Sara Porkalob (she/her/they) is an award-winning artist, activist, and creator of The Dragon Cycle, a trilogy of matrilineal musicals about her Filipina American gangster family, with one play for each generation built around a central female protagonist.

This trilogy honors her family—three generations of Filipino Americans descended from gangsters and karaoke fighting to survive, thrive, and love.

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Part I: Dragon Lady

Premiered at Intiman Theatre, 2017

Dragon Lady is a two-act cabaret musical with a three-person band and a cameo appearance by Maria Porkalob Sr., the matriarch of the clan. We won’t divulge any more about this part as you're here to see it!

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Part II: Dragon Mama

Premiered at American Repertory Theatre, 2019

Dragon Mama is a two-act solo show with music about Maria Porkalob Jr., the eldest of the second generation. Born to an immigrant mother with lost dreams, an absent father, and a society that fails immigrant families, Maria Porkalob Jr. is forced to grow up too soon, acting as surrogate mother to her four siblings while trying to balance her intersectional identity—poor, queer, brown, an immigrant. She yearns for a gayer, more POC-filled life than Bremerton, WA can offer her. When the opportunity to earn a lot of money in a short time presents itself, Maria must make an important decision. Leave her debt-ridden mother, four young siblings, and newborn daughter for the wild unknown of Alaska, or stay close to home, family, and intergenerational ghosts? Dragon Mama traverses 25 years of her mother’s life filled with queer love in a barren land, a dope '90s R&B soundtrack, Filipino gangsters, and ghosts.

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Part III: Dragon Baby

Currently in development

Dragon Baby is a three-act genre-defying musical(?) with a cast of ten. The first of her family to attend college, Sara Porkalob has one more project to complete before she begins her glamorous life as a professional actress: her senior thesis. Faced with her parents' ugly breakup and midlife crisis, Sara decides to devote all of her time and energy into writing the next Great American Musical, but no matter how much she writes, it all seems...wrong. What story does she have to tell? What story can she create that hasn't already been invented?

Picking up where Dragon Mama left off, we follow Sara’s journey from the queer communal house of her childhood in Anchorage, AK to her teens in her conservative hometown of Bremerton, WA to the hallowed halls of a Seattle liberal arts college as she deconstructs her white supremacist education, juggles five jobs including but not limited to a phone sex operator, a drug dealer, and a pizza call center aide, and ultimately realizes her purpose in the universe.

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Dragon Lady

PART I OF THE DRAGON CYCLE
SEPT 4 – OCT 6, 2024
LOS ANGELES PREMIERE
GIL CATES THEATER

Written & Performed by Sara Porkalob
Directed by Andrew Russell
With Pete Irving, Jimmy Austin & Mickey Stylin

On the eve of her 60th birthday, Maria Porkalob Sr. fires up her new karaoke machine to regale her granddaughter Sara with her astonishing life story. As a lounge singer who escaped a gangster-controlled nightclub in Manila to become a free-range mother of five in the United States, Maria is a matriarch not to be trifled with. Broadway star and storyteller Sara Porkalob embodies dozens of characters in a trigenerational tour-de-force performance that fuses killer karaoke with laugh-out-loud comedy to tell her family’s incredible origin story.

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