RAE RED’S ‘Kawala’
Dingdong Novenario’s “Kafatiran”
Siegfried Sepulveda in “The Valley Mission Care”
VIRGIN LABFEST 7 Freedom, escape–exciting theater By: Gibbs Cadiz
Philippine Daily Inquirer
How numerous times can 1 spin versions about the concept of entrapment and escape, the need to flee what is becoming a destructively unsettled—or its flip facet, becalmed—state?
At the latest Virgin Labfest 7, which closed a number of Sundays ago after a two-week run on the Cultural Middle in the Philippines’ Tanghalang Huseng Batute, ten new plays—nine one-act and a single full-length production—preoccupied on their own with that central motif in methods that summoned verve, ambition and fashion, if not always illuminating insight, the iterations going the entire hog through the grimly highbrow to the unabashedly populist.
Not that they were aware of it, it appears. For your initial time considering that its founding seven a long time back, this yearly festival of “untried, untested, unstaged plays” did away with idea pegs or themed titles for its perform sets of a few entries every single, preferring to permit the supplies coalesce by by themselves and also the viewers to find a common thread in them, if ever.
Still, even though the resulting smorgasbord appeared random by virtue in the plays’ dissimilar tales, directorial therapies, and also efficiency styles, what emerged, very serendipitously, was a unifying issue: independence and flight.
It’s the existential query, for example, on the core with the Labfest’s greatest entries—Rae Red’s “Kawala,” Dingdong Novenario’s “Kafatiran” and Floy Quintos’ “Evening on the Opera”—all of them about characters stuck in a few dead-end halfway zone, scuffling to wrest an inch or two of traction from their pinched, pallid existences for that extended hoped-for leap into a much more habitable realm.
‘Kawala’
In Red’s “Kawala,” directed by Paolo O’Hara, that premise is transformed into a vibrantly humorous tale of an elevator boy who, right after five decades in his dreary task, lastly has the chance to bolt out around the wings of his recently acquired university degree.
But on a fateful day when the other elevate goes about the blink and the most colourful tenants with the high-rise he operates in are forced to pack themselves into his very small chamber, there to splatter out their tricks and messy personal entanglements, Mr. Elevator Boy ends up seeking at his station in lifestyle with new eyes.
Red’s dialogue could from time to time be clear (“Masyado kasing delikado sa labas, mas ligtas dito sa loob,” went one particular), but around the whole it crackled with assurance and energy. And with only one-half in the stage as functionality space, O’Hara masterfully maneuvered the action using the aid of what amounted to get the Labfest’s tautest ensemble—Jerry O’Hara, Jelson Bay, Tess Jamias, Peewee O’Hara and Regina de Vera, along with the gifted Cris Pasturan because the hapless elevator boy.
‘Kafatiran’
Imprisonment of a diverse sort, and era, knowledgeable Novenario’s audacious “Kafatiran,” about 4 Katipuneros around the eve from the Philippine Revolution wrestling with their shared secret—not the one about getting insurrectos, but the variety that dared not communicate its title.
In a dazzling feat of historical revisionism, Novenario ransacked the gay pop zeitgeist and seamlessly grafted some of its most recognizable totems and talismans to his time period milieu, in the end proposing nothing significantly less compared to origins of, say, gay patois (the Katipunan’s manifesto rendered in a newly invented language); the queer penchant for embellishment and ceremony (the secret codes and rituals, the Santacruzan as proto-beauty pageant); and, most resonantly, the fighters’ dash into battle as being the allegorical equal of coming out and coming to phrases with one’s self, in spite of the odds.
In its sheer impudence, attraction to plausibility and bravura staging (by director JK Anicoche), “Kafatiran” arrived closest to the Labfest’s spirit of refreshing, thought-provoking, taboo-breaking theater. Anicoche’s smartest move was to eschew camp, the default tack in substance similar to this, to get a rigorously un-ironic, ultimately a lot more stirring,
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‘Evening with the Opera’
Meanwhile, Quintos’ “Evening with the Opera,” directed by Jomari José, revisited well-worn territory—the globe of warlord politicians and their dutiful wives, in this particular scenario, the shrewd, sophisticated Miranda (Ana Abad Santos) and her want to carry opera to the kapitolyo in her province, “Fitzcarraldo”-like.
Between the everyday thuggery of her governor-husband (Jonathan Tadioan) and the badgering of her long-dead mom (Frances Makil-Ignacio), present in her consciousness because the generational website link to a sordid family legacy of public privilege and non-public emotional appeasement, Miranda struggles to negotiate a sacred place for herself, to seek out a shred of beauty while in the gutter she’s in. (Why opera for their penurious city? rages her partner. “All that rage and detest and anger created lovely, each of the ugliness of human nature created bearable,” she says.)
While “Evening in the Opera” broke no new ground within the subject matter of politics and power, being a character research of an or else capable female who has contorted herself into a grotesque lifestyle of complicitness and compromise, it absolutely was riveting and really nearly devastating. Abad Santos, Makil-Ignacio and Tadioan practically seared the stage with their intensity (in Makil-Ignacio’s circumstance, impeccable comic timing). As well as the smile on Makil-Ignacio’s experience after her daughter repudiates her with a slap simply competent since the creepiest scene within the Labfest.
‘Streetlight Manifesto’
The scarce pleasures and grating perils of cramped circumstances also coursed via two other strong entries, Mixkaela Villalon’s “Streetlight Manifesto,” and Rachelle Rodriguez and Wennielyn Fajilan’s “Kinaumagahan.”
In the previous,
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Engagement Rings Tiffany, an easygoing hit-man using a liking for Hawaiian shirts, who promptly tries to nudge her back again into spot. “Hindi ka superhero, uy! Ni hindi ka nga hero. Ikaw ang kabaliktaran ng hero, ang hinahabol at hinuhuli ng mga hero para sila maging hero!”
“Streetlight Manifesto” showcased a totally believable turn by Vergara as being the party girl-attired assassin Gillian (Paolo O’Hara and Ness Roque completed the cast). Directed with flair by Ed Lacson Jr., it hummed using a hip, mordant sensibility—quite a uncommon voice from a debuting playwright. Its amoral playfulness, exploding now and after that into savage violence, could only be named Tarantinoesque—not original by any likelihood, but bracing nevertheless when transposed to neighborhood way of life.
‘Kinaumagahan’
Rodriguez and Fajilan’s “Kinaumagahan” supplied less exotic characters as protagonists: a younger few hoping to produce ends meet, and their relationship work, even as their respective careers keep them primarily apart. He's a contact middle agent who operates during the night, she a nurse on duty inside the mornings. In that little sliver of togetherness at sunrise just prior to she’s off to perform and he to mattress, they bicker and make love (or attempt to—fatigue’s a bummer), seesawing in between the previous vestiges of their immaturity and also the grown-up disposition now essential by their conditions.
This slice-of-life setup reads verily like a cliché, however the resulting play directed by Riki Benedicto was, actually, buoyant and heartfelt. The 2 sales opportunities, Noel Escondo and Via Antonio, reached an desirable chemistry, and their layered interaction conveyed the two the burdens of their characters also as being the deliverance the couple has staked a declare to down the road.
‘The Valley Mission Care’
The Labfest’s most poignant overall performance, nevertheless, belonged to Siegfried Sepulveda in Russell Legaspi’s “The Valley Mission Care.” A lonely widower living in a US nursing residence, hungry for stories from your just lately arrived Filipino nurse (Mayen Estañero) assigned to him, Sepulveda’s cranky, frail-looking geezer convinces the nurse, towards her far better judgment, to help him depart the nursing property a single night for an unexplained rendezvous he is adamant to fulfill on the desolate California seashore at sunrise.
Missy Maramara’s staging of this plainspoken materials was unwieldy, with fitful blackouts and awkward scene and set transitions. But the previous minutes in the play—when the widower eventually reveals, in a wordless gesture, why he has risked coming to this remote spot on this chilly morning—was profoundly transferring. In that elegiac minute, the old man’s earlier admonitions for the nurse rang truest. “Why would you like to go away?” she protests. “The Valley gives you everything!” “You really do not require everything!” he bellows back again.
‘Isang Gabi Bago Magbukas ang “Portrait of an Artist as Filipino” ni Nick Joaquin’
All these preceding performs, incidentally,
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The production had the greatest forged while in the Labfest—15 actors—and so director Paul Santiago’s most simple achievement was, as it have been, to possess whipped this straggly mass into a divertingly parodic if decidedly shallow whodunit-cum-valentine to the theater-making of outdated, with standout comic touches from Paolo Rodriguez and Che Ramos.
Garcia borrowed a signature Agatha Christie trope—all the various personages conspiring in on a murder that may now haunt them, like a storm and an unseen vengeful killer help to entice them inside of a rundown theater whilst they rehearse to the opening of Joaquin’s landmark play—but the dialogue is winkingly smart-alecky. “You indicate you’re undertaking this because you have mommy and daddy concerns?” demands one particular if the murderer is exposed. “Why don’t you are attempting acting?”
Too poor the play stayed mostly on that levels, declining to mine the rich opportunities and implications with the pedigree to which it had connected alone.
Three a lot more productions produced their respective riffs about the idea of transferring on and closure—or the absence of it: Juan Ekis’ “Requiem”; Patrick Valera’s “Mga Lobo Tulad Ng Buwan”; and Joey Paras’ “Bawal Tumawid, Nakamamatay.”
In every single circumstance, the perform was directed by the playwright himself. And in every case,
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Coincidence, or even a telling pattern? Curiously, CCP Carrying out Arts division head Chris Millado, though not exclusively addressing these performs, had this to say in a pre-Labfest job interview: “Next yr, we will advise that playwrights not direct their own performs. Determined by my individual knowledge, it would be far better if you entrust your operate to another innovative brain. It enhances the perform. Theater is really a collaborative procedure. The writing procedure continues within the theater.”
‘Requiem’
Take Ekis’ “Requiem,” which floundered on some basic weaknesses that one more, much more goal pair of eyes may well have served heal. The text wasn't only relitigating a hackneyed topic—incest, and how it renders its victims deeply dysfunctional, not able to escape the past—but furthermore, it telegraphed its theme, even the play’s dramatic framework, too broadly in the dialogue.
“Can I sleep right here?” the playwright sister repeatedly asks her painter brother. Afterwards, she says,
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There had been also a lot of of them, however, dissipating as an alternative to amplifying any sense of pressure in the play. Including for the tedium,
Pandora Bracelets, the two leads (Joel Parcon and Frankie Pascua) ended up uninvolving, evidently regardless of their finest efforts, and Ekis’ own route was wan, unimaginative.
‘Bawal Tumawid, Nakamamatay’
If “Requiem” suffered from the circumstance of dullness, Paras’ “Bawal Tumawid, Nakamamatay” had an overdose from the reverse. A rambling, overheated mass of fuzzy scenes and characters whose glib, punchline-drunk back-and-forth would not have been from location within a comedy bar, this play was a virtual Television sitcom transplanted for the stage (a reality underscored by an true product plug for Planet Telecoms jammed into your dialogue.)
The nominal tale, about a girl (Kiki Baento) caught in targeted traffic even though on her method to her estranged father’s funeral, and an outdated gentleman using a tragic backstory with whom she bonds on that choked street corner, grew to become a slender excuse for Paras’ cluttered staging; the actors’ all-over-the-place mugging (gasp,
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‘Mga Lobo Tulad ng Buwan’
Finally, there’s Valera’s “Mga Lobo Tulad Ng Buwan,” an “elegy,” because the playwright named it, to the victims and survivors from the M/V Princess with the Stars, which sank a few decades ago off the coast of Romblon amid a storm and grew to become one of many worst sea disasters in modern memory.
Valera’s thought of honoring grief and making sure eternal remembrance was via a operate that bypassed accessible narrative, deploying rather mood, motion, visual allegory—the stark white stage blanketed with paper containing the names from the victims, as an illustration.
In this quasi-dream planet, 3 females (Mary Jane Alejo, Kate Sabate and Chic San Agustin) cling to lamentation and memory for that kin and pals they missing at sea. Their characters, to get blunt about it, registered much less as flesh-and-blood people roiled by real emotion, as constructs for that playwright’s high-toned reckoning of, and forced myth-making about, the catastrophe. (To rejoin the living and put their pain at the rear of, the females pay fealty to a “sirena ng karagatan.”)
Valera’s theatricality, his creativeness and willingness to defy convention are to become admired. But this bloodless, self-conscious physical exercise, its voice veering jarringly from your literal towards the poetic, evinced not 1 correct observe from its ocean of abstracted anguish.
Ironically, it subverted the really thesis of Valera’s operate, that, as a single character put it, “Ang alaala ng trahedya ay walang talinhaga para sa mga nawalan” (“The memory of tragedy holds no metaphor for that bereaved”—Valera himself in his director’s notes). At 40 minutes or so, “Mga Lobo Tulad Ng Buwan” was practically nothing if not a blown-up metaphor.
E-mail gcadiz@inquirer.com.ph, check out www.gibbscadiz.blogspot.com, follow on Twitter www.twitter.com/gibbscadiz
Tags: Chris Millado , Cris Pasturan , Ding Novenario , Floy Quintos , Jonathan Tadioan , Paolo O’ Hara , Rae Red , theatre , Virgin Labfest seven
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