Rob Macaisa Colgate, poet and playwright, recently released My Love is Water, an experimental verse drama dealing with heartbreak and hauntings. The Filipinx and bakla protagonist, Danilo, disrupts the stage and page with their schizophrenia and longing, conversing in American Taglish and meandering through a house party as they strive to get over a ghostly ex. 

I was intrigued with the play as a fascinating intersection of literature and performance, as well some of the striking imagery that seemed overwhelming for the stage yet so elegant as a poem (such as when Danilo’s hands grow to enormous proportions). As a playwright, I was struck by the text’s unconventional use of dramatic form to explore love, passion, and mania within the context of Filipino/white racial, romantic, and disability dynamics. I reached out to Rob, and we met over Zoom twelve time zones apart, morning in the Philippines for me and evening in Chicago for them. 

This interview has been edited for clarity. 

AA: Let’s do an artist check-in: how are you doing? What’s exciting for you lately?

RC: I’ve been busy because my book of poems, Hardly Creatures, came out, and then 12 days later, the verse drama came out. I had a lot of fun touring, which I didn’t think I would. I don’t tend to socialize more than once a week max; if I socialize more than twice in a week, it starts to nag at the psychosis. I was like, how am I going to do this tour? But halfway through, I scheduled a stop in Martha’s Vineyard, where my aunt lives, and she’s one of my closest friends and a safe haven for me. The stop had blank days before and after it, which saved my life. 

In Austin, Texas, where I went to grad school, my friends read, and then I read from the poems, and then I assigned my friends characters in the play, and we did a little staged reading. It was also the first time I had heard it out loud, because I really wrote it as poetry. 

AA: The experimental structure is so compelling – my mind went in between poem, play, and art installation. What inspired the structure?

RC: I was so sick of feeling so emotionally overwhelmed over what felt like it should be a small romantic affair. I needed to play up the melodrama of it. I thought, we’ll do it in verse. Then recently, I was looking through some of my archives and I found this idea web, and it says things like intimacy, issues, care, mental disability, rest, Filipino nurses home, coming party as intimate space, gay sex. They’re all ultimately connected to each other. And the play happened at this moment of confluence, where I was at the end of this situationship, and fed up with myself about it, and about a year into doing disability studies and curious about the role of care, especially romantically, and the role of care when something like mental disability is involved.

I also hadn’t found a way to really write about my Filipino identity, and I wanted a way in. I decided to give myself a bit of structure to try. I’m grateful I did, because now it’s something I’m very concerned with in my work. But I had to impose it. And when I was thinking about care and all these spaces, I was talking with a friend about how there are all these Filipina nurses, and how that’s care from a professional standpoint. Whereas I was thinking about care in relationships that are not professional but are deeply personal, where you have different obligations. 

I started scribbling in whatever voices were coming out, and it gradually coalesced into this play. Once I realized I was doing a play, it took a while to start writing scenes. At first, it was errant lines, what now seem like monologues or soliloquies, but at the time were just blobs of text. I thought of the play as a container I could pour into, like the language is the liquid that the glass it was in. The vessel was the play. 

AA: I love how you played with the Tagalog, the “too big” and tubig (water). What’s your relationship with Tagalog and also the Filipino community, family, and friends? 

It felt like things were all clicking into place with the Tagalog. Something that happens with my schizoaffective disorder is schizophasia, like disorganized speech, word salad. There’s always an element of broken speech in my writing; whether or not I’m revising it out is a different story. And also, I don’t know Tagalog, I grew up in a pretty white neighborhood, I’m half white, and I did not have a particularly Filipino upbringing, and had a lot of white privilege, kind of white passing, you know?

All this to say that I don’t know Tagalog, and I want it in the play, but it’s not going to be accurate because I’m either asking for individual words from my mom or my aunt, or I’m using Google Translator like an online dictionary. I gave myself permission for the Tagalog in the play to be broken, not just because it would be like my broken Tagalog, but also because there is an element of breaking speech in the writing and the living I do.

I was like, Oh, you don’t know how to keep your words together in psychosis, that’s okay. Same thing as not knowing Tagalog. There was a parallel there that felt informative to me in terms of Filipino culture. I also think I thought I wasn’t in touch enough with Filipino culture, just because of growing up the way I did. My touchstones for Filipino culture are very common ones, they’re all based on spending time with my extended family.

I always joke that being gay helped me come out as Filipino because I have been out since I was 11. College is when I first started dating, and that’s when I became most aware of being Filipino. I was having a very different experience than these white boys, and the racism of the gay male or gay male-ish community was the first time I was being consciously forced to grapple – or just acknowledge – the fact that I was Filipino. Suddenly I’m getting treated really differently because I’m Asian. I realized that a lot of my personal experience with queer love was inseparable from being Filipino. Once I realized that could be a cultural touchstone, not only was I like, This is something I have to offer to the Filipino lens, I was also like, This gives me more permission to write about heartbreak and hookups and situationships. It was a moment of two things giving permission to each other. 

AA: That’s the cool thing about it being like a play, because you could always cast an actor who’s all the shades of Filipino. I also wanted to ask about mental illness or madness in this play, how they interact with the structure and drama. 

RC: A big thing that happens for me is this imposter syndrome, like madness imposter syndrome. I’ve talked to mad friends and we kind of all have it. Even in psychosis, sometimes I’m kind of double bookkeeping and I’m fully psychotic, fully present, watching it both happen, and I’ll be like, Oh my God, would you stop? But I’m not stopping, I’m still doing it, and having the sensation that any glimmer of insight when you’re dealing with madness somehow invalidates the madness. 

When I was writing this play, I was very insecure in my identity as a mad person and equally insecure with the sheer volume of emotion I would bring to romantic and sexual situations, and feeling like, Well, they have to be overlapping, right? Like, no one is being this crazy and intense. There was a deep sense of insecurity about all of that.

I was thinking about how I can dramatize it, and if it feels huge in my day-to-day experience, you can make it huge on a page or on a stage. And in classical tragedy, madness is often a punishment. The hubris or whatever comes in and the protagonist gets struck, and they’re often disabled in some way, and if it’s not physical, they’re struck mad, and that’s the tragic end. I curious: What if the madness isn’t a tragic end?

AA: I’d love to circle back to the bakla term. What does it mean to you, how do you think of bakla aesthetics?

RC: This play is actually how I came to identify gender-wise as bakla. I always had this sense that my gender and sexuality was deeply connected to being a Filipino, but I didn’t know there was actually a cultural identity for that. In researching for this play, I was doing my online translations and gay translates to bakla, but then there’s all these footnotes to it. I started reading, and I discovered there was a deeper identity. I found out there was a more nuanced way to talk about my experience.

The term originally meant feeble. It meant weak. I have always connected with how madness used to be called feeble-mindedness. I think a lot about feebleness, weakness, and how being gay, being Filipino, and being mad, all have this common thread of weakness or presumed weakness. I was interested in exploring Danilo as a feeble character, as a weak little bitch, and seeing what redemptive qualities came out of that. He’s super gay, he’s super Filipino, he’s a total Schizo, and he’s just floppy. And what happens if I just let this floppy guy have a whole stage to say what he wants to say.

AA: That reminds me Danilo’s enormous hands and how he cries all the time, and paradoxically, thinking about power found in “weakness.” 

RC: That like too-muchness, that, Oh, am I Schizo, or am I just bringing too much emotion? I wanted something physical for him, like physically clumsy and too big. And that’s where the title ended up coming from. I was with my aunt, and she can understand Tagalog fluently but can’t speak it fluently, but she’ll occasionally throw around Tagalog words. She was setting up dinner, and she was like, You want soda, tubig? And I was like, What? She’s like, Sorry, water. And I went, Say that again? Because I had just been writing something like, my love is too big. And when I heard that homophone, I was like, Oh, that’s the play. Even within the broken Tagalog, there’s so much richness in the translation.

AA: Do you envision this piece being performed?

RC: Though this is a verse drama, it really happens in poems, and with how metaphysical the stage directions are, I never really envisioned it performed, because that’s just not how I think. If anyone wants to put it up, totally, go ahead, give you my full blessing, and I’ll come see it, I’ll do a little dramaturgy with Danilo, right? But I’m not directing it. I’m certainly not performing in it. (laughs)

AA: Where are you feeling, receiving or giving love lately?

RC: I’m feeling love from people who know that I end up pretty off the grid. The ability to disappear and reappear as a mad person has been so lovely. I’m also feeling so much love for my cat these days. We adopted a cat in January, and we adopted him with some issues. He got his leg amputated, but he’s so much happier because that leg was slowing him down. His name is Bibingka, he’s such a ham, he’s such a goof, and he’s been a joy to take care of. So I’m loving my family a lot, and I’m loving writing. I’m still writing, and it is the thing I love. The past few months have been so Author, so public-facing, and it’s been making me even more eager to get into the work. 

I’m finding little scraps of time to do a bit of writing here and there for a verse novel. Right now it’s linked poems. It’s more hybrid, it’s more Filipino. I’m feeling so good writing it. And the last thing I’m feeling love from is Lake Michigan. I’m locking in really hard at work so I can squeeze out an extra couple hours and bike to the lake and dive in the water. I had this moment where I was like, I understand Lorde’s Solar Power really well. I too would abandon all my other artistic pursuits and write something just about being obsessed with the sun and the water. 

So yeah, that’s a lot of love.

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Amanda L. Andrei is a playwright, translator, and theater critic/journalist residing in L.A. by way of Virginia/Washington D.C. Her play Mama, I wish I were silver won the 2022 Jane Chambers Award for Feminist Playwriting. http://www.amandalandrei.com