To be held in Manila House, the reading of Gaven Trinidad’s lauded play examines the delicate interplay of race, colorism, and identity within Filipino beauty standards.
“Filipinos love love. Filipinos love beauty. Filipinos love beauty pageants.” So begins the cheeky premise of Mercury Makes the Skin Glow, a play-in-development by New York-based writer Gaven Trinidad. The work recently earned recognition as a finalist in both the 2025 Eugene O’Neill Playwrights Conference and the 2025 Bay Area Playwrights Festival, and this January 18, 2026, Trinidad will be hosting a special public developmental reading alongside fellow industry professionals at Manila House, BGC, giving audiences the opportunity to witness the creative process behind a promising work-in-progress.
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What’s A Developmental Reading?
A developmental reading is a glimpse into a play’s early life: a stage where the work is complete on the page but still finding its full shape. Plays often take years, sometimes five, seven, or even ten, to fully become themselves, and readings like this are a vital step in that journey.
In major theater cities like New York, London, and Manila, such readings are standard practice. They allow playwrights, fellow artists, producers, and theater administrators to hear the work aloud, explore the characters, and reflect on what resonates. Many shows now considered classics, including modern musicals like Hamilton and Hadestown, spent nearly a decade in development before their premieres.
What makes this reading of Mercury Makes the Skin Glow unique is that the public is invited to witness a process that usually happens behind closed doors. This often involves artists discovering their characters in real time, guided by curiosity and instinct rather than polish. Attending means seeing the play in motion, hearing it evolve, and being part of the creative conversation that shapes a work before it reaches the stage.
About Mercury Makes the Skin Glow: A Filipino American Teleserye For The Stage
Mercury Makes the Skin Glow begins with former beauty queen Carmelita returning to her home of Queens, New York, to start a new circuit of beauty pageants for the community in celebration of the 125th Anniversary of Filipino Independence Day. Her daughter, Jesca, is against the practice and tries to stop them. As a way to prevent Jesca from doing so, Carmelita coerces her seven-year-old grandson, Ernesto, to participate, which then unearths troubling questions surrounding the multi-billion-dollar industry of skin whitening that has gripped the global south for decades.
Trinidad’s play probes the ever-relevant issue of Filipino beauty standards, exploring the tensions and intersections of race, colorism, and identity embedded in our global obsession with appearance. Drawing on the many cultural pillars that shape Filipino life, the bold new work is part teleserye, part beauty pageant, and part historical reckoning, a provocative narrative that asks: does mercury—the dangerous ingredient found in so many skin-whitening products—really make the skin glow?
The special developmental reading of “Mercury Makes the Skin Glow” will take place on January 18, 2026, at 4 PM in Manila House, BGC, Taguig. Entrance for Manila House members is free, with a PHP 500 fee for guests. Register through https://bit.ly/MercuryMakestheSkinGlow. For reservations and inquiries, contact +63 0917 816 3685 or +63 0917 657 2073, or email [email protected].
