Exponential Festival Brings Filipino-Chinese Immersive Historical Solo Show AMA

Playwright Kenneth Keng's show AMA, about their grandmother surviving the 1945 Battle of Manila in World War 2, will be featured at Brooklyn's Target Margin Theater under the Exponential Festival banner in January.

Ama means grandmother in Hokkien, the birth language of Kenneth's grandmother. The piece was originally performed by Kenneth, but for its rendition at the Target Margin the show will be performed by Emma Callahan, a Brooklyn born Filipino-American interdisciplinary performer, writer and video artist.

According to Kenneth, "AMA is Ask Me Anything but it's my grandma asking and the audience answering and also she's dying and also my country is about to be invaded for the second time this century."

Kenneth describes the piece as a participatory silent monologue about the difficulty of intergenerational communication despite trilingual fluency, interrupted by the invasion of the Philippines by the Japanese Imperial Army.

"I was concerned with how to portray my grandmother as the articulate, intelligent and insightful person that she is, only held back by her lack of English proficiency. By giving the audience a very limited set of words- fifteen, roughly as many words as I know of her birth language- with which to converse with her, I aim to have the audience feel her own, and my own, struggle to communicate across languages and generations", says Keng.

Kenneth sees the play's immersive elements, which include a carrier pigeon, inflatable tank and a toy scale recreation of the 1945 Japanese invasion of Luzon, as "an invitation to participate in choosing who gets to be the Philippines' next colonizer".

AMA will be directed by Annaporva Green, who also directed the immersive postcolonial Filipino scifi space opera Brought Up, written by Kenneth Keng earlier in 2024 under their residency with the University Settlement's Performance Project.

The Production Team includes stage manager Laila Gerstmann, scenic designer Goran Popovich, lighting designer Zee Hanna and sound designer Marisa Conroy, with poster design by Emma Callahan.

AMA is an official selection of the 2025 Exponential Festival under Nic Adams and Theresa Buchheister, and will be presented alongside productions led by Sophie Zmorrod (Gilda, with an Olive) and Lal Ensari (Winter Solstice) over a time slot totaling 100 minutes.

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