Post-show photo of the Daryo Fam with our Bindle Fam with the Audience Fam 🙂 May 18, 2025, Oakland Asian Cultural Center, Oakland, CA
Another one in the books. It’s been a long minute since I “self”-produced one of my plays. Self is in “” because of course, I couldn’t produce this play by myself. And actually that’s from a lesson learned from trying to do it before, but that’s for another time.
In September of 2024, at a friend’s going away party, I met up with some dear friends, earLena and Mallory Somera and we got to talking about having an opportunity to produce something together. I can’t remember the timeline where I also met Indra Mungal, the Program Director at Oakland Asian Cultural Center. I approached both of them about an opportunity to share Daryo’s All-American Diner at that space.
And lo-and-behold, eight months later, we had a one day staged reading performance featuring Joe Cascasan, Jake Fong, Jacinta Kaumbulu​, Jamie Nallas, Mark So, earLena, with Mallory directing, Lindsay “LO” Ordesta who was our SM, co-producer, and Assistant Director and Terry Boero who dramaturged the play.
It’s been a couple of days since the performance and it’s still taking me a while to absorb what happened. I’m really happy with the way it turned out. We had almost 200 people attend. The laughter hit at the right spots and there was an unexpected audience gasp. The feedback was tremendous. And nothing beats a standing ovation with some whoops and hollers. That was cool.
But something more than cool is being able to fulfill my purpose of being a playwright – write a play about an issue that brings a community together. I am so grateful for everyone who came out to support us. Our Bindlestiff Family rolls DEEP and I am truly humbled, inspired, and motivated by them in promoting our stories.
I’m not making much sense (because of allergies), but to sum everything up, I’m just really GRATEFUL!