Banner Photo: March 2025 Headshot taken by Adam Fontana.

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Company One

Chuang Stage

UPCOMING ​WORLD PREMIERE IN BOSTON OF
​LEARNING HOW TO READ BY MOONLIGHT
​May 16 - June 8, 2025

Under the moonlight, six-year-old Eddie imagines a dragon eating moons and an imaginary friend teaching him English. His mother smokes as she prays to a statue of the Santo Niño. His father waits alone in Manila for their daily phone calls. Songs from a mythical giant turtle travel across oceans, but are drowned by the voices of Duterte and Trump on the television. As fantasy and reality become indistinguishable, the family is forced to learn how to articulate unspoken truths that will either break them or heal them. How will the weight of living undocumented in New York City force them to reevaluate their understanding of “community", “dreams”, and "home"?

​To assist the actors, a new narrator (a fellow artist, community organizer, or elected official) joins the cast every night. The narrator reads the play aloud to the audience, having neither seen the play nor read the entire script. The cast performs original music and songs to help tell the story. The play is spoken in English and Tagalog with subtitles.

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 ​FINALIST O'Neill Playwrights Conference 2025
​Mercury Makes the Skin Glow

Only 5% of the 1,600 script submissions made it to this phase of the selection process. I'm so proud to be named among the 95 finalists, a good number of them I'm lucky to call friends.

​ABOUT THE PLAY
Filipinos love love. Filipinos love beauty. Filipinos love beauty pageants. Former Beauty Queen Carmelita returns to Queens, New York, to start a new circuit of beauty pageants for the community in celebration of Filipino American Heritage Month. Her daughter, Jesca, is against the practice, and tries to stop them. As a way to prevent Jesca from doing so, Carmelita coerces her seven-year-old grandson Ernesto to participate, which then unearths troubling questions of race, identity, colorism, and the Global South’s obsession with the multi-billion dollar industry of skin whitening. We explore whether mercury makes the skin glow and what inner monsters we resurrect in the process. Part Filipino telenovela, part pageant, and part melodrama, the play hopes to get under the skin of all who interact with it.