Accounting for Change

Community-engaged work does not follow a linear path. Theatre artist-activist Sara Porkalob meets with Professor Elizabeth McQueen following a 2024 public talk with University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Center for Performance Studies, Center for the Study of Women/Streisand Center, UCLA Asian American Studies Center, and the Geffen Playhouse. In this second conversation held on 18 September 2025, they follow up on their relationship with community-engaged work at various scales. Their work first intersected in 2018 when Porkalob was the curator of the Intiman Emerging Artist Program in Seattle, and McQueen was a participant. Their own scales of work, as a scholar and artist, have changed in the last eight years. The two attend to Porkalob’s shifting perspectives on transformative movements in creative practice.

Elizabeth: You had a busy summer. You've been workshopping and developing a new piece, Dragon Baby, the third in your trilogy. What has the process been like?

Sara: It has been shrouded, until very recently, in mystery. Anybody who knows me knows that I'm driven to action. I am somebody who prefers to live my life making a series of decisions efficiently and consistently. So, when I’m mired in this developmental process of "I don't know" and "What am I doing?" it's very scary for me.

I had a workshop as part of the Ground Floor at Berkeley Repertory Theatre (Berkeley Rep). I had the wonderful privilege of having Lisa Kron (Fun Home) as my dramaturg, along with my collaborator, Andrew Russell, who I’ve been working with since 2017; an amazing cast of actors at the table; and the incredible support by all of the staff and the team at Berkeley Rep. I, for the first time in my development of Dragon Baby, had a feeling that I knew what I was making.

I've been working on Dragon Baby since 2021, and there was a stop for a couple of years. I was scared of what I would learn if I investigated. I was investigating Baby with my eyes closed. Lisa Kron also has a history of solo performance and a history of writing about herself and her family. She sat me down, and she asked me these hard-hitting questions. I ate it up.

Elizabeth, you know me for my time in Seattle, where I worked really hard to be the artist that I wanted to be. That also meant that, along the way, I created this reputation for myself. I was met with a lot of people who were intimidated or who really respected me. As a result, however, of that respect and the reputation that preceded me, I didn't receive a lot of face-to-face interpersonal critique from my collaborators.

Elizabeth: A mark of Seattle passivity as well, right?

Sara: Yeah, and I touted it.

Elizabeth: When we talked a year ago, at the beginning of the finalizing of Dragon Lady at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles, you were at a very different place with Dragon Baby.

Sara: Dragon Lady was my Los Angeles debut. That city has a certain amount of prestige, and it has a reputation, the way that New York has a certain prestige and reputation. So, in Los Angeles, I had people looking at me and being like, "You made it," and I was like, "Did I?" Then, I had my experience with the Geffen, with that incredible community and the staff. It had been, honestly, the first time that I had felt that in my life since pre-Broadway. I was like, "Wait, why? Maybe I need to process my Broadway experience."

Elizabeth: You performed in the Broadway revival of 1776 in 2022. Along with that being your Broadway debut, a Vulture article that publicly criticized the show led to pretty explosive and tumultuous social media and public discourse around your criticism and you as an artist. You went through a process of going viral and getting "canceled" by a community. How did you come to create again?

Sara: Going viral and getting canceled for being authentically myself feels like the culmination of something. It happened in the capitalist heart of theatre, which I didn't predict, but was maybe fated to happen. I am thankful to have had not only the systems of support through that period in my life, but also the accountability that my community demanded.

Elizabeth: My immediate reaction when the Vulture article came out, was, “Go, Sara, go!” This is the critique that I've been waiting for. This is an article I'm going to assign in all my theatre classes. To me, it felt so aligned with your work. What was accountability like in your community when this happened?

Sara: You weren't the only person who felt that way. A lot of people felt moved by the work. The critique was a direct extension of the work that I do. It spoke to people, I think, at the institutional sphere and at the interpersonal level.

Now, the accountability came from people on my team saying to me, "I felt hurt by what you said. I felt disrespected by what you said. What you said was unprofessional, and it hurt our experience being in the show with you." So that level of accountability was happening at the interpersonal level.

At the institutional level, American Repertory Theatre (ART), who previously had commissioned me to finish Dragon Baby, ended their relationship with me after the Vulture article. That's a form of accountability in its own way, an institution going, “This individual acted differently or in opposing ways to what we considered to be a healthy collaborative relationship. We are going to end our relationship with them.” That felt like a form of boundary making. Though I didn't like it at the time, I can respect it.

Another form of accountability, I think, were the people really, really close to me who were like, "We love that you spoke your truth. When you speak to the media, people are going to interpret what you say with an intention that you didn't mean," and I'm like, "Yeah, but the intention is what matters," and they're like, "Actually, the impact is what matters," and I'm like, "Oh, my God. You're right." You know?

Elizabeth: Yeah.

Sara: Consequences are a part of accountability, and I accept that.

But the irreverent part of my answer that I want to say is like, at the end of the day, I know that I worked hard to repair the harm that I caused, and while some relationships were lost, some were maintained. I also feel confident in my ability to continue making because other people in the industry who have created different levels of harm, Harvey Weinstein, Woody Allen, anti-vaxxers who work on Broadway, those people, in my opinion, cause more harm than I did.

So when I look at what I did, and I think about the harm that I caused and the steps that I took to rectify, even if it all didn't shake out perfectly, I feel confident that I'm going to make work again. I'm not a power-hungry producer who decides to take a couple years of hiatus and then have another producorial project on Broadway. If those people can come back, I definitely can.

People really forget what I think is the most powerful levels of transformative work, which is the individual and interpersonal.

Elizabeth: I want to read this passage from James McMaster's piece about Hamilton; it is striking me in this conversation. It's a beautifully written piece, and at the end he writes: 

Hamilton has received rave reviews almost categorically. I agree with much of this praise—the book, the score, the choreography, the direction, the lighting: It's all genius artistry. I also yield that a Broadway production that puts so many performers of color to work does constitute a victory. This should be celebrated, but this is not enough. We cannot afford to position Hamilton above critique.… We can and should demand that musical theatre stage the revolution we need, that the musical theatre materialize and make irresistible, with its unique magic, the just world we all deserve.

That critique comes from such a place of love and the possibility of transformation. It seems essential to your practice. As a person who is invested in what I would call a kind of transformative justice, a lot of the work you do is in relation and acknowledging harm and working through repair. How has the Broadway experience informed your justice-centered practice?

Sara: Frankly, the Broadway experience has made me, I think, a softer person, more empathetic and open to the gray areas. It reminded me that nothing happens in a vacuum, but every project feels like a vacuum. It also reminds me that not everything is for you, and you can't always bring all of yourself to a thing.

My Broadway experience has taught me that there are myriad ways to engage in transformative justice at these four different levels of culture: the individual level, just me to me; at the interpersonal, me to you, me to other people; at the institutional, me within an institutional culture; and me at the systemic level. People really forget what I think is the most powerful levels of transformative work, which is the individual and interpersonal. People forget that. When they wake up to being a disenfranchised person or a privileged person, they feel like they have to show people that they’re changing.

During my time on Broadway, I felt like this script could not contain the biggest dreams that our creative team had and, in fact, trapped some people into believing that we can do more than what it says on the page. I might have made my Broadway debut playing a white male slave owner, but having me, a Brown femme, on stage for a Broadway audience, is still a very good thing. At that time, I thought it wasn't enough. I thought our directors were doing us a disservice. I didn't remember to think of them, too, as people wrestling with this play. I thought of them only as positions of power, and that was my mistake. That came out in a disrespectful language, the critique that I had of them in the article.

I'm just thankful that what was probably the most recent, biggest transformative moment of my life didn't make me flinty and hard.

We are responsible to different scales of change.

Elizabeth: I’m thinking about these levels, these scales of transformation. When I met you, when I walked into that interview room for the Intiman Emerging Artists Program, I didn't believe in theatre. I didn’t really think theatre could make the change that I was interested in seeing. I was kind of at a loss at that point, which is absurd because now I'm a professor of theatre. We are responsible to different scales of change. Those different relationships are so important to tend to. You brought up that first tier is your relationship with yourself. That's also what you're doing now with Dragon Baby, right?

Sara: Within Dragon Baby, yes. The other two installments in the trilogy, Dragon Lady and Dragon Mama, have very unique forms. Dragon Mama is very much a traditional, cinematic, coming-of-age, queer odyssey, and that's my mom’s story. Dragon Lady is a two-act, immersive cabaret where I talk to the audience as if they're my favorite grandchild. By the end of it, we see this woman in the last chapter of her life, reckoning with everything that she did that she's not proud of, reckoning with the pain that she caused her family unknowingly and knowingly. I end with this tribute to my grandmother in song, and I wrote this musical with my grandmother as the emcee of her own life because that's how she was. She would regale us with these stories because she wanted us to remember her in a specific way with glamour and glitz and drama.

So Dragon Baby is also the story of how I developed my process, and, in the development of my process, self-actualized and individualized. I recognized the reason I was able to do all of that was because of my family. There's some critique of theatre as a form in there because I can't avoid that, but the majority of the play is wrestling with these two arcs that, at a pivotal point, collide and make something really crazy.

Elizabeth: So you have a play that is you relating to yourself. How are you developing that performance of yourself?

Sara: First, I had to recognize everything that I was making. I was like, "What is this? I'm making stuff, but what is it doing?" I'm always asking myself, "What is this piece of work doing?" and that is directly informed by my inner voice, which is, "What are you doing? Why are you feeling that way? What are you feeling? What's the result of your feeling?" I'm always asking myself that.

Elizabeth: You did this exercise with us in 2018. We had to ask “Why?” and “Why?” and “Why?” and “Why?” I failed that exercise. I think I could do it now.

Sara: You could totally do it now. You could totally do it now. I do that “Why?” exercise with myself 24/7.

Elizabeth: Another question of scale: We have to acknowledge impact works at different scales as well. I'm saying that as an employee of the state of Florida, where I need to ask where I am maintaining certain structures of knowledge in the university system and where I am breaking from that. How can I best serve the students, but also to the broader communities that I'm a part of? This question of scale, I think, can feel conceptual and abstract, but it's actually one of the most tangible ways to think about change.

Broadway has limitations that are largely defined by the scale of capitalism. We have to acknowledge and point out the limitations when they happen.

Sara: Yes, it is. This is something that I have to remind my students and my mentees. If you're somebody who walks through the world conscious of being an agent, there's no way that you can deny how your actions and your words affect the people around you at all of these different scales. At the scale of the individual and the interpersonal, that work I think should and can happen all the time. While we sit here and wait for the two-party system to crumble and something new to emerge, we can still have these conversations with ourselves, our loved ones, our neighbors, our coworkers. We can still manifest that change by articulating it, by living it, by embodying it.

Elizabeth: By iterating it, right?

Sara: By iterating, yes.

Elizabeth: That means changing scales, seeing where something didn't land, acknowledging harm, moving through, changing yourself. Even the format of our conversation resists a pithy quick response. There's no button to press, obviously, these things wander... I keep coming back to scale.

Sara: It's so key.

Not to bring everything back to the Vulture article, but I think that in many ways, whether or not people realized it, the harshest critique that was coming at me was because people were offended by my ambition and assured confidence of my own worth as a maker and—perhaps more importantly—as a person.

Broadway has limitations that are largely defined by the scale of capitalism. We have to acknowledge and point out the limitations when they happen. We have to critique them because only when we show that, and we articulate it for other people in ways that are accessible for them to, can we then come up with radical solutions. If we can’t understand the limitations, we’re going to be charging people $500 to see…what? Who has $500?

In this capitalist world, the more that you accumulate, the more you want. I was talking to my friend, and she was like, "How are you going to not become corrupt?" I was like, "I think I have to really trust in my friends and community, people like you. I want to trust that I'm going to have people in my life like you who are going to say, 'This thing that you're doing is really fucked up, and it's on the path to corruption.'" This is where the community is key.

Elizabeth: I'm so appreciative because I think just watching your work informs my work, and there's that sense that the road is long. There's that part of me that's seeing a life of work, what a career means not in the capitalist sense, but in a philosophical sense. So, I just feel honored to be developing my career as your career keeps growing.

Sara: I feel really honored, Elizabeth, for our relationship and our careers. And I know that our work is feminist. We do feminist work.

Elizabeth: We didn't even talk about feminism.

Sara: That's beautiful though because we're just doing it.

Elizabeth: If this were a really straightforward interview and we didn't get to really big questions, but also sticky ones, it wouldn't be our conversation.

Sara: What's beautiful, and I trust the fact, is we're not the only people having these conversations and we're not the only people thinking this way. It seems contradictory, but that's why I think it's so important for individuals to speak their truth. I'm doing it because I know that I'm not alone. Or rather, I should say, I trust that I'm not alone.