Earlier this year, Julia Dixon Evans and I visited PARU Tea's co-founders, married couple Amy Truong and Lani Gobaleza, in their tranquil La Jolla shop. Over some memorable teas — ceremonial grade matcha, blue chamomile, Hanadoki (Japanese cherry blossom) — they told us about their own serendipitous and dramatic love story (set in Japan) and how they introduced a largely unknown product to San Diego: single-origin, loose-leaf tea. It was an inspiring and courageous story of entrepreneurship, love and sticking to your principles, and it ended up being the first episode of The Finest podcast.
Naturally, given how much I enjoyed her work in tea, I leapt at the chance to see a different side of Gobaleza. She is also a playwright and performer, and her play "Nighttime Julianne" (her second, after 2023's "Everyday Vanilla") is making its premiere at this year's 13th annual San Diego International Fringe Festival. The play is a self-described "solo dark comedy" and tells the story of a 35-year-old woman navigating crushing grief as she lives alone in the oversized house she once shared with her wife and dog, both of whom died in an accident two years prior.
The debut performance on the festival's opening day was an exciting kickoff. The room was fully packed, hardly an empty seat in the house. Gobaleza — the show's only actor — has an effervescent personality, and despite the melancholic subject matter, the play packs plenty of laughs, as well as enlightening ideas about grief, desire and reckoning with competing parts of one's self.
Gobaleza said the play was inspired by Frank Ocean — whose song "Godspeed" plays in the climactic scene; American philosopher Judith Butler, who is name-checked in the performance and described in the program as "known for their theories of the performative nature of gender"; and her own desire to see "Filipino American representation and a nonbinary love interest front and center rather than on the sidelines," according to a Q&A provided in the show's press materials.
Early in the play, her character Julianne reminisces about her old life with her wife. "We used to be dreamers," she says. "We had passions, legacy, we wanted to see the world and go change it." This determination to do something great, she says, comes in part from the sacrifice of her immigrant parents and the Filipino concept of "utang na loob," or "debt of the heart." Julianne describes it: "You owe the most important part of you before you even know what that is."
Much of the play is inspired by its writer's own life — her mother grew up in the Philippines, and Gobaleza herself certainly possesses ambition and determination, balancing a full-time copywriting job, helping to run PARU and doing her own art. (She even dreams of launching her own black box theater someday.) She's also dealt with her own grief recently. This past winter, Gobaleza lost both her dog and her uncle, whom she describes as a father figure. Already signed up for the Fringe Festival, she poured those experiences into the play, which she drafted in just two weeks. Between all her other obligations and pursuits, she said she works on writing and learning lines between the hours of 11 p.m. and 2 a.m.
In our podcast interview, Gobaleza and her spouse Truong taught us about the Japanese concept of "ichigo ichie" — "one chance, one meeting," a reminder that every moment only happens once and that you should fully grasp and experience it. (They're full of thought-provoking, foreign phrases.) This one made such an impact on Julia and me and that it became a central theme of our episode. Tea, we discovered, tastes so much better when you fully immerse yourself in every detail — every little flavor and moment of interaction that comes with sharing it with others. Even if the script is exactly the same for all five of Gobaleza's Fringe Festival performances of Nighttime Julianne, they will each have their own distinct character and flavor based on the audience and nuances of the performance. Live theater, especially plays written and performed by local artists, offers a special opportunity to be fully immersed in a moment and learn more about our neighbors and our own unique San Diego culture. There's no other place or time where you can find it quite like this.
"Nighttime Julianne" has two remaining performances: Thursday, May 22, at 9 p.m. and Saturday, May 25, at 7:30 p.m., the final day of the San Diego International Fringe Festival. Tickets are available at sdfringe.org.
