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For the past 17 years, The Filipino Express has provided the Filipino American community the best news, arts and entertainment coverage from around the United States and the Philippines.
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Photography exhibition on Fil-Am history set for April 3
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Ang hindi lumingon sa pinanggalingan ay hindi makararating sa paroroonan (He who does not look back will not get to where he is headed.) — Tagalog proverb
New Haven, CONNECTICUT --- History and cultural heritage are not always communicated well through written description. However, photographic documentation provides a visual point of reference and a connection on an emotional level.
It also enhances a playgoer’s experience, offering oral history and personal narrative that can further educate and illustrate the fictional world of a play.
A new exhibition, “To Be a Filipino in America,” offers visitors and playgoers an informed and aesthetic look at life in the Filipino American community in California in the 1930’s and 1940’s.
Curated by Randy Gener of New York City and April Donahower of Connecticut, the display is on view March 16—April 3 at lobby of the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, Conn., in conjunction with its New American Voices production of “The Romance of Magno Rubio,” Lonnie Carter’s award-winning play adaptation of a Carlos Bulosan short story, which is directed and designed by Loy Arcenas.
Moreover, on Sunday April 3, Randy Gener, senior editor of American Theatre magazine, will appear on the Long Wharf stage with noted Filipino American scholar and author DR. E. SAN JUAN in a matinee symposium—also titled “To Be a Filipino in America”—in which the two speakers will discuss how the activist and author Carlos Bulosan reflected, in his novels and poetry and other writings, the lives and history of Filipino migrant workers in the United States.
“Carlos Bulosan is the first important literary voice for Filipinos in the United States,” says Randy Gener. “His most famous novel, ‘America Is in the Heart,’ depicts the terrible living and working conditions of Filipino immigrants struggling to survive in America. He immigrated to the U.S. from the Philippines in the early 1930s as part of the early 20th-century wave of immigrants from that country known as the Manong generation. He thought America would bring new opportunities.”
“Featuring rare photographs,” Gener continues, “this lobby exhibit at Long Wharf Theatre offers a poignant portrayal of the home lives and work of the Manongs at a pivotal point in the 20th century. Long Wharf Theatre has asked me to be the curate and organize this Filipino exhibit. In addition to supplying the photographs and texts (written in English and Tagalog), I wrote the captions and contextual history for the exhibit.”
Some of the photographs in the display, adds Gener, were taken by Tomas Gaspar, a Los Angeles-based art photographer and the son of a Filipino father and Mexican mother, both of whom were farmworkers in California. Most of the other photographs are courtesy of the Filipino American National Historical Society of Seattle, Wa., which generously gave their time and energy to the display.
Headed by Dorothy and Fred Cordova, the Filipino American National Historical Society (FANHS) is the most important national resource and archive for all things related to the Filipino American experience in the U.S. Says Gener: “These photos provide both human and aesthetic dimensions to the play adaptation, ‘The Romance of Magno Rubio,’ which combines the clever word play, rhymes and rhythms and reveals the lives of migrant workers, their struggles, dreams and their longings for home and a better life.”
Gener’s essay, “Love in the Time of the ‘Manongs,’” in which he introduces audiences to times of the first major Filipino immigration to the U.S., has been published as program notes in the Long Wharf playbill for the duration of the play’s run.
For more information, visit the websites: www.longwharf.org/show_voices.html or more directly www.longwharf.org/notes_magnoRubio.html.
Now in its 40th season, Long Wharf is an organization of international renown with a $6.5 million budget and an annual audience exceeding 100,000.
Long Wharf is recognized as a leader in American theatre, producing fresh and imaginative revivals of classics and modern plays, rediscoveries of neglected works and a variety of world and American premieres.
Long Wharf Theatre (222 Sargent Drive, New Haven, Conn., 06511) is located directly off Exit 46 on the Connecticut Turnpike (I-95), at the junction of Interstates 95, 91 and Route 34. The box office number is (203) 787-4282. Toll free number is (800) 782-8497. Visit www.longwharf.org.
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