Chapter 3: Twelfth Night (dir. Kate Jopson) at Coeurage Theater Company, 2016

A FILIPINX TWELFTH NIGHT IN LOS ANGELES

Coeurage Theatre in North Hollywood advertises itself as “LA’s Pay What You Want Theatre,” and its vision statement describes a theater that “continually lifts up artistic voices from the global majority, provides equitable access to theater, reaches traditionally underserved audiences and explores new storytelling languages.” It is perhaps no surprise, then, that for Coeurage Theatre’s 2016 production of Twelfth Night, director Kate Jopson chose to focus her adaptation on themes of immigration, linguistic isolation, and violence toward people of color, centering Filipinx characters in a play that also encompasses Latinx. Jopson’s production takes story lines that audiences might expect to see with Latinx characters and instead centers Filipinx. In a 2009 report on language diversity in Los Angeles County, 4.0 million people stated that English was their primary language, 3.3 million claimed Spanish, 288,000 Chinese, and 196,000 Tagalog. Although the drop-off from English and Spanish to Chinese and Tagalog is steep, Tagalog is the fourth most-spoken language in Los Angeles, and the Filipinx population comprises more immigrants than does Los Angeles’s Latinx population, making Jopson’s concept apropos of a cultural group that often gets overshadowed by Latinx but shares experiences of colonial histories, immigration, and racism. Oftentimes when Brown characters are depicted, they are homogeneous in background and language; here Jopson created what could be considered a multicultural Shakespearean production but what I deem a Latinx Shakespearean production because of the deliberate extension of Brownness in a Los Angeles setting. (p.84)