Louella Dizon
by Brandi Andrade, Ph.D.
Louella Dizon was born in 1966 in Cebu City, the Philippines. This was the time of the “third wave” of Filipino immigrants to the U.S. (the first coming at the turn of the century, and the second in the 1930s), when thousands of professional Filipinos immigrated to the United States in search of better opportunities for their families. Accordingly, Dizon’s parents, young doctors from poor families, came to the U.S. two years later, settling in Detroit, Michigan.
Dizon was interested in artistic pursuits from an early age, directing and writing stories as far back as elementary school. She continued to write (plays, poetry, and short stories), direct, perform, and compose music throughout high school and college. She graduated from Princeton in 1989 with a B.A. in English and moved to New York. Till Voices Wake Us was written two years later. It was performed as a work in progress by the Ma-Yi Theatre Ensemble at the Soho Repertory Theater, and was subsequently produced at the Soho Rep in 1994.
Dizon has written two other plays, The Sweet Sound of Inner Light (which was staged as part of the New Works Festival at the Public Theatre) and The Practical Heart. She then took a hiatus from writing to pursue an advanced degree in Computer Science, and began working on a novel in 2002.
Dizon says that although the story in Till Voices Wake Us has many autobiographical elements, she stopped identifying herself strictly with Rosie once the Grandma character hinted at all the other lives from the past that had shaped, in large and small ways, the person she is in each moment of her present. That’s just what I love about this story: it’s about the necessity of understanding the past in order to navigate the present; it celebrates foremothers; and it touches on the importance of embracing cultural differences (an idea we continue to struggle with at home and abroad) — all the themes that resonate with me as I keep trying to figure out who I am as a scholar, as an artist, as a woman.
The title of the play comes from a favorite poem -- T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” -- but Dizon describes the moment that the play’s true significance came to her, “after the last curtain call of the last show, and the last word had been spoken -- given life -- by an actor. In the empty theater, I sat and wept, because for the first time, I had really opened my heart, and since then, I have been writing to do just that.”
Sources: Lucy Burn, Asian American Playwrights: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook - Greenwood Press, 2002;
Kathy Perkins and Roberta Uno, Contemporary Plays by Women of Color - New York: Routledge, 1996
[March 2008]