Spotlight on ROGELIO BRAGA
Part of the NHS Yarns Project
Rogelio is one of the playwright collaborators working with Theatre Témoin on NHS Yarns.
We are so excited to be working with Rogelio.
Rogelio Braga is an exiled playwright, novelist, essayist, publisher, and a human rights activist from the Philippines.
Miss Philippines
Rogelio’s first play written entirely in English, Miss Philippines, is currently under development commissioned by the New Earth Theatre in London.
Miss Philippines revolves around a story of Calle Real, a fictitious slum community in Duterte Philippines where only women are left to survive since their husbands, sons, lovers, and gay male friends are either killed through extra-judicial killings, fled, jailed, or missing (forced disappearance) in the bloody government campaign against illegal drugs and activists since all the characters are women from different ages and backgrounds struggling to continue the long tradition of an annual gay beauty pageant in their community: a grandmother who survived the war in Mindanao during the Marcos Martial Law regime, a Filipina domestic worker who just returned from abroad, a nurse waiting for her flight to London, transgender women who work as pageant contestants, a mother, a former Communist cadre turned street vendor, a lesbian journalism student, and a Muslim woman. All these women have three things in common: poverty, the absence of men in their lives because of state violence and persecution, and the various ways of coping with loss.