I did not want to write a play about Imelda Marcos, former first lady of the Philippines to dictator Ferdinand Marcos.
In late February 1986, the People Power Revolution happened in the Philippines along Epifanio de los Santos Avenue (EDSA) in Metro Manila. Over four days, the Philippine people carried out nonviolent protests against the Marcos dictatorship and won. The Marcoses fled to Hawaii; peace attained freedom.
My family home is a 20-minute drive from EDSA. But in order to drive along EDSA, you have to quickly go along Marcos Highway. Funny that.
I grew up in Marikina city, famously known as the Shoe Capital of the Philippines due to its quality craftsmanship of footwear. So, unsurprisingly, the shoemakers of Marikina made quite a number of Imelda Marcos’ shoes. Just around the corner of my family home is the city’s shoe museum, which displays around a quarter of Imelda Marcos’ shoes. If you can imagine a cute little museum fitting all that, just imagine how many shoes this woman owns.
Billions of Filipino tax payments are still being used for recreational purposes by officials, old and new. Freedom has become a distant memory for it currently comes with a price tag and how could you afford that when your money has been stolen from you?
Social media became a big thing in my teenage years, allowing me to learn all about the world’s injustices. My outrage was a flame that burned bright, except I had nowhere else to put it but reblogging posts on Tumblr. Thankfully, I was accepted into a theatre making degree that encouraged making art political. All art has inherent politics but lecturers loved when you leaned into it because then you were stringing together what the world was giving you and what you took from that. However, as life went on where reality found its way to sink deep in my bones, my flame went out.
In 2022, Ferdinand Marcos Jr. became president of the Philippines after a successful campaign on unity and recovery. Funny that. 36 years prior, Filipinos were united against your family and how do you recover the wealth your family and every other corrupt official had already spent? This also happened to be the year we were tasked to make a 20-minute piece for our graduation showcase. Two of my Filipino coursemates and I had joked we’d make a show about Imelda Marcos because one of us had enough pairs of shoes to pull it off.
When we started making the work, I was already raged out and tired. What change could I ever implement an ocean away, anyway? But deep diving into Filipino history and Imelda led me to find that the change I could offer laid in getting people to listen to what each other really had to say.
So I got what I wanted. I haven’t written a play about Imelda Marcos, she doesn’t deserve that from me. Instead this is a play about the hauntings of violence and an argument that freedom doesn’t need to be bought, rather something to simply want. All we have to do is go for it, like we did before.
Donita Cruz is the playwright and AV designer of IMELDA, produced by Sapatos Angels Collective and playing at KXT on Broadway from 31 July – 15 August. IMELDA was originally supported by The Blue Room Theatre Summer Nights 2024 program and featured as part of the CAAP Works in Progress 2025. Tickets are available here.
