“Stay,” President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. said last week, addressing healthcare workers at an event in Leyte where the government turned over patient-transport vehicles. His remark was an acknowledgment of the great number of healthcare workers seeking employment abroad.

A similar point was raised in the recently staged play “Nobody Is Home” by the Philippine Educational Theater Association (Peta) and the German theater company Mecklenburgisches Staatstheater: Should Filipino healthcare workers overseas return to the Philippines so they can physically care for their loved ones, or simply endure being far away because of the economic benefits it brings?

At the start of the play, members of the audience are advised that “Nobody Is Home” would be an interactive experience at some point, and then are whisked to Germany through a whimsical ad showing the national hero Jose Rizal inviting today’s “modern-day heroes”—overseas Filipino workers—to seek gainful employment in that country as nurses. Three key characters respond to the call and are literally unpacked from balikbayan boxes onstage: Filipino nurses Kai, Bea, and Seph (played by Peta’s Meann Espinosa, Julia Enriquez, and Ekis Gimenez), who are hired by a care facility for the elderly facing a staffing shortage.

The three are eager to fulfil their duties, but soon discover that on top of the challenges that come with caring for elderly patients, they must also deal with the difficulties of adapting to a new country and culture while trying their best to support and stay connected with their families back home.

Meanwhile, the patients’ families add another layer of difficulty as they express their own concerns regarding the care that their parents are receiving, especially in the hands of foreign workers. Language is one of the biggest barriers that both parties face, even as migrant workers are required to pass tests certifying their fluency in Deutsch.

Still, the Filipino lambing prevails: The show focuses on the relationship between Kai and Ilse (played by Susi Wirth), who, despite her dementia, is responsive to her nurse’s care. Ilse’s daughter Maureen (Ute Baggeröhr), while grateful for Kai’s service, cannot help but be frustrated at how she is missing out on that connection with her mother; after all, she is a mother herself with a hundred and one responsibilities to fulfill every day at home.

Here is where the show invites the audience to think deeper about the global care economy, especially its impact on women: Maureen, in a gasping monologue, enumerates the daily expectations of her as a mother and as a woman, from seeing to her children’s needs, to tending their home, to being emotionally available to her husband the provider—and then, of course, to ensuring that her elderly and frail mother is being looked after.

The facility’s head nurse, Karina (Julia Keiling), provides a macro view of this issue. Germany is an aging country, she says, and there are not enough staff to ensure that care facilities offer the best service possible. So, it invites migrant workers—the Philippines’ “modern-day heroes”—and offer them well-compensated jobs, but not enough support to ensure that they can easily integrate into the country and culture in which they now need to work.

Ilse offers a chilling solution: What if she just dies?

Then arises the pivotal issue that puts everyone watching on edge: When faced with a life-and-death problem, Kai has to decide whether she should return to the Philippines to physically care for her son maimed in a severe accident, or remain in Germany so she can continue earning well and pay for her child’s treatment. What to do? Her fate is put in the hands of the audience; through an interactive online survey, the decision is put to a vote via a quick scan, using mobile phones, of a large QR code flashed onscreen. The results, presented as a pie chart, are posted in real time on the same screen.

In the show we watched, the last one of the production’s local run, the vote was for Kai to stay put in Germany. Post-show, Peta announced that while the outcome varied in the three-day run on Aug. 8–10, the results were always neck and neck.

In the end, there was no solid conclusion to the story. Instead, the audience was asked to reflect on the show’s themes, and, as they walked out Peta Theater Center’s doors, to think of how they could build their own “communities of care”—so that the likes of Ilse, Maureen, [names], would no longer view giving and receiving care as a burden but, rather, as everyone’s responsibility in order to make the world we live in more human.

“Nobody Is Home” is a collaboration between Peta and Mecklenburgisches Staatstheater, written by Liza Magtoto and directed by Nina Gühlstorff and J-mee Katanyag. Stage design is by Marouscha Levy and Nina Gühlstorff; video by Bene Manaois; costume by Marouscha Levy; dramaturgy by Philip Klose; and music by Raphael Käding and Ada Marie S. Tayao.

The production will also be staged in Schwerin, Germany, where both theater companies hope to continue sparking more conversations on the global care economy.