Theatre review: Homecoming's intergenerational story of Filipinx women is at its strongest in the delicate details
Paper planes, food rituals, and more, in Urban Ink and The Cultch production that maps a family’s connections and disconnections over decades
Homecoming. Photo by Moonrider Photography
The Cultch and Urban Ink present Homecoming at the Historic Theatre to May 12, as part of The Cultch’s Femme Festival
A RETURN HOME necessitates a separation. In Homecoming, written by Kamila Sediego and directed by Hazel Venzon, the slippery, bittersweet sentiment is often delicately traced, only occasionally veering into overly expansive territory.
The play explores physical and internal spaces throughout time and across continents, extending a warm, empathetic embrace to three generations of a family marked by distance. At its core lies Ana (Rhea Casido), the 26-year-old Canadian-born daughter of Tess (Carmela Sison), a Filipinx immigrant who set out on her own journey at the tender age of 19, leaving behind her caring mother Eleonora (Aura Carcueva) and lively younger sister Vicky. What was meant to be a two-year departure stretched into 30 years, devoid of reunions or introductions for Ana.
Ana’s initial curiosity about her family is sparked by a school assignment; she writes a letter to her lola, Eleonora, asking for details about life on her side of the world. Despite receiving no response and her own mother’s refusal to foster this curiosity, Ana refuses to give up on connecting with her estranged relatives. Her pen against paper becomes a recurring sound, and her letters, folded into paper planes, introduce a more fluid structure to the play as they travel across time and geography. Random time jumps and memory-like segments map the connections and disconnections between the women over decades.
Moments of cultural specificity construct some of the connecting threads: when Ana eventually meets her tita, Vicky (Lissa Neptuno) holds out her hand, expecting the customary mano greeting, a sign of respect for elders in Filipinx culture. Oblivious, Ana flips her tita’s hand around and places a welcoming treat she made in it. In its funny awkwardness, the clash underscores the vast gulf between them. Moments later, we are transported back to Vicky and Tess’s childhood, when the sisters lovingly greet their mother with mano.
In immigrant narratives, food often emerges as a motif, and here it cleverly ties into each woman’s flowing identities. For Ana, her interest in dishes of the Philippines are a way to reconnect with her cultural roots, even if her aunt makes fun of her shoddy pronunciation of ingredients. For Tess, food becomes a status symbol (even if it’s not really indicative of her tireless work to provide for herself and Ana). When she reunites with Vicky, she mentions, to her sister’s annoyance, that she prefers baking over cooking—making specialties like lavender macarons.
For Eleonora, it’s about teaching her icked-out daughters the correct way to descale fish to sell at the market. Fish blood and pig guts, made of ribbons of fabric, along with pots and pans, stack up on the sparse stage, reflecting the women’s labour and slowly building a landscape filled with remnants of culture, home, and the family’s economic realities.
But in between these carefully crafted details, at times the dialogue can feel a bit overcooked. While clearly rooted in genuine emotion, it occasionally leans too heavily into explanation. Take, for instance, moments like Tess’s frustration, plainly voiced with, “Have I made the wrong choice [in moving to Canada]?” or Ana’s inquiry to Siri about “How to be more Filipino”. It’s as if the script opts to sacrifice individual nuances for broader strokes on the immigrant experience, or simply reveals the characters’ thoughts, when it could let the recurring, evocative elements do the heavy lifting.
Lissa Neptuno and Carmela Sison in Homecoming. Photo by Moonrider Photography
Lighting and sound design, while creating especially memorable scenes in the play’s opening and conclusion, could use more texture throughout to envelop us even deeper. The cast delivers great performances all around, their lived-in portrayals helping to ground the emotional resonance of the script’s occasionally overripe moments. The easy chemistry between the performers consistently lands jokes within the play’s convincingly clashing yet lighthearted interactions.
Delving into the tensions of coming home and coming into oneself, Homecoming bravely undertakes the task of reconciling the different experiences of its four female characters. It’s within its delicately woven moments of interconnectedness, cultural resonance, and tenderness that the tale’s specificity and universality resonate with equal strength. 
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