Grandma. Gangsta. Guerrilla. depicts a "sassy old lady" with a sense of humour
Abi Padilla’s new play draws inspiration from both of her grandmothers
Abi Padilla in Grandma. Gangsta. Guerrilla. Photo by Emily Cooper
Ruby Slippers Theatre, in association with the Shadbolt Centre for the Arts, Presentation House Theatre, and Blackout Art Society, presents Grandma. Gangsta. Guerrilla. at the Shadbolt Centre for the Arts from February 6 to 8 and at Presentation House Theatre from February 13 to 16
WHEN VANCOUVER PLAYWRIGHT Abi Padilla was in the research phase for her new work, Grandma. Gangsta. Guerrilla., she interviewed her grandmothers for background information. They were children during the Japanese occupation in the Philippines in the 1940s. After both told Padilla that they didn’t really want to talk about those years, she became determined to find out why.
It turns out that her elders knew people who were “comfort women”, some 1,000 Filipinas who were forced into sexual enslavement by the Japanese army. While only about 40 are still alive, they are still seeking justice to this day.
This dark chapter in Philippine history is just one aspect of her homeland that Padilla wanted to draw attention to in her new play. But she’s doing so with a sense of humour, and she emphasizes that she didn’t want to draw a character who was defined by the traumas of her past. Rather, the work is a comedy about a “butt-kickin’, bar-spittin’, tough” grandma who escapes the care home to be with her family.
“I wanted to play a sassy old lady,” Padilla tells Stir in a phone interview. “I got inspiration from my grandmothers and a bunch of TV-show characters like the Golden Girls, but when I was gathering some information I interviewed both of my grandmothers and it was just fascinating to me how both mentioned that they were kids during the Japanese occupation in the Philippines. I asked about their lives and they decided they didn’t want to talk about it. The moment they said they didn’t want to talk about it, it made me more curious about what was happening in the Philippines during that time. I read books and watched documentaries about comfort women turned into sex slaves by the Japanese during that time.”
A friend of hers acquired a research grant that enabled her to interview some of the last surviving comfort women. “She noticed that every time some people wanted to interact with the comfort women, it was always about traumatic things during the war,” says Padilla, who came to Vancouver from the Philippines at age 23 in 2011. “But they’re still regular grandmothers who love to watch show-business news shows and soap operas and who love to gossip. I decided I was going to go in that direction. There are already a lot of plays about war. I don’t want to be minimizing people to their traumatic experiences. I want to see the life outside the horrible things that have happened to a person. The main character is a typical sassy grandmother who has lost her filter, who doesn’t care about peer pressure, and who has her own sense of humour and celebrity crushes.”
Directed by Leslie Dos Remedios, Grandma. Gangsta. Guerrilla. follows the tale of Lola Basyang, who goes missing, and it’s up to her grandchildren Nika and Jun-jun to bring her back to safety. Using Lola’s unfinished memoir, they discover clues to her whereabouts, her “full-of-beans” origin story, and the historical tumult of their motherland.
The production started out as a 15-minute graduation piece when Padilla was studying at Studio 58, and from there it evolved into something longer, broader, and deeper. There’s a nod to Commander Liwayway, a Filipina guerilla fighter during the Second World War, giving the show an edge of female empowerment. The production also has some Filipinx pop-culture references as well as what the artist calls the dark humour of the Philippines.
“Sometimes, with Vancouver being a multicultural city, you want to be respectful and don’t want to offend people unnecessarily,” Padilla says. “But in the Philippines, you push someone’s buttons to really make fun of them or to alienate them, and it’s really to build a bond. It’s part of Filipino family dynamics. There’s a lot of that in there.”
Padilla also draws from Filipinx action films that incorporate gangs and drug lords, with the lead character even breaking out into rap. “We will have some fun fight choreography and some musical breaks here and there,” she says.
The play’s seven actors are all Asian, Padilla points out, with the three main characters being Filipinx actors and the others being of Vietnamese, Malaysian, Taiwanese, and Chinese ancestry.
“Even if you’re not a Filipino or of Asian descent, this piece is about family, whether it’s biological or found family,” Padilla says. “Sometimes it’s a matter of finding a place where you truly belong, where you feel like you’re loved and cared for. I do hope when people watch this, regardless of race or culture or gender, they will be able to think about family and reflect on the sacrifices their ancestors have done for them.”
Padilla says she’s inspired by both of her grandmothers and by the character she has created for Grandma. Gangsta. Guerrilla.
“I’m getting a sense of still being able to live life with joy and laughter as a brand of rebellion, a brand of resistance, to all the negative things that happen to me,” she says. “If I let those negative things dictate my life, then I’ve already lost. If I find something to laugh about and something to be joyful about, I’m winning.” 
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