Clint Ramos knows that the story he’s trying to tell won’t be for everyone, but it’s an important one nonetheless. “It’s voyeuristic in a way,” he says, “about a person living in solitude, attempting to connect with a larger outside world.” Clint Ramos says he first saw the play Request Concert by Franz Xaver Kroetz when he first moved to the U.
S. for graduate school in 1994. “It was a commentary on capitalism,” says Clint, who has since seen different iterations of the show.
“I’ve been thinking about how a large part of our economy is fueled by overseas workers. A lot of Filipinos in the diaspora take care of other people instead of the people they should be taking care of. And by the time they come home in their old age they are empty shells, their own kids, strangers.
It’s a complicated level of self-sacrifice.” “I’m not trying to judge that practice since it benefits a lot of us,” he says. “I hope the play opens up these conversations for us.
” Clint says he constantly wonders about how all this contributes to the national psyche. “It’s profound that our number one export is care,” he says. “And while others acknowledge the skill of Filipinos who take care of other people, for the most part they’re still kind of invisible to the world.
” He recalls a conversation he and Request sa Radyo director Bobby Garcia once had. “We thought, what if we make the protagonist of the show a caregiver? Bobby and I just ran with it,” he .