WHEN TWO THEATER pros at the peak of their powers join forces for the first time in their much-garlanded careers, the resulting wild ovation would be entirely apropos, and not nearly enough.
And so it was two weekends ago, when Nonie Buencamino and Irma Adlawan came together for the first time in Liza Magtoto’s play, “Hubad.” The play was the final entry in Virgin Labfest 2, a modest festival of some 15 untried, untested and unstaged dramatic works by the Writers’ Bloc, a loose group of emerging and established Filipino playwrights.
Mounted at the CCP’s Tanghalang Huseng Batute, “Hubad” saw Adlawan and Buencamino fearlessly playing a husband and wife who’ve taken to playing sexual games to spice up their marriage. The two actors were a wonder to watch—nothing less than master classes on the use of body, voice, mind and experience to create tactile characters onstage.
Magtoto’s play featured strong humor and a bracing, penetrating honesty. This could only have been written by a woman deeply in touch with her own powerful sense of self and sexuality.
And as staged by another woman, Denisa Reyes, the former artistic director of Ballet Philippines who was making her directorial debut in theater, “Hubad” exuded a ripe, zesty maturity which made it the perfect vehicle to cap this year’s edition of Virgin Labfest.
Bold reimagining
A similar sensuousness, but of a dark, gothic kind, marked Rody Vera’s “Ang Unang Aswang,” a bold reimagining of the aswang legend. Under Herbie Go’s acute but light-as-a-feather direction, members of the Philippine High School for the Arts’ Dulaang Sipat Lawin thoroughly overhauled the mythology.
The creature from another world was now One of Us—born of everyday human deceit and cruelty: “Ako ang unang aswang, supling ng poot, sindak at paghihiganti! Ako ang salamin na ayaw ninyong harapin!” (I am the first monster, child of hatred, rage and revenge. I am the mirror that you have long ignored!)
Vera had another entry, the madcap “The Return of Flor,” about the late Flor Contemplacion who is sent back to earth to comfort another Filipino maid jailed in Singapore. Mailes Kanapi was Flor, and she was a deadpan hoot, especially in her most precious line: “All I wanted was to send home a box of pasalubong. Instead, it is me they bring home in a box.”
Alfonso Dacanay’s “First Snow of November,” adapted from Bienvenido Santos’ “The Day the Dancers Came,” limned the loneliness of exile with exquisite feeling. More wondrously, the play was also performed (and co-directed, with Go) by PHSA’s Dulaang Sipat Lawin—high-school students whose emotional transparency could give older actors a run for their money.
Abner Delina Jr., all of 16, essayed the role of Filemon Acayan, the aging Pinoy expat in a Chicago nursing home who remembers the US visit of a Bayanihan-like dance troupe 20 years ago. Elegiac and autumnal, “First Snow of November” played like a heartfelt, bittersweet note on a violin. Among “Labfest’s” entries, it cut the deepest.
Preachy, shopworn
Rather expectedly, the “message” plays, those that were baldly engaged in social issues, tended to be preachy, shopworn or unsubtle.
Go and Sipat Lawin’s one weak entry was “Pragres,” based on F. Sionil José’s short story “Progress,” about a naïve provincial clerk chasing a promotion through a rotten government bureaucracy. It was vibrantly performed, but by verbalizing its point—“Ganito ang pragres nung panahon ng New Society ni Marcos. Ngayon, me nagbago ba?”—it overstated the obvious.
Rene Villanueva’s “Isang Dakilang Mamamayan ng Republika,” directed by Regina Anne Ronquillo, also treaded a well-worn path—poverty as the trigger for shocking acts of desperation. Villanueva’s lines were lyrical—“Malapit man ang Quiapo, napakalayo naman ng langit para sa aming nga daing”—but the dazed, rambling quality of the play was a drag. (Quiapo may be near, but heaven is too far to hear our pleas.)
In Layeta Bucoy’s interesting but heavy-handed “Ang Anak ni Gloria,” directed by Tess Jamias, a hooker kills her child in exchange for a promised security, as Gloria Macapagal Arroyo’s State of the Nation Address in the background lends a big allegorical note to the story.
The over-mannered touches came in the form of bizarre, marionette-like movements that the two actors, May Bayot and Mayen Estanero, performed at odd moments, coupled with what sounded like passages from Euripides’ “Medea” that sporadically bubbled out of their mouths, alternating with the piquant Filipino dialogue.
Rogelio Braga’s “Maganda Pa ang Daigdig” could use more of this sort of over-execution. Its premise was startling enough—a family of pro-Erap loyalists railing against the hypocrisy of Edsa II, and conspiring to hide a murder by using the ongoing tumult as diversion. But this would-be black comedy, directed by George de Jesus III, never managed to rise to a truly absurd level, its contrasting surreal and naturalistic scenes blurring into one nervous, fuzzy brew.
Perils of yearning
Four plays—Niel de Mesa’s “Pag-Uwi, Pag-Undas,” Debbie Ann Tan’s “Dragon’s Breath,” Argel Tuason’s “Palabas/Exit” and Job Pagsibigan’s “The Palanca in My Mind”—tackled shades of hope and yearning.
Tuxs Rutaquio’s expressionistic direction of “Pag-Uwi, Pag-Undas” amplified an essentially flimsy tale about lost souls pining for remembrance by loved ones in the living realm.
“Palabas/Exit,” meanwhile, under Rolando Inocencio’s direction, traced a similar search for connection, this time between two young gay men whose counterpoint dialogues hardly met, just swerving off each other until the desolate end.
Pagsibigan’s “The Palanca in My Mind,” directed with mock-Brechtian flair by Roobak Valle, offered a diverting (if sitcom-ish) stab at the stuffed, geriatric image of the Palanca Awards, the country’s premier literary competition. Here, a ditzy call-center agent goes through all sorts of humiliations to realize her dream of joining the awards.
Wenah Nagales virtually gobbled up the scenery as the starry-eyed writer Dory, supported by a shape-shifting cast of talented Tanghalang Pilipino actors.
In “Dragon’s Breath,” staged like a tone poem by J. Victor Villareal, a Chinese woman (Marjorie Ann Lorico) loses half her eyesight, but her hopelessness is checked by a blind man (Peter Chua) whose epigrammatic words—“Listen not with your ears but with your soul”—allows her to seek solace from her Chinese heritage and identity.
Noted playwright Nicolas Pichay’s contribution to “Labfest” was “Tres Ataques de Corazon,” three monologues ruminating on the unhindered nature of love and the human heart, all inspired by his recent coronary bypass surgery and directed by Vincent de Jesus.
The second vignette was the funniest, with Ariel Diccion having a ball as a voluble gay man surrendering to “pag-ibig, amore, l’amour, luv.” But the most substantial was the third, about a Pinoy Everyman (a terrific Eric Bisa) who would employ every trick in the book, including using a loved one’s death for blackmail, to wangle a US visa.
“Sa lupain ng milk and honey, ‘f-k you’ ang tunog ng doorbell,” he said. But there he was, reduced to happy tears with his wish granted.
Pronounced humanism
Finally, there is J. Dennis Teodosio, whose “Payb/Siks” and “Baka Sakali” deserve special mention.
Last year’s “Geegee at Waterina,” while flabby in places, showed off Teodosio as a playwright of pronounced yet unsentimental humanism. His two new plays are a pleasing confirmation of this gift.
The witty, disarmingly simple “Payb/Six” had actors Jake Macapagal and Arnold Reyes discussing sex-for-money as a playful business transaction. The casualness of their repartee, the unforced allusions to the real world (specifically, the country’s prostituted state as a debtor nation), and Phil Noble’s even-tempered staging took the wind out of any easy moralizing on these proceedings.
In “Baka Sakali,” directed by Catherine Racsag, a poor boy and his grandfather (Joel Garcia and Bodjie Pascua) argue over the meaning of fortune and chance, as the old man prepares for yet another crack at a TV game show. Their dreams end in tragedy, but not before Teodosio has very skillfully sketched two more shabby but sturdy characters hoping for a break.
“Baka Sakali” is the first piece of theater we know to comment on the Ultra “Wowowee” tragedy, but it did so in an oblique, almost respectful way.
Obviously, emotionalism wasn’t Teodosio’s point. Rather, the play’s plainspoken language, fleshed out by the winsome acting of Garcia and Pascua, gave every indication of interior lives richly imagined. As with the best of this year’s Virgin Labfest 2, “Baka Sakali” was a play that rang true.
E-mail the author at gcadiz@inquirer.com.ph
