'The Bottoming Process' star, playwright, director share joys of telling Fil-Am story | TFC News USA
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Award-winning Broadway performer George Salazar is the lead star of the stage play, The Bottoming Process.
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Salazar shares the stage with Rick Cosnett in a story that deals with modern-day relationship issues
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and honestly depicts gender politics and racial stereotypes.
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Salazar explains how he related to Milo, his Filipino-American character.
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What I love about Milo is that he's imperfect. He's messy. He makes mistakes. He learns from his mistakes.
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I mean what we're doing is telling a really universal story that's like really relatable
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but we're telling it through the lens of the Filipino-American existence.
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I spent a long time kind of chasing after this dream man, you know, like he's got to be tall and white.
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We're still decolonizing our minds.
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The Philippines went through, you know, hundreds of years of Spanish colonization and conquering, right?
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It's like it's kind of, it's a part of our generational trauma. We carry that with us whether we know it or not.
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The actor also played George Conway on TV in American Crime Story Impeachment
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and also appeared for two seasons in NBC's Superstore.
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The Bottoming Process was written by Nicolas Pilapil and it is his first full production project.
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He shares that he started the story as a romantic comedy.
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As America grappled with social issues in the last couple of years,
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he felt compelled to include some aspects that he learned as the country was changing.
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Writing it as Filipino-American, you know, who am I based off of what I do and what I experience
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and less than who am I based off of my family's trauma or my family's sacrifices
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which there's nothing wrong with telling those stories but I think we know those stories.
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And so what I'm really trying to explore is what makes me, me.
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What's been so wonderful is people come up to me afterwards and they're like,
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thank you for writing my story. And I'm like, oh, did I do that?
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You know, I'm like, I always say like, I'm so sorry that this is your story because it's kind of rough.
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It kind of goes there. It's a lot of heartbreak.
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And yeah, just hearing that and knowing that by me being myself, other people are able to see themselves.
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It's kind of touching and meaningful and something I didn't plan out to do but it's a nice surprise.
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The play has gotten rave reviews from critics and is hailed for its insightful take
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on interracial relationships and identity politics.
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The bottoming process is directed by film actor-director Rodney To.
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A veteran actor in Hollywood, To was also one of the Filipino cast members of the movie Easter Sunday.
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You know, I remember when I was young being like, oh my gosh, it was exciting.
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But this is exciting in a way. It's accelerated, right?
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Because not only are the projects available, but we're finally playing ourselves in all these complex characters.
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We're playing ourselves. We're playing different versions of ourselves.
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We're now starting to see many of us in the same project.
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Whereas it was always just one. That's how we all became friends, right?
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We became friends because we were all in the same waiting rooms and we were all fighting for the same one opportunity, right?
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That's how many of us, the Reggie Lees of the world and Alec Mapos and John-John Briones,
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we were all coming into a world, into a time when we were just, we were hoping that we were that one person getting that one track.
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The bottoming process is playing at the Los Angeles LGBT Center's Renberg Theater till June 12.
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Yoang Chavez, ABS-CBN News, here in Hollywood.
