Communing with the Vampire
The seductive works of Jessica Hagedorn—including a hot-button new musical about celebrity murder-teem with mythic and real-life monsters
By Randy Gener
LOLA AGONG: Most likely they were seeds of the trumpet flower. Aswangs can’t resist picking them up—it’s almost as if they are mesmerized by them. That’s how you find out who’s really an aswang. (Holds out her arms) You poor child! Come to your lola. Without the shaman there would only be darkness. (Lola Agong takes Awit in her arms)
MARAYA: There you go, spoiling her again.
LOLA AGONG: Perhaps it was nothing but a dream, Awit.
AWIT: But you said that dreams are real, too, Lola.
LOLA AGONG: Did I?
—Three Vampires, by Ping Chong and Jessica Hagedorn
When speaking of the most dreaded of supernatural ghouls, we Filipinos prefer to use the word aswang. This all-purpose term, popular among Tagalog and Visayan folks, can cause some confusion, especially when the Filipino-American poet, novelist and playwright Jessica Hagedorn translates the word as “vampire,” because its original Filipino meaning actually lumps together a formidable tangle of disparate beliefs. The word might refer, for example, to the manananggal, an ordinary human by day who becomes by night a viscera sucker whose upper torso departs from its lower body, its guts hanging, as it sprouts claws, fangs and wings. Or the word may evoke a tikbalang, a centaur whose knees tower above its horse head when it squats on a banyan tree, chewing tobacco. The legend about the aswang my grandma (lola) told me refers to the wak-wak, a birdlike creature that emerges at night in search of prey. Lola used to say that when youhear this creature’s faint “wak-wak-wak” call, you should immediately slam the windows shut, because an ungû (Cebuano for “vampire”) is no doubt lurking nearby. The tik-tik, yet another winged creature, lands on the roof of a house and sticks its long, threadlike tongue through any opening it finds until it reaches the exposed belly of its victim, usually a pregnant woman. A tik-tik finds the unborn baby from a mother’s womb delicious—which is why you should always cover your sleeping body with a blanket.
| Related Links: Creating and Producing the New American Musical Theater, a panel discussion with Jessica Hagedorn and Mark Bennett (TCG Conference) Breaking the Sound Barrier, on Mark Bennett and other sound designer/composers (American Theatre) Dogeaters by Jessica Hagedorn (TCG Bookstore) |
All varieties of aswangs appear and recur in Jessica Hagedorn’s edgy, irreverent body of theatrical work—real aswangs, a few pretend monsters and a host of figurative ones. In the beginning, her use of this imagery was all canny insinuation and playful suggestion. In her most famous work, the 1998 stage adaptation (revised in 2001) of her 1990 novel Dogeaters—about her ambivalent love for the Philippines and its tangled relationship with American colonizers—the radio personality Nestor Noralez, in the guise of a vampire, emits a creepy banshee laugh on the fictional radio soap opera “Love Letters.” This aswang’s kitschy entrance is juxtaposed with the abrupt arrival of a mangy-haired pimp who exhorts the 16-year-old Afro-Filipino hustler Joey Sands to get off his butt and hurry over to a love motel where a certain don and his wife are waiting to be sexually serviced. Later in this epic play, a steely Imelda Marcos smirks to scare off the talk-show host Barbara Villanueva when she alludes to rumors of “ghosts of all the workers who remain buried underneath” the movie theatre that the then Philippine First Lady had hastily built in 1981 for the first Manila International Film Festival, designed to promote the Philippines as the Cannes of the East.
Hagedorn’s characters have also wielded aswang as an epithet. In an exchange in Stairway to Heaven—a 2005 play set in San Francisco’s squalid Tenderloin that Hagedorn created for Campo Santo, the resident theatre company at the Bay Area’s Intersection for the Arts—a perpetually strung-out pole dancer, Minnie, inquires of Mickey, the brooding apple of her eye, the whereabouts of his roommate Nena, a garrulous insomniac with a passion for cooking exotic dishes from her homeland. “She takes these walks around the neighborhood when she can’t sleep,” Mickey says. “Whoa—at this hour?” Minnie remarks. “Bet she’s a vampire, Mick. One of those—wha’ does she call ’em? Assoo…wa-was? She’s one of us, awright. Prowlin’ aroun’ till the sun comes up. Right? Am I right or what? Gotta cigarette?”
Lately, Hagedorn’s aswangs have grown from tossed-off reference to full-blown metaphor. The three ghoul-ridden tales that comprise Three Vampires—her multimedia puppet-theatre collaboration with Ping Chong, which is expected to premiere in New York City this fall—grab hold of the wak-wak, tik-tik and sirena (mermaid) from Philippine folklore and transform them into mordant symbols of the chilling consequences and lurid ironies of the West’s colonial adventure in Southeast Asia.
Hagedorn’s idea of vampires clearly goes beyond the traditional definition. Her plays borrow from the scary-quaint-macabre folkloric idea of the aswang as a person who has become ill or is in a state of being possessed. According to legends, bloodsuckers look and live like normal people, may even have jobs (usually as butchers or undertakers) and could be your next-door neighbors. In Hagedorn’s fevered imagination, vampires need not be skulking demons in the dark or meat-eaters biding their time in remote rural barrios. The metaphor has moved right up front. And the most disturbing thing about her portraits of the vampires is their familiarity: Modern-day aswangs might be the pimps, prostitutes and oily politicians in the urban jungles of Manila (Dogeaters); the strippers, drifters and grifters of America’s seedy tenderloins (Stairway to Heaven); or the killers, gay A-list types and ambitious journalists who flock to sun-kissed oceanfront enclaves like San Diego and Miami in her newest work, the controversial musical drama Most Wanted, for which she wrote the book and lyrics.
“Vampires are my trademark,” Hagedorn says, in a double interview with her composer and co-lyricist Mark Bennett this past October at La Jolla Playhouse, located just north of San Diego, where Most Wanted received a fancy workshop production through the company’s “The Edge” series, an offshoot of its Page to Stage development program. “That’s what we do to each other on some level—all of us. We suck each other dry. In nice ways and not-so-nice ways. It’s human, isn’t it? Vampires sap it out of you. They drain you. They’re all around us.”
Danny Reyes, the half-Filipino gay party boy turned spree killer in Most Wanted, is a bright young man whose pathological lies and zealous worship of glamour, celebrity and material success ultimately land him in the FBI’s ghoul hall of fame. Loosely based on Andrew P. Cunanan, the elusive fugitive who in 1997 killed the fashion designer Gianni Versace outside his mansion in Miami before committing suicide, Danny hails from an interracial, working-class background; his Irish-American mother is a devout Catholic, his Filipino father a squanderer who had abandoned the family some 15 years ago and high-tailed it back to the Philippines.
Seductively sung and winningly portrayed by Daniel Torres, Danny craves everything with a rapacious desire that might have had the potential to become a reality, given that he earned a scholarship to an elite private school in La Jolla (as did Cunanan). “From everything I read, a character like Cunanan got plenty of props growing up,” Hagedorn says. “His parents spoiled him. He was treated like a prince in his house. His siblings were not given the same attention. In a way, it started with the idea of his being a star.”
But, unfortunately, Danny feeds on the perverse pleasure of making up outrageous stories about himself. Like an aswang, he keeps shape-shifting. Hanging out in the gay neighborhood of Hillcrest, with its ever-changing gallery of tourists, foreigners, people of leisure and military men (including a considerable Latino and Filipino population), he tells one friend that he is “part-Spanish, part-French and part-Israeli—that his father had been in the Mossad.” He styles himself as a high-roller, claiming that his family had inherited an ancient villa in Florence. He promises his own mother that she would eventually live in the guesthouse of his Beverly Hills mansion. “He was the perfect son,” his mother attests. Even when he was telling the truth about his Filipino provenance, he couldn’t help but hyper-embellish. “He told me that his father’s family owned a vast sugar plantation in the Philippines, 6,000 acres,” says one of Danny’s lovers in the show. Because of his mestizo skin, accent-free speech and gregarious ways, Danny becomes a high-flying fixture on the gay social circuit, attracting the sexual ministrations of a wealthy older gentleman (with a wife and kids on the East Coast) who puts Danny in a gilded cage and turns him into a kept boy. Danny proceeds to charm a handsome Caucasian boy he meets at a local gay bar with expensive meals, gifts, drugs and a scintillating night at the opera. “Cunanan was the life of the party in a great way,” Hagedorn says. “To his parents, he was the light. To his friends, he brought good feelings. He put people together. He was the guy who made the party happen.”
Says Bennett: “We hope that the audience will also get seduced by Danny—up to a point. Obviously, because of the nature of the events being told, the audience is going to need to have a viewpoint shift about him. The challenge is how to modulate a character that you are going to, if not fall in love with, at least feel sympathetic toward or have some identification with—and then the show sends that character down a path that we wouldn’t necessarily go down ourselves. How does the audience shift its perspective about that character in a way that still makes the piece work?”
Most Wanted voyeuristically re-maps the creation (and self-destruction) of a radically new stage character—a displaced queer person of color who roots himself not in place or ethnic identity, but in fantasies of wealth and glamour. To infiltrate and traverse “the scene,” all Danny has to do is to pass. The white, upwardly mobile, Vanity Fair–reading stratum Danny yearns to move in is one that valorizes the trappings of capitalism and American consumerism, a chichi gay cloister that mimics and adopts the values of the straight world, where appearances are everything. This fast life of parties, dances, drugs and easy sex is evoked at the end of Act 1 with “Get Your Gold,” an exuberantly cynical number set in a gay dance club, located in the “City of Angels N’Eternal Youth,” where Danny and his hot, younger boyfriend work up a sweat after chancing upon the fashion designer Apolo Serra:
Say whatever I need
To get all that I want
If it means I can feel
Like this when I want
If it means I can have this
In my life
All my life.
I’ll say whatever I need
To get all that I want
Do whatever I want
To get all that I need
Get the love, get the groove
Get the gold, get the toys
And get the boys.
Unraveling like a fever dream in a land of sunlight and miasma, the framing scenes in Most Wanted move in and out of a Hillcrest nightclub, Uncle Buck’s, where an imposing, all-knowing drag queen named Stormy Leather holds forth as sardonic emcee, cabaret hostess and compassionate narrator. Though ferociously portrayed by Ken Page, Stormy Leather is an uncritical mouthpiece, a bard of the culture of racialized desires. “She is a strong presence guiding us through the evening but not landing one way or another about a particular character in the show,” explains Bennett. Stormy Leather does pose some questions in the ironic song “Celebrity of Me” about what’s going on with Danny and the entertainment reporter Liz Mitchell from the tabloid rag Guilty Pleasures, on whom the killer bestows coy, phoned-in tidbits (a fictionalized stand-in for Vanity Fair correspondent Maureen Orth, who penned a tawdry book about the real-life saga, Vulgar Favors: Andrew Cunanan, Gianni Versace and the Largest Failed Manhunt in U.S. History). Adds Bennett: “What Stormy Leather is basically doing in that number is to reflect the feelings both these people have—she’s not necessarily coming in to say this is an awful thing…”
“…or that it’s the best thing that’s ever happened,” Hagedorn interjects. “Stormy gives us an entrée into a bigger story that we could tell—about gay culture, sexuality, mixed-race issues, money, power, passion and obsession. She symbolizes how we reinvent and transform ourselves by taking on different personas. We’re all pretending to be somebody we’re not, or pretending to be somebody we want to be.”
One fatal flaw in Danny’s beguiling personality is that he mutates himself to appeal to the social standards of the white gay ethos. With a knowing eye, a lustful heart and crystal meth in his system, Danny replicates himself over and over again, constructing a different façade to suit and impress the gaze of every new person he encounters. Recklessly, he builds a house of cards, a tissue of lies that falls apart when the possibilities he had seen for himself suddenly disappear. Most Wanted is a fast and furiously creepy parable about an artful cad whose aspirations run amok—and who flames out. And when his world caves in, he morphs into a queer monster. Note this surreal exchange between Danny and a bartender who, in one of the strangest moments of the show, shape-shifts into his absent father, Lee:
DANNY: Pop???
STORMY (To Danny): Angel, you trippin’, or what?
LEE: I never thought I’d see you looking like a bum, Danny Boy! You can’t show up at the Serra opening looking like that. (Hands Danny the mojito) Here. Don’t drink too fast.
DANNY: I miss you, Pop.
LEE (Glancing around bar): It’s slow tonight. Usually we get much better clientele. But the “A-list” is over at the Serra party, right? (Beat) Hey, son. Did I ever tell you about aswangs when you were a kid?
DANNY: I don’t remember.
LEE: I’m sure I told you. Aswang is a Filipino term for creature of the night. Bloodsucker. The town I come from is famous for its bloodsuckers. Did I ever tell you about the town I came from, Danny?
DANNY: Nope.
LEE (Lowers his voice): See that guy over there? Keeps his head buried in a book. A little old, a little dull, but nice style. Look at that blazer and those shoes…Gucci loafers, Danny! Go get him, Dracula.
(Danny walks across the bar to where the man is sitting.)
“It’s the end of the party,” Hagedorn says. “As [Most Wanted director] Michael Greif says, it’s the party gone wrong. We are all living in a time where anything goes, and suddenly you crash, and you pay a price for living on the edge.” Both Hagedorn and Bennett, however, are careful to point out that Most Wanted does not moralize—nor does it glorify or glamorize the real events upon which it is based. “In a sense, it’s a cautionary tale,” Hagedorn reasons. “But, no, Most Wanted is not a celebration. I think I know the difference between killing and not killing, between cruelty and not cruelty.”
What Most Wanted does aim to do is to serve up an incisive yet entertaining story. “We allow the audience,” adds Bennett, “to view the actions of the characters in a certain world and a certain time, and to make its judgment about what they see. There are these people. They had trajectories. They follow them. This is how they got what they got. What do you think?”
Amid the mythmaking and checkout-aisle schlock, which elevated Cunanan into an evil genius and handed him the renown he had desperately craved but could not gain in his ordinary life, Most Wanted offers a tough-minded, Asian-American-centered view. Unlike the media, which virtually ignored what really drove Cunanan, Most Wanted seeks a differing interpretation, suffused with feral ambivalence, driven by pop/rock songs and situated in a deep humanism.
Says Hagedorn: “We have to ask ourselves: If we assimilate, what are we assimilating into? What is that American dream, and is it worth living out? What does it mean to find the pot of gold if we’re just going to turn out to be the same old crass, materialistic human being that everybody aspires to be? Why does Danny Reyes long to be rich and famous but not work for it? Because it makes him feel good? What does it mean to go after the kind of recognition where we’re willing to debase ourselves or commit an act of incredible cruelty?”
Most Wanted drew the ire of the religious right and some members of the gay community when the news broke in 2003 that the creative team (including director Greif and La Jolla Playhouse’s associate artistic director Shirley Fishman) nabbed a $35,000 National Endowment for the Arts grant to develop the musical for an eventual Playhouse premiere. Back then, when it still bore the original title Disposable, the show’s vehement critics felt that it was a misuse of federal arts funds. Gay media watchdogs voiced their alarm over what they perceived would be a sensationalistic Broadway-style exaltation of a notorious, fame-hungry murderer, a damned spree killer whom the media had branded as a “criminal mastermind,” “a master of disguise,” “a chameleon,” “a social climber,” “a gay hustler,” “possibly Caucasian” and among the most infamous “serial killers” of all time. (The New York Times, July 17, 1997: “He had a thousand stories and the faces to match.” The New York Post, on the same day: “He looks like a fashion model, a clubland vampire or the boy next door.”) To avoid capture by the police, Cunanan gave head to a semi-automatic pistol in a Miami houseboat. But since he left no suicide note after killing five people in four states over a three-month period, Most Wanted scintillatingly blends fact, conjecture and fiction in order to fully expose a shadowy figure who has remained an enigma wrapped in a mystery obscured by hyperbole.
When the controversy erupted, Des McAnuff, La Jolla Playhouse’s then artistic director, along with Fishman, the show’s dramaturg-slash-godmother, had to quickly stamp out the fires. “The critics were very vocal and concerned—and rightly so,” remembers Hagedorn. “These were people who had no idea of who I was, or who Michael Greif or Mark Bennett or the theatre were. They just read about the show and reacted. It was beautiful how Des shielded us from it. He did a press conference early on and stood by the project. It was important for those communities to realize that we’re not doing some non-serious show.”
Since La Jolla commissioned it in 2002, Most Wanted has gone through a long gestation period, in part because it was both Hagedorn’s and Bennett’s first full foray into musical theatre. After numerous private, invited-guests-only sessions (including a 2005 stint at Sundance Theatre Institute in Utah), La Jolla’s stripped-down workshop production this past October was not open for review, and, as this article goes to print, the future life of the show remains an open question.
No doubt, Most Wanted is too hot-hot-hot a property for Broadway producers hunting for easy commercial hits: Even though a good deal of time has passed since Versace’s death, the risky subject alone keeps it from immediately attracting investors looking to turn a quick buck. Yet it is a testament to the integrity, hard work, theatrical skills and first-rate artistry of the show’s creative team—including its company of talented actors (notably Arthur Acuña, Danny Gurwin, Zandi De Jesus and David Nathan Perlow)—that Most Wanted made a potent impact on the San Diego community whose lives were rocked by the massive manhunt that followed Cunanan’s homicidal spree.
During the two evenings I took in the show, several of Cunanan’s friends and schoolmates were in the audience, and they lingered and asked thoughtful questions during the post-performance discussions. Some of them noted the care that the creators took to show that ordinary people (not just bold-faced names like Versace) were among Cunanan’s victims. “We’ve had these really amazing encounters with people who grew up with Cunanan and who knew many of the real-life characters that we were inspired by,” says Hagedorn.
For those intimately connected to Cunanan, Most Wanted offered a chance to heal the wounds. Actor Torres, for example, met several people who went to the Bishop’s School, an elite preparatory school in the La Jolla neighborhood, where Cunanan studied French and theatre, and the University of California–San Diego, from which he eventually dropped out. “There was a woman who said she knew Cunanan,” Bennett says, “and she had not cried since the event. In the last 10 minutes of our show, she broke down. These unexpected moments have been something we hadn’t prepared for.” Hagedorn adds: “We were prepared for other reactions—we expected hostility, or that sense of ‘he belongs to us’ and ‘how dare you.’ We expected them to be defensive with us, but instead they’ve been incredibly generous.”
Much of what drives the irrational fears around Most Wanted stems from the thin, flickering veils that swathe Hagedorn’s ripped-from-the-headlines creations. A fearless purveyor of counter-myths, she is willing to cross the line and twist the accepted narrative. The first Filipino writer to attain any kind of mainstream recognition in the U.S., she has shown a penchant for confrontation. Dogeaters, for example, raised hackles in the Filipino community, since its title is a derogatory epithet coined by American soldiers during the Philippine-American War. To this day, Hagedorn deals with the remnants of that upset. She had to respond to the criticisms and questions when she flew back to the Philippines this past November to attend the Philippine premiere of Dogeaters (in which Imelda Marcos was played by a man) and made guest appearances on Boy Abunda’s “Private Conversations” on ABS-CBN Channel 2 and on Cheche Lazaro’s “Charlie Rose”–style talk-show “Media in Focus.”
“I was anxious about how this play was going to be accepted there,” Hagedorn recalls. “I’m sure many of them came with a let’s-see-what-this-is-going-to-be-like attitude. People there are gracious, but I’m no fool. When you get to a certain place, you get these hits—it’s all part of the territory. I chose to title my novel this way and, therefore, I have to confront what comes with that and take responsibility. So, yeah, I get critiqued a lot.”
Audacity, hybridity, contradiction, simultaneity, funky chaos, madness, vivacious humor and poetic beauty—all these swirls of style run through the word machine of this author’s perfervid mind. She exults in blurring the lines between seriousness, caricature and scathing satire. “I don’t always know if I’m succeeding, but I am always curious about myths around people,” she says. “I’m drawn to mythmakers who are interested in propagating their own legends. If the myth is about somebody being good, I don’t quite swallow it. What’s behind that story?”
Hagedorn’s public image is that of a cool-crazy, canny-witty, spiky-haired cat—a worldly-wise entrepreneur of the roman à clef. Even when she is in close cahoots with other artists, she emerges as a mischievous remaker of signs, icons and sacred cows. “I don’t want to make light of it,” she insists. “When I alter the facts, my intent is not to write a ‘Saturday Night Live’ skit. I hope the whole deconstruction is mordantly funny. Satire is one tool, but it’s not the whole thing. I want the stakes to be high.”
So high, in fact, that she refuses to rest on her considerable laurels. Thanks to a $50,000 grant from the Lucille Lortel Foundation, Hagedorn has been able to concentrate on playwriting for a year. Shuttling between New York City, where she resides with two daughters, and San Francisco, where she spent her formative years as a poet, performance artist and lead singer of a rock band, Hagedorn has been pushing herself to explore new terrain. “To compose the lyrics for Most Wanted, Mark taught me the rules of scansion,” she quips. “I’m proud of that. I’m proud I can even say the word.” In tandem with Campo Santo, Hagedorn has also embarked on a trilogy of delightfully sharp plays, which includes 2005’s Stairway to Heaven and last year’s Fè in the Desert, both character studies about fraternal twin sisters. “Even though I wasn’t sure where my plays were going for Campo Santo,” she says, “I immediately committed to the idea of a trilogy. The twins are the connecting thread. The third play is not necessarily going to be about them again—that much I know. I know the actor I hope we can get to work with us on it [Omar Metwally]. I work backwards in many ways—I started writing with those Campo Santo actors in mind. It’s a bit unorthodox. I would never do that with another company.”
Hagedorn’s panoramic canvases typically involve multilayered plotlines, lots of characters, overlapping sketches, nonlinear time shifts and Brechtian fast-switches. Incorporating elements of musicals and performance art, her early works—Chiquita Banana (1972), a one-act play-for-TV satirizing the actress Carmen Miranda; and Tenement Lover: no palm trees/in new york city (1981), a pastiche of letters, rock songs and monologues about the Filipino immigrant experience—are fractal social satires, darkly comic ruminations on popular culture and racial and gender identity. Collaboration with other artists suits Hagedorn best, as attested by several notable theatrical productions, such as Where the Mississippi Meets the Amazon (1977), with Ntozake Shange and Thulani Davis; Teenytown (1988), with Laurie Carlos and Robbie McCauley; and Airport Music (1994), with Han Ong.
Stairway to Heaven and its prequel Fè in the Desert depart from Hagedorn’s obsessive meditation on her ancestral homeland. Still, these smaller-scale plays for Campo Santo, which operate in a spicy Sam Shepard mode and take a more America-centered tack, bear all the typical motifs of a wacky Hagedorn party. “I live here in America, and I should grapple with what goes on here,” she says. “Campo Santo is very open to my work—they pursued me for a long time to come write for them. There’s a real level of trust, an acceptance of the surreal and the wacky.” Campo Santo’s electric sense of ensemble and multicultural makeup coax Hagedorn into strong feelings of complicity.
Although she insists that she doesn’t always want to be writing about the Philippines, Hagedorn couldn’t pass up the golden opportunity to collaborate with one of her cherished role models, the maverick director Ping Chong. Their Three Vampires , which will be co-produced by Chong’s East Village outfit and Ma-Yi Theater Company, is bound to be a fifth addition to his poetic East-West Quartet. Chong has previously tackled Japan (Deshima), China (Chinoiserie), Vietnam (After Sorrow) and Korea (Pojagi). This time, Chong and Hagedorn have created a savory, fright-night allegory of the history of the Philippines teeming with phantasms and aswangs .
Just as Most Wanted forced Hagedorn to try her hand at writing librettos and lyrics for musical theatre, Three Vampires lures her into the world of puppetry. “Ping’s challenge to me was: ‘How could I deal with the Philippines differently, not like Dogeaters?’ I think the vampire mythology is the key: Vampires suck you dry and live off you. That’s what the colonizers did—and what they continue to do. The vampire is the perfect metaphor. It’s a beautiful one. It’s classic.”
Organized around three tropical apparitions, Three Vampires begins with a simple folktale about the genesis of the world and the bucolic innocence of the pre-Hispanic period of the Philippines. A little girl in a village by the sea is left alone by her parents and grandmother. Strange and fantastic things happen. Spirits and strangers visit her. Then the ships of the Spanish galleon arrive.
The story then moves to the haunted home of the governor of a remote province during the Spanish colonial period. Performed in Spanish, Tagalog and English, this grisly episode unfolds like a melodrama—imagine The House of Bernarda Alba literally invaded by bloodsucking wak-waks and carrion-eaters. The first of the three daughters of Governor Alba and his wife, Bernarda, is mysteriously killed. That evening, a shaman shows up to perform an invocation so that the dead daughter doesn’t wake up and terrorize everyone.
The third episode, set in the near future, is a horrific picture of blatant excess, a surreal dream feast: An ostentatious party rages in the sprawling mansion of Philippine President Tiffany Tumbog-Ligaya, who is described in the stage directions as “perky, petite, smart and speaks perfect English.” Her cabal of guests includes celebrities, movie idols, mega-stars, pop singers, politicians, military brass, Westerners and diehard fashionistas. Might she be an obscene fictional stand-in for the current president Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo?
An impish traveler on frontiers of theatrical mischief, Hagedorn bursts out laughing when I pose that question.
“I embrace everything—the ghost world and gritty realism,” she says. “I love to laugh. I love to be amazed. To me, there would be nothing strange about you and me sitting in a café, and a big aswang walks in, half man and half animal with a tail, and this creature sits with us, having a cup of coffee while we continue our conversation. That would be a typical day in the life of my characters.”