Fil-Am ‘cowgirl fights for justice’ at NY playfest

Kayla May Paz Suarez (left) and Michaela Jose are in the cast of AJ Layague’s “Cowgirl Katarungan Is Fixin’ to Fight.” THOMAS LYNCH

NEW YORK — Filipino American composer and playwright AJ Layague shines a light on the importance of justice with her new theatrical piece. Her play “Cowgirl Katarungan Is Fixin’ to Fight” will be staged at the PanAsian NuWorks Festival.

In the play co-directed by Ely Sonny Orquiza and Kayla May Paz Suarez, the title character is a “Filipinx-American cowgirl truth-teller, detective poet” who recounts, in rhyming verse, four vignettes dealing with anti-miscegenation, fraud, misogyny and public rudeness and privilege.

The play’s roster of characters comprise imagined figures and real persons from history such as Filipino immigrant Salvador Roldan, who wanted to marry white British woman Marjorie Rogers in 1931 but was denied by the courts.

Ed Gonzalez Moreno is projection designer, Aria Renee Curameng is costume designer and the playwright herself is handling sound design. Cast includes Paz Suarez and Michaela Jose.

Layague’s credits as a composer include music for Shakespeare productions at Keck Theater/Occidental College in Los Angeles; film; a Star Trek video game; and chamber music for string quartets and chamber orchestras, among others.

Musicals she has composed include “A Good Boy” (co-composer), “Lucy Larcom,” and “The Ilustrados,” which features a wide range of Filipino music influences including Visayan folk tunes, kulintang and Fil-Am DJ culture.

Plays include “The Ballad of Timo and Mel” and “Kasparov in 45/Deep Blue in 19” which recounts the famous chess rematch in 1997, from the viewpoint of Billie, a young Filipina chess prodigy.

Family

Layague celebrates and honors her family with this piece, combining the passions they’ve nurtured in her as she was growing up.

“I grew up in a family of specialized knowledge,” she says. “Both my mother and my maternal grandfather emigrated from the Philippines as scholars who specialized in American culture and history. This unique mix of worlds, being brown in a white-centrist world, yet educating Americans on their own histories and policies, became a fascination to me as a writer and composer.”

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Her grandfather, Aquilino Layague, taught at Silliman University, Dumaguete City and at Buena Vista University, Iowa. Her mother, Elmira Layague Johnson, taught at different universities, including Syracuse University in New York and West Virginia University.

“She was one of the first Asian women deans in the US  at College of the Desert in Palm Desert. She and my dad, Eugene Johnson, met as faculty at Franklin College.”

“My strongest memories of childhood are cautiously asking my Filipino grandfather to turn down volume of the television, which was usually blasting ‘Bonanza’ or ‘Gunsmoke’ or some other western. I knew him as an intense professor who specialized in the history of colonization.”

“Only after he passed away did I see and fully understand all the newspaper articles that heralded him as a resistance leader in the Philippines during World War II. The hero that I thought only existed in fictionalized, Americanized westerns.”

Music and history

Layague says that theater and music is crucial to her “engagement with Filipino and Filipino American history.” This is connected to her work as an ethnomusicologist. She’d lived and studied music in Southeast Asia.

 “I am most interested in how music-cultures and cultures can evolve, respond, and even thrive during colonization. And how they sound and re-sound post-colonization.

For example, she says, “When you hear and play kulintang you also hear the sophisticated metallurgical techniques of a gong culture which thrived and survived centuries of colonization.”

“So much of my artistic journey is connected to my cultural roots journey. How do I honor my ancestors and my background? How do I do their stories justice? Cowgirl Katarungan has been a way to embody and recognize and connect to those who came before.”

“Cowgirl Katarungan is Fixin’ to Fight” runs June 6 to 10. Visit Panasianrep.org.

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