Alaska Is in the Heart

How a new musical and a community-based drama vie to capture the frontier lives and immigrant dreams of Filipino Alaskans

by Randy Gener

Isang magandang senyora, libot na libot ng espada (There is a beautiful lady, surrounded with swords).
—a warning in Tagalog to newcomers to America

Prologue

Marcelo Quinto II of Juneau, Alaska, is Filipino.

He is also Tlingit Indian. "I'm Indopino," he declares. "That mixture didn't go over very well here in this town for a very long time. People didn't want to see a white lady marry an Asian or an Indian. To do so would be to cause yourself a whole lot of grief."

Quinto's Filipino father went to college but could only find work as a cannery worker or a bartender because of the color of his skin. His Tlingit mother, a proud member of the second largest indigenous Alaskan population after the Eskimos, banded together with other Native wives to raise money to build the Filipino Community Hall in downtown Juneau. Growing up a mestizo, Quinto wasn't welcome in the Alaskan Native Brotherhood, who recognized only full-blooded Indians. Mixed-bloods were not considered Indians until they turned 18. "That law did not change until 1962," he continues. "I was blown away by that. It even came to the point where my mother could not get services because she was married to a non-Native."

Now 64 years old, Quinto is one of the many Filipinos whose stories I have traveled to Alaska to see depicted on stage. He has come to the Perseverance Theatre in nearby Douglas to tell it like it is about the Alaskan manongs (Ilocano for "oldtimers") who have played a role in his life. "Because we are half-Filipinos, the oldtimers in this town were basically our uncles when we were growing up," he tells me. "It was quite an extended family in that sense. Those ties are here today, 65 or 70 years later. You can't break them."

and when 5 o'clock rings
we rise groggily, for we could hardly move our legs
we are still chewing our breakfast
the bugle sounds furious and fast
and we rush to the cannery pronto
and we work as hard as a water buffalo
I go to the restroom often to while away the time
why, oh why, did I come to the Land of the Midnight Sun
—from "untitled" by Trinidad Rojo

Wilderness

In Southeastern Alaska, less than a week before Easter Sunday, the weather is unseasonably warm—and unpredictable. The thick morning fog over Juneau's airport, wedged between ocean and snow-capped mountain, has lifted to reveal a noonday crawl of dewy highways and loops of compact streets slicing through an uneven topography. Sun-dappled rainforest spruces conceal hiking trails and gold-rush sites. At the northern head of Mendenhall Valley, looming above the suburban homes and rocky riverbeds like a breathing Ice Age giant, lazes a spectacular 13-mile-long river of glacial ice whose bluish-white hues are today being whitewashed by the bright sun. At the Filipino Community Hall, one manang (female oldtimer), made tetchy by summer's slow arrival, tells me to avoid the forest trail that leads to a wooden water flume past residential Evergreen Avenue. A bear was recently spotted there. "The grizzly devoured the picnickers," she says, with a naughty smile.

It is late March—still winter. In Alaska, there is no spring. The melting of snow and the slush of mud are called "breakup." In April you wait. You wait for the flowers to bloom. Shop owners of Native regalia and knickknacks wait for cruise-ship passengers to disembark. Elaborately carved on the cedar bark of a roadside totem pole, a raven perched on the head of a tribal warrior on top of a ferocious bear stares down on the Haida, Tlingit and Tsimshian people. All are waiting for the spirits living under the sea to assume the form of the salmon—for seething masses of them to return to the stream of their birth, where nature is hatched anew.

On Douglas Island, though, tension is high; rapt anticipation is in the air. Less than 10 minutes across the bridge over the Gastineau Channel from downtown Juneau, Douglas is the unlikely home of Alaska's largest and best-known professional troupe, doggedly named the Perseverance Theatre. No sooner do I pull apart the glass doors of this busy not-for-profit outpost than I hear the familiar voice of director Peter DuBois barking the name of an unseen female stage manager. To my left, inside what looks like a dusty storage room for light boards, building supplies and assorted wirings (it is actually the Phoenix, Perseverance's second-stage space), the composer Fabian Obispo sits in front of his computer talking shop with his music director, George Fulginiti-Shakar. Everyone is anxious for the clock to strike five, the call for four local actors who portray a chorus of boisterous "Alaskeros"—Filipino salmon cannery workers of the 1920s and '30s-to rehearse the showstopping tinikling (bamboo dance) number. "They are only available in the evening," Fulginiti-Shakar explains. "It's taken me twice as long to work with them on vocals, and with limited dance time."

Juneau—Alaska's forested capital (pop. 31,000)—is not exactly the first place that leaps to mind when you think of major new musicals, but The Long Season, a heartrending original work by Obispo and playwright/lyricist Chay Yew, is receiving its out-in-the-wilderness tryout here. It is the first important Broadway-style musical about the Filipino-American migratory-worker experience to be mounted in the U.S. It has a Filipino composer, a Filipino choreographer and a mostly Filipino cast composed of professional actors and community members—one of the latter, the muscular dancer Ellery Lumbab, has actually slimed fish in the Alaskan canneries, and caught and processed codfish and king crabs out in the open seas off the Bering Strait.

In fact, Perseverance is cooking up not one but two socially progressive theatre pieces, performed a month apart, which together trace, probe and celebrate the evolution and impact of the old Filipino bachelors—the manongs—who settled in Alaska during the first decades of the 20th century, a potent history that is rarely told and, until recently, has never been depicted on stage, let alone with this much hard work, energy and concentrated focus. What intrigues, however, is how these two Alaskan portraits vie and strive to capture different aspects of the same Filipino immigrant experience—one by taking the form of a musical, and the other through docudrama. Beautiful and full of longing, The Long Season is a tough-minded Filipino love story using the early unionization efforts of a 1929 Ketchikan salmon cannery as its backdrop. A musical fantasy, it is a restless, ballad-driven yarn about a new immigrant from the Philippines who leaves everything behind in the old country and struggles to find life anew on American shores. Voyage, the companion piece to The Long Season, is a community-based nonfiction play based on eight months of interviews with 20 individuals representing four generations of Filipinos in Juneau and Anchorage, including Indopinos like Marcelo Quinto. Both are the offspring of what had originally begun as a grand initiative called "The Cannery Project."

The birthing process of these theatre projects has not been easy. Over the past two years, complications ensued, testing the time, resources and ambitions of Perseverance, a gutsy, first-rate, yet humbly appointed rabbit warren perched on the hilly terrain of a coastal island on the frontier's edge of the continental U.S. Founded by Molly Smith in 1979, Perseverance enjoys a well-deserved reputation for excellence that contrasts with the modesty and rough qualities of the physical space itself. (Instead of a neon marquee, a parked white van sports the theatre's phoenix logo at the right side of its two-storied demesne.) The company takes great pride in its Alaskan Native–inflected repertory (Yup'ik Antigone, Tlingit Macbeth). To a visitor, what is most impressive, in the cases of The Long Season and Voyage, is the company's profound commitment to reflect and respond to the Alaskan community-to lend authenticity and virtuosity to these locally themed projects. As Bernardo Bernardo, the seasoned Filipino actor and comedian who has lead roles in both shows, observes: "Tira ng tira. (They keep plugging away.) Yet this place is small enough that anybody is reachable. In the sense of hanap buhay, nakahanda na ang banquet. Eat ka na lang. (In the sense of looking for work, the banquet is already laid out. Just go and eat.)"

Arriving from out of town, I receive a round of cheerful greetings, a quick tour and a director's firm request: I am not to see tonight's performance. I am not to take in the show until opening night on Friday, although it is all right for me to be a fly on the wall and observe rehearsals. Apparently the show has just survived heavy cuts and edits that lopped off about 45 minutes from a nearly three-hour running time three days ago—the only time the entire show, in its four years of development, has been performed on its feet. After tonight's second preview, there will be a full day of rehearsals tomorrow, Thursday.

So while this picturesque Alaskan day could allow a visitor time for sightings of humpbacks or orcas or tufted puffins and blacklegged kittiwakes, at Perseverance, time is precious. The show's book writer and lyricist, Chay Yew, has already flown back to Los Angeles to go into rehearsals for another play of his, A Distant Shore. In the wee hours of Saturday morning, right after opening, the show's composer, director and music director are going to fly out of Juneau as well, returning to New York City, where they are based. Considering that The Long Season is Yew's first musical effort, his early departure could be viewed as hasty or unfortunate, but it gives the actors the break they need to adjust to the cuts. On opening night, several principals will remark that it was like the dress rehearsal they never got.

Community

In another part of Douglas Island, Merry Ellefson, Perseverance's most-produced playwright, finds herself in a quandary. How much ethnic conflict and dirty laundry can a documentary play air in public? Would it hurt Voyage's dramatic oomph and authenticity if identities were kept anonymous? At one point, feeling overwhelmed by matters relating to Filipino customs and language, the blonde Caucasian asked her Filipino-American director Flordelino Lagundino if he would consider writing Voyage himself. Imported in January from Washington, D.C., by Perseverance's new artistic director, PJ Paparelli, the young, doe-eyed Lagundino, who works more frequently as an actor, declined the offer. Like Yew, he is an outsider to the Juneau community. Having wrenched a 45-minute first draft out of a stack of 129 pages of single-spaced transcribed interviews, Ellefson worries about insensitivity. Her play might stir too much "not-so-good blood," she says, as when it relates how in the 1950s and '60s several uppity Filipino women, newly arrived to Juneau and feeling threatened by Filipino-Indian intermarriages, slammed the doors in the face of Tlingit wives and mothers, who were charter members of the Filipino Community Hall they had built. Their Pinoy husbands became angry and bitter. "We're not proud of any of this," Voyage's mestizo says. "Don't get me wrong. It is just part of history."

With a chorus of four actors shifting parts to portray more than 22 Filipino citizens of Juneau, ages 16 to 87—remarkably, the Indopino character, partly lifted from Marcelo Quinto's stories, is being portrayed by a woman—Voyage spins forward and backward to tell a whole stretch of Filipino history in Alaska. Poetic, unsentimental, sparely produced (a trunk for props, a cream-colored scrim bearing the names of pioneering manongs in Juneau and Anchorage), the docudrama samples from the everyday realities of Filipino parents, teenagers, actors, service-industry drudges and cannery workers. Sketching themes of identity, family, work, assimilation, struggles and dreams, the play recovers memories of persevering in the face of white racism, of confronting intolerance even among Tlingits and Filipinos, and of the longing (or lack of desire) to go home to the Philippines. Aside from the mestizo, a state lesgislator and an 87-year-old merchant marine emerge as indelible characters.

Directed by Paparelli and Lagundino, Voyage was performed for two weekends this past April, first at the Filipino Community Hall and then at Perseverance's second-stage space, which seats about 60 people. This coming fall, Perseverance plans to tour Voyage to Ketchikan, Sitka and Anchorage, as well as Kodiak, where the population of 13,913 is almost 15 percent Filipino, many of whom still work in the canneries. Ellefson mostly merges the true stories into group composites, "just out of respect," she says. "It's the line you draw. I live here, too. I see my community in the bank, on streets, on the trails." For the tour, Voyage will name some names: She got permission from Long Season's folkloric dancer Ellery Lumbab and his hip-hop-loving 18-year-old son, Joshua, to lay out their fractious disagreements onstage.

Ironically, Voyage is the documentary play that The Long Season was supposed to have been. The double irony is that The Long Season was never supposed to have been a musical in the first place.

Controversy

With Chay Yew living in Los Angeles and both Fabian Obispo and Peter DuBois in New York City, it is miraculous that The Long Season came together at all. The show's principal actors came from both coasts and were rehearsed in New York, while the chorus of local Alaskeros was rehearsed in Juneau. Because the bicoastal team was developing a major musical, there was naturally a strong push to bring professional singers from out of town to play the Alaskeros. "I understand the need for that," says Paparelli. "But what having these local actors in that show does for this town is indescribable."

The creative team's major hurdle, once they were in Juneau, was to integrate the Equity actors with the Juneau natives. "The local performers brought a kind of soul and honesty to the musical," says DuBois, who was artistic director of Perseverance when he commissioned the work in 2001 as "The Cannery Project." "Coming back, I wanted the piece to be something Juneau audiences would embrace," he continues. "It was for me a farewell to the theatre and a thank-you to the community."

The idea for the Cannery Project came out of DuBois's work on Moby Dick, an adaptation of the Melville narrative combined with interviews with the Iñupiat Eskimos and Alaskan whaling communities. His collaborator, Yew, a renowned L.A.-based playwright of the Asian-American experience, would base his text for the docudrama partly on America Is in the Heart, writer and labor organizer Carlos Bulosan's 1946 autobiographical novel. Moreover, Yew would consult with Filipino-American scholars, historians and leaders, among them former Alaska state legislator Thelma Buchholdt. The first Filipino woman elected to any state legislature in the U.S. and the author of the invaluable history Filipinos in Alaska: 1788–1958, Buchholdt was to have been an adviser to the final production of the Cannery Project (she ended up becoming a major character in Voyage). "Filipino men who married Alaska Native women were strong role models," says Buchholdt, "but they rarely talked about the Philippines to their children. They talked about returning to their home towns to visit someday. Many of the fathers didn't get back there, not even once."

The first important literary voice for Filipinos in the U.S., Bulosan gained national popularity during the '40s as a spokesman for Filipino immigrants—predominantly young single men, similar to Chinese and Japanese laborers during the decades of U.S. exclusionary laws. Almost 100 years ago, these manongs left their wives or families to seek jobs in this country as migrant workers, farmers and domestic servants along the West Coast and in Hawaii. Between 1898, the year the Philippines became America's first and only colony, and 1946, the year the islands gained their independence, the first and second waves of Filipinos were considered "nationals" rather than "aliens," and they were not required to carry passports. Many hoped to further their American education in the colonial motherland and eventually return home. But starting in the 1920s, thousands of others were recruited by way of Seattle to work in Alaskan canneries for two to four summer months.

The Alaskeros, as these pioneers were called, held unskilled jobs in fish houses and warehouses: They were box-makers, butchers, slimers, egg-pullers and slicers. They lived in segregated bunkhouses, where they provided their own bedding or put up partitions to have privacy. Contractors, some members of their own ethnic tribes, often took advantage of them, forcing workers to buy food, clothes and other goods at exorbitant prices from their stores; many were so dependent on contractors for advances that they were deep in debt before they ever sailed to Alaska. Facing dangerous work conditions, racial discrimination and little pay for long hours, they were pushed to organize. In June 1933, they formed in Seattle the Cannery Workers and Farm Laborers Union, the first such organization to be dominated by Filipinos.

Because of its unique subject matter, the Cannery Project could only have been born in Juneau. Today self-identified Filipinos comprise the largest nonwhite ethnic group in Alaska (about 2.6 percent of the state's population), after Alaska Natives. Since the project spoke directly to Perseverance's mission of producing new and classic works through an Alaskan lens, it received generous funding from an array of foundations and public agencies, including the TCG/MetLife Foundation and the Nathan Cummings Foundation. Seeds of controversy, however, were planted when, about a year and a half ago, Yew decided that he did not want to write a documentary play, and he abandoned the idea of doing interviews.

"I lost interest in oral history," the playwright admits, speaking by phone from Los Angeles. In reading the interviews and archival research, Yew felt that the stories and materials he found stirred up his own experience of crossing the Pacific and struggling to make it in America. On a pure emotional level, he connected to America Is in the Heart. "Bulosan's book put in sharper relief what it was like to be an immigrant who came to America," Yew says. "Even though I originally come from Singapore, I was surprised how much I understood the manongs—how they felt, what they were thinking, the expectations from the family. I sympathized with their plight. They lived in hotels. Many never married. They were not indigenous. I remember flying from Singapore straight to Juneau. Going from the tropics directly to the cold, wet climate was such a stark contrast. I was trying to figure out all my own baggage of why I came to this country."

Yew's interest in Bulosan has manifested itself in a 1998 play, A Beautiful Country, in which the main character, Miss Visa Denied, a Malaysian drag queen searching for identity and home, alights upon the "Dance of the Manongs," a choreographed riff Yew and Obispo later transformed into the memorable cannery anthem, "We Are the Alaskeros," in The Long Season.

Originally slated for March 2004, the Cannery Project was postponed. DuBois's challenge was how to articulate to the project's numerous funders and to Perseverance's board of directors Yew's decision to switch gears. "Perseverance has a tradition of doing this: You walk in the door with one idea and what shows up on stage is something completely different," he says. "Paula Vogel came up to Alaska to write a play about Italian castrati. Instead she wrote her Pulitzer winner, How I Learned to Drive. There was that history there, an understanding within the organization to 'follow the artist.' Perseverance's strength has been to respond with, 'Okay, we'll go in this direction with you.'"

What if the Alaskeros' story was set to music? What if it was approached as fiction? "There's a way in which fiction can get you to the heart of the matter even more truthfully than fact," DuBois posits, "an emotional truth that you can't always build with the actual words people are saying."

Besides, the docudrama route may have been too quick an impulse, too cookie-cutter a model. "The story of the Filipino immigrants coming to Alaska in the 1920s is as exciting dramatically as anything else in the canon of American musicals," DuBois argues. "When talking about minority or marginalized populations, we tend to use a clinical, politically correct frame to contain that kind of work. What got me excited about The Long Season was its use of the American musical tradition to tell this specifically Alaskan story. For me that is a political act of breaking the mold."

Nevertheless a fracas broke out. Some members of the Filipino-American community in Juneau and Anchorage got wind of the news that The Long Season was not going to be about them, their history and experiences. Board members read an incomplete early draft of Yew's script, which was then circulated among some in the Filipino community. "People were concerned," recalls Paparelli, "that a fictionalized story that took a lot of artistic license was going to appear as documentary fact, as what happened historically."

"Nobody was trying to hurt the project," says DuBois, now an associate producer at New York City's Public Theater. "But it was the wrong way to vet the project with the community, because it did not involve the artists." Such confusion and miscommunication boiled under the surface-a perception that somehow Perseverance had lost some of its ownership of the project-that as soon as Paparelli assumed the troupe's artistic leadership, the first words he heard were: "What are you going to do with The Long Season?"

Voyage's Ellefson recalls: "We were hanging a lot of weight on the project, as a theatre and as a community. What's been interesting for me, as a non-Filipino and as a representative of this organization, was the sense of tangling threads I encountered on a one-on-one basis: 'Whatever happened with The Long Season? What is this thing you're doing?'"

Beyond merely being a way to mend wounds, Paparelli conceived Voyage as a direct response to what he discovered had been an unmet need. He says: "The community really wanted a piece that was made from actual interviews with Filipinos. At the same time, we wanted to let Chay continue on his own path. What we had to do was find another means to tell the truth, but also to show history's complexity."

Instead of running simultaneously, Voyage fishtails The Long Season. This has had the net effect of being an embarrassment of riches for Alaskan Filipinos, who, controversy notwithstanding, threw salu-salo after salu-salo in their homes and in the Filipino Community Hall. One karaoke-filled bash was so extravagant the hosts doled out doggie bags of pansit, adobo and inihaw to Perseverance's actors and crew—with the lascivious Bernardo, on Easter Sunday no less, spicing up the kakanin (banquet) with his salt-of-the-earth standup. "We will all come back next year," he wisecracks, "to star in a musical about gay Alaskeros. All those single men trapped in a bunkhouse!"

Legacies

During a New Dramatists workshop in New York City, Fabian Obispo was taken to task for the curiously unexotic character, at least to Broadway ears, of his Long Season score. A few producers and artistic directors came to expect a Pinoy King and I or Pacific Overtures, or they left simply puzzled: How exactly is a Filipino musical supposed to sound? But one of the vestiges of 350 years of Western colonialism in the Philippines is its hybrid music. Except for the indigenous tribal songs of the Muslim South, Philippine music embodies a blend of mostly Malay and Hispanic influences, shot through with emotional maturity and rich tenderness—as opposed to the pentatonic palette that characterizes much Asian music. Romantic sentiment, along with resignation to heartbreak and pain, is a hallmark of Philippine music-literary forms.

The Long Season's score has something of this folk-music sensibility. Using a three-piece orchestra (piano, mandolin/violin, a cello/bass) for Perseverance's production, Obispo's propulsive work songs, alternating with melancholic pop ballads, draw heavily on Kurt Weill–influenced rhythms and Spanish-style melodies of the harana (serenade) and kundiman (native love song). A Tayabas native from the Philippine island of Luzon who moved to the U.S. in 1984, Obispo sweetens and smooths over Yew's sinewy-long free verses and bone-hard imagery. "I wrote the show with the Filipinos in Alaska in mind," he says. If he has his ideal druthers, the musical's next incarnation would be interpreted by a chorus of at least 10 traditionally trained singers and at least five orchestra pieces, with a stronger emphasis on the banduria, a 14-string mandolin-type of instrument whose frequent use can be gleaned from the archival photos of manongs.

Shot through with humor and fatalism, The Long Season satisfies as a star-crossed romance. Voyage, by contrast, is a docudrama of invocation, a summoning up of personal memories and identities, a mélange of everyday vignettes and genealogical links. Its most immediate impact is on the citizens whose lives it refracts. Where Voyage is a group portrait, The Long Season is a make-believe book of hours. It tells nobody's story but vies to imagine everybody's story.

In effect, Perseverance's emotionally stirring production, directed with verve and élan by DuBois, is a musical reworking—and expansion—of the barely six pages that Bulosan devotes to Alaskeros in America Is in the Heart. Scenic designer Dan Ostling's window-laden suspended wooden dock, which eerily abstracts the oppressive belly of Ketchikan's salmon canneries, raises the metaphor of early Filipino immigrant identity as a kind of floating island in a shoreless sea. The tale's idealistic newcomer, Allos—portrayed by six-foot-tall Paolo Montalban, with a watchful resolve and matinee-idol charms—possesses Bulosan's nickname, but that is as far as the resemblance goes. (Bulosan was actually a small man utterly enamored of Caucasian women.) The radical spirit of America Is in the Heart pervades Allos's coming into consciousness: Both Bulosan and Yew poetically dramatize the decisive moments that force a manong to move from a place of powerlessness and oppression to a passionate articulation of the struggles for equality and justice for his kababayan (fellow countryman); both sing of how harsh circumstances push an optimistic Pinoy toward political action.

The surprise of The Long Season is how hugely Yew invests the character Belen, the adulterous wife of the bullying foreman Conrado, with sardonic significance. Belen despises living and working with him year-round in Ketchikan, and yet she's got nowhere else to go. So as an escape, during every salmon season she boldly takes up a new Filipino lover. In "Take Me Home," she croons to Allos, her latest catch:

Take me away
From trees that pine for sun
Pry me away
From fish that swim home just to die
Tear me away
From rains that drown the sky
Imagine now
And this world will go away
And suddenly
I am home
In my mind

Sung with a lively mixture of spite, sass and angst by Melody Butiu, Belen is a playwright's fancy. In the early decades of the 20th century, Filipinas were not permitted to sail to Alaska. As the Indopino in Voyage testifies: "See, in the early days, the Filipino men came over here alone. They weren't allowed to marry white women, just as the Tlingits weren't allowed to marry white men." In California and Washington, the handful of Filipina workers would have been treated like queens by the manongs—not disrespected, as is Belen, whom Allos's homosexual best friend, Ted, refers to as "the Hester Prynne of Ketchikan." "I take responsibility for Belen," Yew says. "Her presence demonstrates that immigrant women of color didn't have legal rights. She has to survive in her own way."

Says Bernardo, who portrays the despicable Conrado with soulful authority: "Hindi lahat ng contrabida ay puti (Not all villains were white people)." Having succumbed to a life of compromise with Belen, Conrado represents those manongs twisted by stifled circumstances and an absurd desire to assimilate. "Conrado," adds Bernardo, "has changed from being a kababayan to a man who takes on the values of the white exploiters. He is older. He is not schooled. In a lot of ways, he is disabled." Conrado's journey then is to defend his warped sense of home with Belen.

As opposed to documentary, fiction has a stranger mandate: Character, not chronological history or scholarly necessity, drives the action. Imagination intervenes and takes over when the intricate textures of facts and statistics have dissolved into the mists of history. Whatever its flights of fancy, The Long Season does encapsulate the spiritual and emotional truth about the Filipino migratory-worker struggle in Alaska, a powerful story of firm resolve and limited possibilities that, with a few exceptions, has been absent from American social history. The Long Season may not have the same documentary potential for raising awareness about the lives of Alaska's cannery workers as did, say, The Laramie Project, with its ripped-from-the-headlines depiction of violence against gays—but then neither does Voyage, whose multigenerational scope only touches on the struggle of Alaskeros as it traverses through time and space. The unrealized possibility of the Cannery Project, like the promises of the American Dream, is likely to remain unwritten, since so many of the manongs have grown very old. Most have passed on to the next life.

ay manong
your old brown hands
hold life, many lives
within each crack
a story
—from "you lovely people" by Virginia Cerenio

Epilogue

Mary Gubatayao-Hagen is Tsimshian/Filipino. Standing by the glass door with a friend at the end of a Saturday performance, she has been patiently waiting for the cast of The Long Season to appear. Everyone else in the audience has driven home. On this cold, rainy night, the white fluorescent lights in the lobby are softened only by a bouquet of flowers. It is the day after opening night. Carrying a backpack, Flordelino Lagundino is the first to emerge. Gubatayao-Hagen approaches him. One by one, the other actors gather to listen as she speaks:

"I saw my Filipino uncles in your show. They were Alaskeros. The mandolin was a beautiful touch—I really felt the loneliness of my bachelor uncles. Some married Tlingit women who had to be strong for the sake of us, their mestizo children. When you guys did the bamboo dance, I remembered the wonderful parties we had. I can tell some of you are American born. But I can see and hear in the other actors how the manongs moved, how they spoke." She pauses, tears rolling down her cheeks. "This show—this is how they lived. As a Native Alaskan, I get many opportunities to shine. Tonight I shine as Filipino. I can feel that all my grandfathers and uncles and manongs are here tonight. Their spirits are smiling."