I’ve been writing professionally for theatre in the Philippines since the early 2000s. My earliest memories of writing plays (or attempts to write them) date back to when I was 12, in my first year of high school, and two years later, in my junior year.

My first play was a sketch of characters inspired by a comic book of Western philosophers that I can’t even remember now how I acquired. It was a short sketch in which Aristotle, Plato, Herodotus, and other characters conversed about their philosophies. I submitted it to my Filipino language teacher as a class requirement. She mocked it in front of our class. We called her ‘Miss Goldfish’ when she was not around because of her thick red lips and protruding eyeballs.

In my junior year, I wrote a play about old folks in a hospital after World War II, following the Japanese Occupation of the Philippines. I submitted it to our school theatre organisation. It was rejected, and they opted instead to stage parts of Miss Saigon, which was a popular play in the Philippines in the 1990s.

I abandoned writing plays since then. At the university, I started to write fiction. Writing stories became my first love – and poetry my second. In my late teens or in my early 20s, I told myself that I should learn how to write dialogues – and there’s no other way to educate myself than to start learning to write plays.

In 2003, I joined a playwrights group in Manila at the suggestion of a poet friend who was part of it (she later left to focus on writing poetry). I attended fortnightly Sunday meetings just to observe how playwrights write and revise their works and for the free pizza.

My first real play was staged for the public in 2016 at the Cultural Center of the Philippines. I liked it, but the critics dismissed it from the script to the stage direction. It was my first taste of critics lambasting my work in a national newspaper or public space. The good thing from that experience was that writing plays had never stopped since then, and I stopped threatening critics by punching them in the face sometime in 2009. Sex work is work; I started to respect prostitutes and their trade in Manila’s theatre lobbies.

In 2018, I founded a theatre company, ATISA, and for the same reason, I built my own publishing house: if they don’t want to produce my plays, I will create my own theatre company. ATISA has been dormant because my life has been disrupted by what’s been going on in the Philippines since 2016. When my life settles down, I will resume its operations. I don’t usually share spaces as an artist because of my experiences as a writer and a theatre maker in the Philippines: I create my own.

This section of my site will contain all my works, production notes, references, posters, and interviews related to my work as a playwright from 2003 to the present. Please give me time to reconstruct this, as it will take me days to collect all the available and accessible materials I can gather online.