Meet Isabel Beatriz Tongson, writer of Off-Off-Broadway’s ‘A White Girl's Understudy’
I sat down with playright Isabel Beatriz Tongson (BC ‘26) to discuss her new Off-Off-Broadway play “A White Girl’s Understudy,” a timely story about the experiences of women of color in theater.
The cast of "A White Girl's Understudy" on stage during a performance.
Photo provided by Sebastian Tongson
March 10, 2025
On February 7, I attended the opening night of “A White Girl’s Understudy,” an Off-Off-Broadway production at the Chain Theatre written by Isabel Beatriz Tongson, a junior at Barnard. Afterward, I had the pleasure of sitting down with her to discuss the show and her experience as a playwright.
The play follows Lyn Talaga, a young actress whose dream of being on Broadway is finally achieved when she is cast in the new production, “Speakeasy Love,” with one caveat — she is understudying a white actress playing a white role. As the story unfolds, we also learn about Lyn’s complicated relationship with another cast member, her longtime crush from theater camp, who also happens to be dating the lead actress. What begins as a backstage drama soon becomes a deeper exploration of identity, ambition, and the cost of success in the theater industry.
My conversation with Tongson provided a glimpse into the keen insight and sharp humor that made “A White Girl’s Understudy” so compelling.
Writing has long been an important part of Tongson’s life. She shared that she first began writing at age 13 and remembered thinking to herself, “Oh my god, I'm gonna be a teen author.”
Her love of writing continued to grow through her college career. She first began to develop “A White Girl’s Understudy” in her first year at Barnard, through Playwriting Lab with Professor Andy Bragen.
Tongson has found the theater community at Columbia to be “really, really awesome” in encouraging new works. In fact, the first show she took part in at Columbia was an original play, which she said gave her reassurance for her own creative process: “It made me be like, okay, I can develop my own work on this campus and be in a safe environment with it to test out new things.”
A headshot of Isabel Tongson.
Photo provided by Isabel Tongson
So, what inspires Tongson and the stories she chooses to tell? For her, it is a matter of creating the kinds of roles and opportunities for others that she would like to have.
“I started writing plays because, as an actor, I just knew that there weren’t as many roles for me as a Filipino woman, as opposed to my white peers,” she explained. “I wanted to be part of leveling that disadvantage by creating roles for other people and for myself.”
Through the specific story of “A White Girl’s Understudy,” Tongson wanted to explore what it means “for a person of color to play a traditionally white role and not have the aspect of their race be recognized in the performance.” She recalls asking herself some of the same questions the main character grapples with in the play: “What does it mean that I’m playing this role to have other people see me as a white person and, I’m actually asking the audience to perceive me as a raceless or white, like neutral person. Is that erasure? Is that opening up some kind of opportunity for me? What does that mean? And those were the questions that really just got me thinking about, what does this look like on a Broadway scale?”
Discussing her inspiration for the more technical aspects of playwriting, Tongson cited playwrights who experiment with forms of plays and the way they look on the page, such as Bryna Turner, Liza Birkenmeier, Susan Laurie Parks, and Hansol Jung. “You can play with the form of the text, like with capitalization or with a lack of punctuation or even the way that the word is broken up on the page. It’s like poetry,” she said. “That can inform how the actor says it. So then those two things combined give a really, honestly, precise performance map.”
Though “A White Girl’s Understudy” has finished its run, Tongson’s exploration of identity and representation in theater is far from over. If this production is any indication, her work will continue to spark conversations long after the final curtain call.