Staging Testimony in Nanay

Abstract

We present five scenes from Nanay, a testimonial play that we cowrote, drawing on conventional social scientific research transcripts from interviews conducted with Filipino domestic workers, their children, nanny agents, and the Canadian employers of live‐in caregivers. We developed this theater play from May 2007 through August 2008 and performed the piece in Vancouver and Berlin in 2009. A reading of the script was staged in Edinburgh in 2012, and the play will be performed in Manila in November 2013. We have turned to performance to create and extend public debate about current immigration policies, racial and ethnic stereotypes, the commodification of reproductive roles, and the transfer of care labor from the global South to the global North. We interject the scenes presented here with behind‐the‐scenes observations to more fully contextualize the script and to suggest ways in which this process of creative writing and performance informs conventional social science writing.