An aswang (a vampirelike creature in Filipino mythology) stalks a high school’s halls in the brand-new play “Blood/Sucker,” directed by Sophia Franzella, left, and right. The Washington Ensemble Theatre production opens Aug. 28 at 12th Avenue Arts. (Brett Love)▲
Gemma Wilson from The Seattle Times
Updated10 mins ago
Don’t fear the demons and vampires lurking on Seattle stages this fall. They have much to teach us.
While drawing on overlapping elements of Filipino folklore, two very different world-premiere plays — Anamaria Guerzon’s “Blood/Sucker” at Washington Ensemble Theatre and Molly Olis Krost’s “Nanay” at Pork Filled Productions — explore ideas of community, family, culture, diaspora and empathy.
In “Blood/Sucker,” the vampirelike aswang stalks a high school in crisis, while in “Nanay,” alienated twin sisters tangle with a manananggal, a demon said to be able to split its body in half.
Guerzon’s story sparked when, fresh out of college, she worked as a paraeducator at a public high school in 2021. Not only did Guerzon feel the intense burnout following a year of online teaching and learning, she felt the power of schools as social safety nets for children who might have no other safe spaces.
“I also had an unfortunate run-in with a principal during the (critical race theory) hysteria,” she said, “when everyone decided we can’t learn about any history besides generic American history, otherwise it’s indoctrination.”
At the same time, she was learning about Filipino mythology, and all these elements — labor and capitalism, teachers and students, fantastical creatures — came together in “‘Blood/Sucker.”
For Guerzon, writing the play was “part of reconnecting with heritage and culture,” and for Mario Orallo-Molinaro, who stars in both “Blood/Sucker” and “Nanay,” it’s given him language he didn’t even know he needed to help understand himself and his family.
One line of “Blood/Sucker” dialogue in particular, he said, about a method of combating aswangs, unlocked an appreciation for his grandmother’s need to surround her family with protection: St. Joseph statues in the yard, rosaries pressed into hands before road trips.
“The more I’m here, the more I love myself,” he said of his experience in the “Blood/Sucker” rehearsals. A second-generation Filipino American who is also a college and career counselor at Shorecrest High School, Orallo-Molinaro said he felt a strong connection with his “Blood/Sucker” character Mr. G, a dedicated teacher fighting to keep his Asian American history class going after it became the target of online outrage.
“Mr. G is somebody that I wish I’d had,” he said. “This sweet, kind, uplifting person who himself had a role model in the school system. You see this lineage of love that I think our public school systems need now and that we’re constantly fighting for.”
“We’ve been talking about how the public school system is a microcosm of our country,” said director Sophia Franzella. “And so when you see the lack of humanity there, you see it all over our country — we are experiencing a dearth of empathy. It’s a disease.”
This disease is powerful; the body count in “Blood/Sucker” is no joke, nor is the stage violence — a recent rehearsal had actors Rachel Guyer-Mafune and Will Eames pummeling each other ruthlessly, under the guidance of fight director Chelsey Sheppard. (Peggy Gannon and Monty Rozema round out the cast.)
Elements of the aswang — including a long, proboscislike tongue and the baby chicks it sometimes regurgitates — will be tricky to stage, but Franzella and the show’s design team are dipping into theatricality rather than reality for their scares, including work from analog shadow puppet artists Shadow Girls Cult.
“What the horror genre does so well is show us how horrible humans can be,” Franzella said. “That we are actually the monsters unless we make the appropriate changes in our lives to rectify that.”
“Nanay” anchors its story in family, one in which a young woman returns home to find her postpartum twin sister in an unusual living arrangement with a manananggal. (Alanah Pascual and Ays Garcia star alongside Orallo-Molinaro.)
Krost started writing “Nanay” while she was in graduate school, driven by a need to explore an ancestral energy that’s been with her from birth, as well as the interplay among her family, which she said has a lot of twins and sisters.
“I grew up really closely observing all of their dynamics,” she said. “So that was floating in my head, and I was also exploring what it meant to be Filipino American and this idea of decolonizing what it means to be Filipino American.” When she landed on a book that posited that the roots of Filipino folklore creatures might be tied to birthing communities, she was ready to start putting her exploration on paper.
“Both of us are able to explore Filipino diasporic identity and being Filipino American through the content of the show, through the twin sisters exploring that themselves,” said director Alyza DelPan-Monley. “And then also our own personal journeys in trying to trace the culture that we are a part of but also distant from.”
For DelPan-Monley, the show’s two contrasting tonalities proved an enticing challenge. On the one hand, there’s a very funny, quippy, almost sitcom-y energy in scenes between the sisters, they said. On the other, there’s an overlapping, thinned veil of the spirit realm, ancestors, dreams, memories, time and those that are deceased and still with us.
To capture the spirit realm, DelPan-Monley and their cast are leaning into the soundscape, lighting and physicality that differentiates these two worlds, while also aiming for what DelPan-Monley called a “softening of the either/or of it all.” Perhaps, they’re exploring, there doesn’t need to be such a hard edge between these two worlds. Perhaps, they’ll return to a precolonial nature in which things don’t need to be so provable and definitive. Maybe spirits are ever present rather than accessed via ritual.
Both Guerzon and Krost said they had to restrain themselves from burdening their plays with all their research, even as they blew their own minds learning about the ways that colonizers — Catholic missionaries from Spain, the American CIA — had used Filipino folklore against Filipino people to undercut rebellions and undermine historically matriarchal cultures.
“When I started writing (‘Nanay’), I felt a lot of pressure to portray everything quote-unquote correctly,” Krost said. It was only by peeling back the layers of her characters and focusing intently on their specific experiences that she could release that pressure.
Together, Washington Ensemble Theatre and Pork Filled Productions are leaning into the amplifying power of these two plays, celebrating their shared DNA as well as their distinct aesthetics. On Sept. 12, DelPan-Monley and Krost will join Franzella and Guerzon on the “Blood/Sucker” set for a postshow discussion about new play development and Filipino folklore. On Sept. 19, both theater companies are hosting a community day at 12th Avenue Arts celebrating Asian American and Pacific Islander culture through crafts and music.
“The idea of getting to enrich a Filipino theater canon is so exciting,” Krost said. “We want there to be a full, rich canon of Filipino theater works, and it’s exciting that there doesn’t have to be a scarcity mindset.”
