Filipina playwright and performer headed to Broadway

BREMERTON, Wash. — She’s a playwright, an actress, an incredible singer, too. Now the Filipina from Bremerton is headed to Broadway.

Sara Porkalob has cut her teeth on stages from Seattle to Boston. Now Broadway is calling.

When asked what she would say to people asking about her last name, Porkalob didn’t skip a beat.

“I’m going to tell them to remember it,” she said. “Because I’m about to be very, very famous.”

She is a Filipina with the Hungarian last name, courtesy of her mother’s stepfather.

“So, it’s a family name,” she says. A name she is taking from Bremerton to to Broadway. Yes, Ma’am,” she said.

Thirty-two-year-old Porkalob has been performing since she was 5. But her time at Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle set her on her current path.

“I didn’t really have any professors in school who resembled the demographic that I came from which is largely brown, black, queer immigrants,” said Porkalob. “And so, I decided that if I wanted to be a storyteller, a professional storyteller and cultural worker, I had to learn how to tell the story of the people I came from, the people that I wanted to reach my art. And the people that ultimately I want to celebrate and honor.”

Thus was born her one-woman Dragon Trilogy.

“The trilogy is a matrilineal, musical celebrating the three generations of my Filipino-American family,” said.

It started with the Dragon Lady.

“My glamorous, mercurial, talented grandmother who was a cabaret singer in the Philippines, maybe even a gangster before she immigrated to be united states,” said Porkalob. “’Dragon Mama,’ the 2nd in the cycle, is a love letter to my mother and my other mother Tina. Two queer women who decided to break cycles of generational trauma, so they can raise me with all the hopes and passions that they had when they were my age.

“And then ‘Dragon Baby,’ the third and final in the cycle, is about your girl that hasn’t been produced yet.”

As it happens, “Dragon Lady” and “Dragon Mama” are on stage right now at Cafe Nordo in Pioneer Square.

It’s a kind of love letter from Porkalob to the Pacific Northwest. After all, this is the work that got her noticed and has now paved the way for her next stop, the Great White Way.

“Yeah, so, I will be having my Broadway debut in the fall, September of this year, at the Roundabout Theater,” says Porkalob. “And I am playing a Founding Father in the official revival of “1776″ about the signing of the Declaration of Independence.”

Ready, she says, to take New York, by storm.

There is still time to see Sara Porkalob before she heads back east. Her Cafe Nordo run has been extended through March 5th.

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