A ONE-NIGHT-ONLY BENEFIT READING OF LEARNING HOW TO READ BY MOONLIGHT

a play with music by GAVEN D. TRINIDAD directed by NICHOLAS POLONIO | puppets by MARIA CAMIA with guest community reader BABA ISRAEL Under the moonlight, six-year-old Eddie imagines a dragon eating moons. His mother prays to a statue of 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 out by the voices of Presidents Duterte and Trump on television and across the internet. As fantasy and reality become indistinguishable, a young, immigrant Filipino family is forced to confront the one question it can never answer: “Where do I call home?”. The play is performed in English and Tagalog. For this reading, that community reader is Hip Hop theater artist, poet, and educator Baba Israel, Artistic Director of The Performance Project at University Settlement and co-founder of Playback NYC, the first playback theater company to integrate freestyle Hip Hop.