chronicle, Porkalob discussed how her life has changed since that Vulture story and how she’s ready to take back creative decision-making power with “Dragon Lady,” her solo show at Marin Theatre Company.
The karaoke machine-driven cabaret musical, directed by Andrew Russell, is part of a triptych of plays about the women in her Filipino American family.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: What was the range of reactions you got after the Vulture interview?
A:
Imagine the craziest wild s— that people would say to you, and then the nicest stuff that people could ever say to you.
I have people sending emails telling me that they hope I would die and that I was a fat, ungrateful pig who didn’t deserve to be on Broadway. And then the opposite end: I had professors from all over the country, and even outside of the country, being like, “I’m stopping my class today so we can read your article out loud.”
Q: And you say you didn’t expect the vitriol, even
though most actors don’t talk to the media the way you do? A:
Maybe that was naive. Maybe that was inexperience with these bigger centers of commercial theater.
In many ways, starting in college, I deliberately refrained from following the art that was made at those epicenters because I was really worried that as a young artist, if I consumed that much art, it would unconsciously determine how I made art. Like, don’t ask me to name 20 Broadway musicals. I would lose.
Q: That sentiment that you don’t “deserve” to be on Broadway — what even is that?
A:
That’s white supremacy in action: that anybody has to pay dues, consume and swallow a certain amount of bitterness, injustice, violence, humiliation in order to gain access to spaces that are coveted. Like, what the f—? No.
The trolls, the internet people
— I don’t know them. I don’t owe them anything. But then what happened internally with the production, cast, leadership, etc., that was the hard stuff, the humbling stuff. It’s really changed me, who I am today versus who I was last year.
Q: So who are you today? A:
I’ve got softer. I developed a different kind of respect and understanding for people working in New York in the commercial sphere. When you’re trying to survive in this rat race of capitalism and you’re in New York City trying to be a theater maker, that s— will grind you down. So then your survival is a thing that you’re thinking about every day, that next gig; of course you wouldn’t want to say anything to jeopardize your literal rent money. I was coming from a
lot of privilege into Broadway — which isn’t to say that I didn’t deserve it.
Q: How are you softer now? What does that look like? A:
It’s telling myself, “Everybody’s trying their best.”
In many cases, we want to hold individuals responsible for institutional culture that has been in place for hundreds of years. But there’s a problem with that. It sets them up for failure. Yes, they chose this position, and they’re inheriting this, but they’re a whole person outside of that institution.
Q: Where did it come from, your ability to see things this way?
A:
My parents.
My mother — first generation, oldest of her generation — like many immigrant daughters had to grow up pretty fast in order to be a surrogate mom to her siblings. My other mother, Tina, a Black American woman, eldest of her siblings, same thing. (She) had to become a surrogate mom. She would lecture me about integrity and responsibility: “Why are you doing this thing?” — whether it be eating the last cookie or lying about where I was after school.
I pretty early on developed a way of being in the world, not just in my creative sphere, where I’m always trying to know more about who I am and why I am and what I’m doing and why and how it affects everybody around me.
Q: And what about your grandma, the subject of