What a marvelous adventure to dig deep into our INDONESIAN roots and play with this incredible company in Dena Igusti’s WHAT YOU ARE TO ME about friends lovers wife mother daughter and all the complicated strong feelings that arise when we wrestle with the political and the very personal - so grateful to be working in the theater to protest and feeling deep gratitude for the generous company, creative team and crew that worked on this one - TERIMA KASiiiH!!! 💜
#aanhpiheritagemonth Hunter MFA Playwrights Festival of Staged Readings at Frederick Loewe Theater at Hunter College. 5/6/24
CORRIDORS
by Guelan Varela-Luarca
Directed by Aneesha Kudtarkar
With Myka Cue, Jose Gamo, Dorothea Gloria, Karen Tsen Lee, Francesca Fernandez, Julyana Soelistyo, Liz Casasola
Stage Manager Kevin Jinghong Zhu @mnnnyc
Guelan Varela-Luarca is a playwright, translator, director, and educator from the Philippines currently living in New York and New Jersey. He creates plays about dystopias, alternate histories, and nightmares to make sense of his benighted nation.
Last year, his plays ‘Nekropolis’ and ‘Dogsblood’ were awarded the grand prize at the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Award, the Philippines’ most prestigious literary award. Last fall, he had a staged reading at The Getty for ‘The House of Baluyot,’ a Filipino-American adaptation of ‘The Oresteia,’ which he co-wrote with Chay Yew. Some of his original works are anthologized in local and international publications. He is the current artistic director of Tanghalang Ateneo, an award-winning Filipino theater company at the Loyola Schools, Ateneo de Manila University. He is an MFA Playwriting Candidate at Hunter College (Class of ‘24).
My heart holds much gratitude: to the formidable Lileana Blain-Cruz for leading with so much light and love, the virtuosic David Bloom on the podium conducting the rockstar Contemporaneous Orchestra, Thomas Bartscherer’s writing and Dylan Mattingly’s composition that occupy my heart and mind, the remarkable Molly Netter and Isaiah Robinson who lead this company of genius singers, Chris Emile and the amazing dancers who stir my core. In Uriel’s words, let’s linger in this moment.
