The Female Heart
"Pusong Babae" **
By Linda Faigao-Hall

From Paulanne Simmons, nytheatre-wire.com
"Faigao-Hall has a powerful story to tell."

" ... The Female Heart most successfully touches all of our hearts."

From Deirdre McFayden, offoffonline.com:
“Faigao-Hall vividly dramatizes the mercilessness of poverty, the forces that drive immigration, the miscues and incongruities between Filipino and US cultures ...”

"Director Jamie Richards's sure footed blocking plus the work of her talented design team help smooth the play’s leaps through time and space."

From Hollis Rafkin-Sax, Vice Chairman/FD Business Communications:
"Sensational! Gripping! Startling! Fresh!"

From Ralph Guild, Chairman & CEO/Interep:
"A first rate cast! An exceptionally fine production!"

with (in order of appearance)

Rona Figueroa* as Adelfa
Sean Sutherland* as Craig Wilson
Victor Lirio* as Anghel
Ching Valdes-Aran* as Rosario
Tim Davis as Roger Golden

* appeared courtesy of Actors Equity Association

DIRECTED BY JAMIE RICHARDS

Assistant Director: Kristine Reyes
Set Design: Dan Kuchar
Lighting Design: Michael Lincoln, Ryan Trupp
Sound Design: Paul Armstrong
Costume Design: Ardith Ibanez
Fight Director: Craig Rising
Dance Choreographer: Juan Borona
Production Manager: Vincent Hokia
Stage Manager: Karen Hergesheimer
Asst. Stage Manager: Lisa Warmus

Originally commissioned by Starfish Theater Works, "The Female Heart" has been revised and expanded by award-winning playwright Linda Faigao-Hall with Diverse City Theater. It was play in-residence at Ensemble Studio Theatre's Summer Conference 2004 under the direction of Jamie Richards.

A story of hope and dreams deferred and the redeeming power of unconditional love.

The play takes place in the early 1990's and tells the story of two siblings – Anghel and Adelfa – living in the so-called “Smokey Mountain,” the infamous mountain of garbage outside Manila. Confronted by extreme poverty and her brother's ailing health, Adelfa agrees to become a mail-order bride to Roger Golden, a man from Brooklyn who is willing – at a price – to send money for Anghel's medical treatments. In America, she discovers how poverty corrupts and absolute poverty corrupts absolutely.

Award-winning playwright Linda Faigao-Hall examines the legacy of the Marcos administration, whose decades of plunder and inequality deprived hundreds of men and women like Anghel and Adelfa of the chance to leave the garbage dump.  In this play, poignantly, they trade the garbage dump of "Smokey" for something else – an impossible dream.

** "Pusong babae" is a phrase unique to Tagalog, the primary language of the Philippine culture, and is applied to a man possessing virtues traditionally attributed to women and who is not necessarily gay. The term is not pejorative. Feminine virtues, such as compassion, humility and gentleness, deconstructed by Western feminists as sexist are embedded in the Tagalog language without regard to gender: men, both straight and gay, can have "female hearts."

Ms. Linda Faigao-Hall's plays have been produced, workshopped and published both in the East and West Coasts. Salad Days and Other Stories, featuring three of her one-act plays, was recently produced by Ma-Yi Theater in New York (April 2003) at the Blue Heron Theater. Her other plays include A Woman at Heart, Duet, and The Interview, were developed and produced by Starfish Theatreworks Inc., (NYC); God, Sex, and Blue Water, Lark Theater Company (NYC); He & She at Expanded Arts (NYC); Woman From the Other Side of the World was produced by three companies, namely, InterAct Theater (Sacramento, CA), East West Players Inc.( Los Angeles) and Ma-Yi Theater (NYC); The Boy Who Wouldn't Read at P.S. 282, Brooklyn (NYC); Men Come and Go, LAHI Productions (NYC); Requiem at Henry Street Theater Arts Center (NYC); State Without Grace by Pan Asian Repertory Theater (NYC) and the Asian-American Theater Company (San Francisco, CA).

Her plays have been published by Dramatic Publishing Company and Alexander Street Press. Her most current work, Iron Men, commissioned by The Working Theater in New York City, won a National Endowment for the Arts, Department of Labor and Department of Cultural Affairs grants.

Ms. Faigao-Hall has a Master of Arts in English Literature from New York University where she also continued her postgraduate studies in Educational Theater. She also studied Medieval Theater at Bretton Hall College, Wakefield, England. She is currently teaching Literary Criticism at the College of New Rochelle. Ms. Faigao-Hall lives in Brooklyn with her husband of twenty years Terence G. Hall, and their 18 year-old son, Justin.

Jamie Richards directed Light Years (Playwrights Horizons), Stonewall Jackson's House (American Place Theatre, Pulitzer Prize Nomination), The Secret Order, District of Columbia, Flight (Ensemble Studio Theatre), Saint and Magician (Epic Rep). She co-created and co-directed EST's long-running comedy series, Hell's Kitchen Sink, and has directed many plays for EST's Marathon including Of Two Minds, Reunions, Brown, Night Rules, Light Years, All About Al, The I Word: Interns, Real Real Gone, The Seventeenth of June, Dream, Rain, and Ring of Men. (For EST's Marathon 2005, Jamie directed Cherie Vogelstein's Eros).

She has developed plays for Williamstown Theatre Festival, New York Stage and Film, Primary Stages, the New Group, and New Dramatists, among others. She has enjoyed long-term collaborations with, among others, playwrights Cherie Vogelstein, Billy Aronson, Romulus Linney, Edward Allan Baker, Elizabeth Diggs, Michael Louis Wells, and currently, Linda Faigao-Hall. Her own plays include The Spirit and Habit of Science (recipient of the Alfred P. Sloan Project Commission) Roman Fever (Marathon 99) and Looking Glass/Alice. As Executive Producer of EST, she produced and developed plays by Arthur Miller, David Mamet, Craig Lucas, Paul Rudnick, Romulus Lineney and many others.