The Chinoy Chismis Trilogy (2025-2026) was a series of Chinese-Filipino adaptations of August Strindberg's Miss Julie (1888).
When I wrote Miss Julie: Reimagined in 2024 for UP Dulaang Laboratoryo, Tsinoy (Chinese-Filipino) audiences criticized the play for its cultural inaccuracies. Despite already having a Tsinoy consultant on the team, we realized there was much more immersion needed to make the adaptation sound.
Because of this, I embarked on a two-year journey to read about, learn from, and collaborate with the Tsinoy community to engage in better, more responsible cultural representation. Doing the same story three more times, each version transposes the setting to different spaces of Chinese and Filipino convergence: inside an office space, at a Chinese-owned restaurant, and within the walls of a 1975 apartment in Binondo.
Chinoy Chismis 1: Corporate Affairs was a site-specific performance held at the DTI-PTTC ENSAYO Creative Hub in Pasay, where audiences surrounded the actors in an immersive office space performance. Here, Fil-Chi corporate boss Julie is set to be wed in a week, so she uses her birthday celebration as an excuse to flirt with her favorite employee, Jean.
Chinoy Chismis 2: Wah-kong Anak Na Ganyan! was another site-specific performance, set inside the Don Conejos Restorante, Greenhills. This time, we integrated improv comedy with traditional theatre to explore the nuances of saving face, social pressure, and public reputation. Here, Julie's Tsinoy mother is wary of her getting too friendly with the Filipino staff, so she introduces her to three eligible bachelors at an impromptu game show. This project was made in collaboration with improv artists from the Third World Improv community.
Chinoy Chismis 3: Miss Manila returns to the traditional theatre format, staged at the IBG-KAL Theater, UP Diliman. Set in Martial Law-era Binondo, it asks whether Chinese-Filipino households have really changed in the past 50 years.
Beyond cultural immersion, the director's journey across these three plays was documented in my undergraduate thesis, focusing specifically on developing a framework for improving one's directorial practice based on Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi's Flow Theory and Donald Schön's Theory of Reflective Practice.
You may view the full manuscript here.