STAGE: America Adjacent

Being the home of “the industry” and thanks to actor’s union rules, LA is blessed with a bounty of 99-seat theatres, often providing high quality productions. I was treated to some of that on Sunday at the Skylight Theatre in Los Feliz. America Adjacent is set in a small one-bedroom apartment somewhere near Hollywood, packed with six Filipino women and a couple of babies, all confined to the apartment. The women are all pregnant or recently delivered, coming to America so their children will have the advantage of US citizenship. While such a play could have easily verged into polemic, this script (by Boni Alvarez) focuses on the very human stories of these women, why they came, what they hope, and how they cope with being confined in such close quarters. Their backgrounds and situations vary. One is rural and naïve, one is religious, one is more educated, some are conformists and peacemakers while others are risk takers and rule breakers, but all share sacrificing for the sake of their children. It is engaging and moving, and I am glad I saw it.

On Sundays, Skylight Theatre presents a conversation series immediately after the show, and this Sunday’s guest was none other than Jose Antonio Vargas, whose book Dear America I had just read. Being a Filipino undocumented immigrant, he clearly had much to relate to in this play, and talked about the experience of being “TNT”. The Tagalog phrase tago ng tago, which means being in constant hiding (literally “hiding and hiding”), abbreviated TNT, is slang for an undocumented person. Until you hear stories like these women or Vargas being TNT, you don’t appreciate the psychological toll it can take. In the conversation, several people also spoke of how powerful it was for them to see a play with Filipino actors playing Filipino characters, not something often seen. (As a gay man of a certain age, I can relate to that.)