PETA’s Gen G asks who really gets to decide

PETA is putting young people in charge of a flooded Philippines and asking the audience to help decide what happens next. That is the setup of Gen G: GG na ’to!, a new interactive production from the Philippine Educational Theater Association and Move to Change Foundation, Inc.

Set in an alternate Philippines in 2028, floodwaters overwhelm the country and young people end up in temporary communities called Balangay Gen Zones. The adults promise to return, but they don’t — so the young people have to figure out how to run the Balangay themselves: who gets welcomed, what matters when resources run low, and what kind of community they want to build. The audience gets involved in those decisions too.

Gen G uses voting, negotiation, and other forms of participation to influence what happens onstage. Co-playwright Jhudiel Sosa describes one of its starting ideas as a “decision-based game”: you choose, the story responds, and then you deal with what that choice caused.

PETA has played with audience power before. I wrote about Charot! here on Unsaulicited back in 2019, and one of the things I remembered most was its live voting and the possibility that another audience could push the story somewhere else.

So the interactive part of Gen G already feels familiar to me, but the part that lands harder is what PETA wants us to think about after we have made the choice. Director Ian Segarra points out that choosing is rarely simple because family, fear, responsibilities, circumstance, and the systems around us all affect what we decide.

Something that looks like a bad choice from the outside can feel very different when those are the options actually available to you. PETA Artistic Director and co-playwright J-mee Katanyag takes that idea further by asking what happens when somebody else has already decided which choices you are allowed to make.

That is where the audience voting in Gen G becomes more interesting to me. The production is part of Project GG: Game Changers for Good Governance, but it is looking beyond simply getting young people to vote or participate and into what shapes that participation in the first place.

Who gets heard, who has the information, and what happens when fear, misinformation, or scarcity starts affecting the way a group decides? If every option in front of you is bad, how empowering is it to be told that the decision is yours?

The Balangay works well as the center of the story because everyone is on the same vessel and everyone is affected by where it goes. Being on the same boat, though, does not automatically mean everyone gets the same say in where it is headed.

The young people in Gen G inherit a damaged world they did not build, and honestly, that part barely needs the alternate 2028 setting to feel familiar. The production also plays with something Filipinos have been telling young people forever: “Kabataan ang pag-asa ng bayan.”

Katanyag's point is more immediate because young people are already here, already making decisions, and already living with choices made long before they had any say in them. For Sosa, the project is personal too: she remembers A Game of Trolls as the first PETA production she watched and credits it with making her pay more attention to issues outside the theater, so writing Gen G became her way of paying that experience forward.

Ian Segarra directs Gen G, with J-mee Katanyag and Jhudiel Sosa as playwrights. Kabaitan Bautista handles music, Julio Garcia is in charge of set and props design, and Johnnie Moran designs the costumes.

The cast includes Lyle Viray, Johnrick Noynay, James Lanante, Camille Fabian, Francheska Andaya, CB Lagapa, Ada Tayao, and Zoe Damag. Gen G: GG na ’to! will tour 12 schools from September to December 2026.

I still want to know how much the audience can really change and how differently another crowd might experience the same show. I won't know that until I see it, but the voting itself is already not the part that interests me most.

I want to see what happens when PETA gives us a choice, lets us live with it, and then makes us wonder why we chose it at all. That is a much more interesting use of audience participation than simply asking us to raise a hand and pick an ending. G?