Celebration: An Anthology to Commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the Silliman University National Writers Workshop Sands and Coral, 2011-2013
Silliman University, 2013
I cannot write a review of course because the play was something that I wrote. So I’ll write a brief appreciation instead. We’re allowed to do that, right? Here's an appreciation because I know The Midsummer of Manuel Anguilla is a difficult piece to stage, with its bonkers requirements for shadow play, archival news soundtrack, filmed elements, and dialogues in English that’s not exactly simple, reflecting the ornate inflections of an Arguilla prose — all set in a Japanese prison cell during the war.
Set in the last hours before the real-life writer was executed by the Japanese near the tail-end of World War II, it is also a meditation on war, on torture, on death, on love, and most of all on writing — basically an exploration on why writers write. [According to Renz Torres: “Mao ni ang mga hinanakit ni Ian sa pagsulat.”Hahaha.]
This play underwent so many revisions over the years, but I felt it was finally "finished" when I brought back the character of Lydia Arguilla, who was only in the beginning of the story in earlier versions, to round off the end, set in the post-war, Manuel now dead, with Lydia talking to Leon [obviously Leon of “How My Brother Leon Brought Home a Wife”] and explaining the overlooked meaning of the short story, “Midsummer,” with Ading beside her underlining everything.
I have always always loved “Midsummer” by Manuel Arguilla, which strikes most people as a short story about “nothing”: just a girl and a boy and a carabao meeting in the countryside of Nagrebcan. But to me, it is perhaps the most erotic story ever written by a Filipino writer in English, and Ading the most complex heroine who knows what she wants and gets what she wants.
I’ve taught this short story forever when I used to teach Philippine Literature in college. With K-12 now in place, I was no longer teaching the course. So I said, “Sayang naman,” and decided to transform my entire lesson plan into a play! So, yes, it’s very academic in places, and is quite difficult to stage. Which is why I want to thank Rodolfo Vera so much because he believed in it, and pushed for it to win the Palanca in 2023.
When Teatro Sillimaniana Dos came around, Dessa Quesada-Palm and I included it among ten potential plays our senior theater students could direct for the season, but I also told them it was fine if they didn’t choose it. Again I told them it was a difficult play!
But Merliel Natad Putong didn’t listen, probably felt she could rise to the challenge to direct it. She chose it, much to my surprise.
Tonight, we premiered her production, and I was honestly riveted by how Merliel interpreted it. She took the difficult technical parts and made them seamless and simple, while still staying true to the story.
Also, I had no hand in the casting process, so how did she know these were some of my favorite local actors she had cast? Last time I saw him act, Iniaki Montenegro played a drunken Southern woman with a thick Texas accent. As Manuel, he hopped on a roller coaster ride between essaying a man in excruciating pain and a man telling a story. The range! Chandra Pepino-Joshua as Lydia had so much gravitas, and her breakdown in the end made me cry. That voice! That conviction! She was awesome. Aaron Lee as Leon was the perfect glue to the narrative, the angry sounding board to Manuel’s fantastical tirades. He has acting nuances you have to see to believe. The looks he gives Manuel sometimes offer tangents I am quite willing to follow, given the chance. Then there's Lady Lorraine Elmido as Ading, who was my perfect spider woman weaving her web of desire. This was my fist time to see Simon Lim in a play, but I like that he embodied fully how I saw Manong: a handsome “maamo” country lad who absolutely knows nothing about what exactly is going on.
Every time I finish a story or a play, I usually forget how I plotted it. So watching this play become embodied and made real by such capable people, it was like watching and knowing the story for the first time, eager for what comes next; hence I thoroughly enjoyed it.
But you know what? I think I’m going to write a comedy next time.
It’s the first play I’ve written that I’ve seen staged, and I am grateful this did not become a “drawer play,” like so many other plays, even those that have won the Palanca before. So thank you to Merliel and the cast and crew for making this occasional playwright happy. Break a leg for your last show tomorrow, October 4!
For friends in Dumaguete reading this, please do watch the second staging of the double bill of this play and Rolin Migyuel Cadallo Obina’s The Late Mister Real tomorrow night. Tickets are only P200 for both plays. [“Cheaper than a movie!” matud pa ni Frances Hope Yap, who took this picture, by the way.] The show starts at 7 PM at Woodward Little Theater. Again, this is not a review but an appreciation. Support local theatre and literature!
[This piece is dedicated to that local writer who thinks I am full of myself, hahaha.]
CATCH THIS ONE OF A KIND THEATRE EVENT ON WEDNESDAY! In his first work as a come-backing theatre artist, Paul Palmore directs and presents a collaborative work with Dessa Quesada-Palm, Alex Cerra, Mayumi Maghuyop, Iniaki Montenegro, and Fionabelle Marie Cabe doing excerpts from James McLure's Laundry Room and Bourbon and Michael Cristofer's The Shadow Box, the JULY 9, Wednesday at 7 PM at the Woodward Little Theatre, Silliman University, Dumaguete City! FREE ADMISSION [but donations will be appreciated].
9:00 AM |
Incendiary Memories and Diasporic Reckonings
Who says that the body of work of Sillimanian writers are devoid of social issues and is centered only on fruitless formalistic pursuits? Consider the latest two plays in the ongoing Teatro Sillimaniana Festival—Elsa Martinez Coscolluela’s Original Grace, and Linda Faigao-Hall’s Lay of the Land. Both plays emerge from different geographies and aesthetic registers, but they converge on the urgent politics of memory, abuse, and displacement that shaped the Filipino experience in the late 1980s.
In revisiting these works in 2025, we encounter not merely theatrical relics of their time but searing reflections that speak with renewed urgency to contemporary audiences. Set in the wake of the Marcos dictatorship and during the volatile aftermath of the People Power Revolution, both plays interrogate personal and political trauma, the price of silence, and the possibilities of healing.
Coscolluela’s Original Grace, directed by Eazel Sevilleno, stages its battle for truth and justice within the cloistered confines of a convent, juxtaposing legal struggle with spiritual sanctuary. Beatriz Vera [Jade Mary J. Cornelia], a corporate lawyer haunted by a troubled past, is pulled into the case of Carmela Santos [Precious Aranas], a teenage rape survivor whose abuser, Leon Garay, is shielded by layers of patriarchal and familial complicity. The play’s domestic horror is disturbingly familiar: Carmela’s mother Dolores [a very moving CJ Cañete] left for work abroad, a tragic echo of the “OFW economy” that escalated during the Marcos years and exploded in the post-EDSA years as the state normalized the export of labor. The play’s setting—a convent—might at first appear to be a retreat from political terrain, but it instead serves as a charged crucible where class, power, religion, and justice collide. Beatriz’s professional façade begins to crumble as Carmela’s story dredges up her own repressed trauma.
In 1988, when the play first emerged, such portrayals of incest, rape, and female complicity were incendiary; women’s rights were still marginalized in public discourse, and speaking openly about abuse was a radical act. Original Grace dared to expose the fissures beneath the idealized image of the Filipino family—especially the fractured families left in the wake of diaspora and dictatorship. In 2025, its relevance endures: child sexual abuse remains a crisis, and the question of how the law and social institutions fail survivors is still pressing. What deepens the play’s significance today is the recognition of how trauma is inherited and how women—across generations—internalize both pain and guilt.
Coscolluela’s choice to embed the legal battle within the nuns’ convent isn’t merely symbolic; it underscores the complicity of religious institutions in both silence and healing. Characters like Mother Alma and Sister Mary and Sister Lily are not caricatures of piety but fully human agents wrestling with their own ethical limitations. There is no easy redemption here. The staging and performances, particularly by Jade Mary Cornelia as Beatriz and Precious Aranas as Carmela, highlight the emotional tectonics of trauma without collapsing into melodrama. What Original Grace offers is not grace as divine absolution, but grace as the painstaking process of facing the past, speaking truth, and reclaiming one’s agency.
In contrast, Lay of the Land, directed by Tess Gal, unfolds not in the Philippine homeland but in the fragmented diaspora of New York’s East Village—a milieu where identity is as much a matter of survival as it is of longing. Perlas [Liezyl Livestre], newly arrived from the Philippines, steps into a shared tenement space infused with both bohemian American decay and the unresolved specters of martial law. Set during the February 1986 People Power Revolution, the play juxtaposes the euphoria of collective political upheaval with the isolation of the immigrant experience. Perlas’s arrival coincides with the nation’s supposed rebirth, yet her personal displacement reveals how liberation at home can coincide with alienation abroad.
Faigao-Hall’s writing navigates this tension with sensitivity and complexity. Her ensemble cast of characters are not mere emblems of multiculturalism, but embodied critiques of power, history, and belonging. Joaquin [Christian Evangelista], a fellow Filipino immigrant and Perlas’ brother, becomes both foil and mirror to Perlas. He has adapted, assimilated, perhaps at the cost of remembering. Helene, Artie, Gustaf, and Kelly represent various facets of American life—idealism, cynicism, exploitation, and artifice—all of which Perlas must contend with in her search for meaning and footing.
Where Original Grace is intensely internal, Lay of the Land is spatial and relational. The physical space of the tenement becomes a metaphor for a dislocated homeland—shared, shifting, contested. The gallery housed within it reflects the tension between representation and erasure: what gets exhibited, what stories are told, and who gets to speak? The play’s engagement with art and memory echoes Faigao-Hall’s broader dramaturgical commitment to rendering myth and magic real. She subtly weaves Filipino folklore and history into the urban grime of Alphabet City, not through overt fantasy but through atmosphere, rhythm, and metaphor.
The decision to set the play during the climax of the Marcos regime’s fall is bold. In 1986, the revolution promised a rupture from tyranny and the reinstallation of democracy. But in Lay of the Land, that rupture is not clean. The overseas Filipino watches from afar, disconnected from the spectacle of history, burdened with familial expectations and survival in a foreign land. For Perlas and many others like her, People Power did not end suffering—it simply shifted its geography. In 2025, with the political resurrection of the Marcoses and the global backlash against democracy, the play now reads like both prophecy and elegy. The “land” in question is not merely the literal Philippines but the moral and political ground we all must navigate.
Both plays, then, do not merely recall the volatile politics of the late 1980s—they reanimate them. Original Grace dramatizes the internal war for justice and healing within a society riddled with patriarchal silence and institutional complicity. Lay of the Land maps the psychic toll of exile, exploring what it means to hold onto identity, memory, and hope when the homeland itself is shifting under your feet. Each play in its own way reflects a fracture in the Filipino soul—between silence and voice, home and exile, past and present.
In 2025, their meanings resonate anew. The Philippines continues to grapple with historical revisionism, with the return of autocratic figures, and with enduring gender-based violence and diaspora trauma. The brave testimony of Carmela in Original Grace reminds us of the urgent need to listen to survivors and challenge structures of abuse. The lost and searching gaze of Perlas in Lay of the Land calls us to rethink what it means to belong in an increasingly fragmented world.
Together, these plays demand not just witness but reckoning. They do not offer easy catharsis but instead insist on confronting the wounds we have inherited and the histories we choose to forget. In staging them now, we are not merely looking back—we are being asked to choose what kind of future we want to write.
Teatro Sillimaniana Festival is ongoing. Michael Aaron Gomez’s Tirador ng Tinago will premiere on May 3, Saturday, directed by Bret Ybañez. Lastly, Beryl Delicana’s Mango Tree will premiere on May 7, Wednesday, directed by Jorelyn Garcia.
What a way to open the first ever Teatro Sillimaniana Festival! In a showcase of award-winning plays by Silliman playwrights, as helmed by the senior directing class of the Speech and Theater Department of Silliman University’s College of Performing and Visual Arts, Francis Esguerra’s production of Jireh Catacutan’s Una’t Huling Gabi Sa Ramona Disco proved a scintillating beginning—equal parts laugh-out-loud comedy and dramatic exploration about identity and acceptance.
The play primarily follows the journey of Dino [Nico Angelo de Guzman Privado] in finding his birth father. One fateful night, Dino finds himself in an intimate encounter with Andy [Sydney L. Tan], and they soon discover that their lives are somehow intertwined. Dino soon reveals his search for his father, which leads him to an old gay bar in Pasay called Ramona Disco, ran by Nanay Che [Jecho Adrian G. Ponce] and Tita Princess [AJ Delostrico]—and where Dino finally learns the truth, and reconciles his search for identity entwined in the lives of the queer folk behind Ramona Disco.
As directed by Esguerra, the play becomes a powerful act of reclamation, reflection, and representation. This production, at its core, is a searing yet tender exploration of queer identity, familial estrangement, and the possibility of finding oneself in the most unexpected places. The play becomes a vivid tapestry of memory, longing, humor, and hope—all possible because of Esguerra’s commanding direction, and the deeply nuanced performances from its cast.
Like how he demonstrated it with his production of Elsa Coscolluela’s Blood Spoor only a few months ago, Esguerra shows us how his directorial hand is both assured and compassionate, weaving together the play’s deeply personal narrative with theatrical precision and soul. What makes his work truly remarkable is how he interprets Catacutan’s text not merely as a script to be staged, but as a lived truth to be felt. In his director’s notes, Esguerra shares how his journey from performer to director prepared him for the daunting task of bringing such an emotionally layered piece to life: “Now, I am given another opportunity to be the head of a production team… It is another chance to put into practice the theories I have studied, and the practical lessons I have experienced.”
This experience shines in the seamless transitions between the play’s heartfelt monologues, uproarious moments of humor, and poignant silences. Esguerra guides the production with a respect for both form and feeling. He allows the narrative’s emotional beats to breathe, while shaping its structure with clarity and elegance. More importantly, Esguerra ensures that the play’s central themes of self-discovery and radical acceptance resonate with power: “Accepting people as they are can also lead us to accept ourselves and eventually revel at who we really are.” Under his direction, the space of Ramona Disco transforms into more than just a setting—it becomes a sanctuary for broken dreams, awkward truths, and found family. It becomes sacred.
In the role of Dino, Privado delivers a performance that is heartbreakingly authentic. As a masculine-presenting queer man grappling with internalized homophobia, Dino’s journey is rife with contradiction, and his aching confusion of someone desperately searching for his origins while fearing what he might find feels true. Privado portrays these layers with meticulous care—his silences are heavy with things unsaid, his bursts of vulnerability arrive like revelations. [His coño English also makes him endearing.] Privado’s performance peaks in the emotionally grueling Act III, an act steeped in spiritual crisis, where he channels a rawness that becomes almost painful to watch—and yet impossible to look away.
Tan’s portrayal of Andy/Andrea is nothing short of magnetic. With a character that shifts between comic confidence and quiet despair, Tan dances between these emotional states with finesse. Andy is bold, flirty, and fiercely proud—but beneath the surface lies someone who is still navigating the oppressive terrain of “Masc4Masc” culture. “He still sees the need to act masculine to be accepted,” Catacutan revealed—and Tan captures this duality with uncanny skill. What makes Tan’s performance stand out is the generosity he brings to the role. He gives space to every emotion—whether it’s the flirtatious banter with Dino, the devastating recount of childhood trauma, or the climactic spiritual reckoning. Tan’s Andy is never a caricature; he is fully human—beautifully flawed, richly layered, and utterly unforgettable.
As Nanay Che, Ponce offers one of the most soul-nourishing performances of the evening. In the tradition of queer storytelling, the “found mother” is a revered archetype—and Ponce embraces this role with grace and gravitas. Nanay Che isn’t just a character; she is the embodiment of acceptance, strength, and quiet resilience. With every scene she’s in, Ponce’s presence commands attention—both with volume and pratfalls, and also with depth. His delivery is sometimes gentle and sometimes boisterous, but always firm, playful but always wise. Ponce embodies the maternal force that many queer youth long for, offering Andy [and later Dino] the safety and affirmation they have been denied elsewhere. Ponce’s performance is a living tribute to the Golden Gays that inspired the play—a celebration of aging queens who never stopped nurturing.
If Nanay Che is the soul of Ramona Disco, then Tita Princess—brought to life by the vibrant AJ Delostrico—is its beating heart. Delostrico delivers a performance that is both intimate and larger-than-life. She is flamboyant and fabulous, but never one-note. Underneath the loud laughter and theatrical flourishes is a trans woman who has endured, and who continues to give despite everything she has lost. Her chemistry with the entire cast is electric, and her scenes with Ponce’s Nanay Che are particularly moving—two queens holding a kingdom together with eyeliner, sass, and unconditional love.
Una’t Huling Gabi sa Ramona Disco is a play that does more than tell a story—it invites its audience to remember, to grieve, to laugh, and to heal. Catacutan wrote it “to speak about the things [he] found odd or problematic in gay culture,” but he also wrote it as a love letter—to queer youth, to found families, to those who are still searching. And under Esguerra’s visionary direction, that love letter is delivered with both fire and finesse. The cast responded with performances that will be remembered for their honesty, vulnerability, and sheer theatrical brilliance.
I like that we are, at curtain fall, left not just with the story of Dino and Andy, but with a renewed sense of empathy and understanding. The play reminds us, as Esguerra so eloquently put it, that “their story is also our story of discovery, acceptance, love and celebration of the life that we are gifted with.” What a beautiful gift this production truly is.
INTERVIEW WITH JIREH CATACUTAN:
How did you come up with the story?
After writing my first one-act play, Pasilong sa Payag, for my Playwriting Workshop class at Silliman, I took in all the criticisms and thought that if I ever have to write another play, it had to be something that was really close to my heart. The play was also the last creative work I wrote before graduating from Silliman, so I wanted it to be special. I was thinking about what I wanted to see. What little queer boy Jireh wanted to see on stage.
For four years, I sort of felt like the token gay kid in class so I decided to lean into it. I am a writer who has the power to tell the experiences of queer men. And in 2023, the story about the Golden Gays was featured in the New York Times and gained traction, I would admit that I wasn’t really aware of their existence, but it inspired me to write about the Filipino queer experience through characters that come from and represent different generations.
What was your intention in writing this play?
In a way, the play was also an avenue for me to speak about the things I found odd, or for the lack of better term, “problematic” in gay culture. Say for example, with Dino, he represents the “masc” presenting queer men who struggles with internalized homophobia. I have encountered gay men who tend to avoid the flamboyant type of gays because they see femininity as “nakakahiya” or a sign of weakness. This is then countered by the character of Andy/Andrea that is open about his sexuality but also struggles with the “Masc4Masc culture” where he still sees the need to act masculine to be accepted or to hook up with other queer men. I also wanted to highlight other themes such as the domestic abuse young gay men go through, spirituality, and even the idea that gay men have to give away something [in this case, Gatorade and monay] just to feel loved.
I also wanted to express the idea of found family through the characters of Nanay Che and Princess who have taken the role of nurturing mothers to young gay kids who are seeking a home where they could freely be themselves.
Growing up, I always saw gay characters portrayed as comedic relief. Pushed aside to be the funny best friend or the person who dies of sickness at the end of the movie. With that in mind, I felt it was time to bring these characters to the forefront and take control of their own narrative.
What was it like to write the play?
It was crazy but at the same time, it was the most fun I had. I think all the scenes just fell into place because it was a story I was determined to tell. When I was a senior, I commuted back and forth so when I’m on the bus, a joke would pop into my head and I would immediately write them down on my phone.
In the first two drafts, the third act didn’t exist at all. [The play has four acts.] Its addition was needed since the last act felt too abrupt—Dino was being forgiven too quickly. Writing the third act was the hardest for me. I vividly remember writing at one in the morning, sobbing as I typed about the spiritual turmoil that bothered Dino and Andy. I think it was because I went through it when I was younger. There was a time where I prayed so hard to the point of crying, begging Him to make me straight. I guess Act 3 was just the part where I sort of inserted my own struggles as a queer man too.
But overall, Una’t Huling Gabi sa Ramona Disco was the story I had the most fun writing. And when it was finally staged, I was just glad that people laughed at the jokes I wrote on the bus. And as the lights dimmed after every act, hearing the audience sniffle and blow their noses meant that they were able to empathize with the characters I’ve written. Hearing the audience laugh and cry was the ultimate pay off, and I just hope that they left the little theatre inspired by the bravery and resilience of Dino, Andy, Tita Princess, and Nanay Che.
Teatro Sillimaniana Festival is ongoing. Elsa Martinez Coscolluela’s Original Grace will premiere on April 26, Saturday, directed by Eazel Sevilleno. Linda Faigao-Hall’s Lay of the Land will premiere on April 30, Wednesday, directed by Tess Gal. Michael Aaron Gomez’s Tirador ng Tinago will premiere on May 3, Saturday, directed by Bret Ybañez. Lastly, Beryl Delicana’s Mango Tree will premiere on May 7, Wednesday, directed by Jorelyn Garcia.
It is understandable why the color red suffuses much of the atmosphere—and the metaphors—of Pulang Langob, the restaging of the two-act musical play in Binisaya written by Hope Tinambacan and directed by Dessa Quesada-Palm for the 62nd cultural season of the Silliman University Culture and Arts Council. A blood red moon—projected on the Claire Isabel McGill Luce Auditorium stage—is a steady motif in the play’s unfolding, and crimson is the shade with which the play’s lighting design chooses to bathe many of its scenes. Then there’s the title itself, which is “Red Cave” in translation. Red is everywhere.
I get it. Red is such a rich metaphor, since it is on one hand, the color of foreboding and danger—of betrayals, of incursions, and of one specific sense of “blood,” which is deadly. On the other hand, red is also the color of life, of pulsating love, and, once again, of blood, but in another specific sense, which is familial kinship. It doesn’t matter. All of these somehow come into play in this story about a teenager’s quest for identity and purpose, set in a mystical place called Isla Tawak.
The island is populated by various creatures gleaned from Philippine lower mythology, including the kaskas, the sigbin, the kapre, the tikbalang, the duende, the mambabarang, and the manananggal. [Collectively, they are known as “wakwaks.”] It is the setting with which a young man named Lukas [alternately played by Dasig Nalam and Cristopher Anasario, the latter of whom essayed the role on opening night] must come to face his destiny, with a two-fold purpose that begins his journey: first, to escape the clutches of heinous men who apparently want him for a genetic gift he is largely ignorant of; and second, to find his long-lost mother, a denizen of Isla Tawak named Kasing [played by the luminous Anna del Prado], who might be hiding in the island. That purpose, of course, ultimately changes when Lukas comes to know the island and its people—and the dangers they face involving the encroachment of human beings, settlers who hail from another island called Owat. [Hahaha, this is a clever pun. “Owat” means “trickery” in Binisaya, of course—but reverse the word, and the letters say, “tawo,” the word for “human.” Ikaw jud, Hope.]
Lukas arrives in Tawak in the company of his father Jong [played by Mark Peter Lacson], who acts as his guide, and as his conduit to both the island’s native creatures and encroachers—both camps to which Jong, a human, has strong ties with. Upon his arrival and his subsequent meeting with the wakwaks, Lukas spends all of the first act being privy to a series of flashbacks—how the island itself is abundant with natural resources [all of it somehow connected to the santilmo, a rich and mystical source of power hidden and protected in the titular place]; how human beings—led by researchers Jong, Belma, and Magal—came to the island to find a cure for a plague that’s ravaging humanity; how these researchers later on paved the way for other human beings to settle in the island, ultimately convincing some of the wakwak to embrace their ways and values, forsaking their own [Junsly Kitay’s Mamumulong is especially heinous as a Bible-bearing con man]; how Jong and Kasing fell in love—a pairing that eventually came to bear Lukas; and how the suddenly villainous Belma and Magal seek ways to control the island by looking for the Santilmo, which is protected by Kasing, the only one who holds the secret in opening the red cave.
Truth to tell, the story can be a bit convoluted—but it’s somehow easier to understand Pulang Langob as an amalgam of other stories: there’s definitely Avatar and FernGully: The Last Rainforest and Pocahontas in the mix here, with a little bit of The Lion King thrown in, and also a smidgen of Avatar: The Last Airbender, especially in how it ends—but I will not spoil that crucial development in this space. Stories about pillaging colonizers and the native communities they affect are old as history, and there is really no getting away from the usual arcs of this narrative if this is the story that has to be told. They are like the oral epics of pre-history, whose stories sung by succeeding generations of bards are familiar to every listener—but each one appreciated only by one measure: the richness and uniqueness of the telling.
In that regard then, Pulang Langob is a winner in the telling. Ms. Quesada-Palm, the founder of Dumaguete’s foremost community theatre group Youth Advocates Through Theatre Arts [or YATTA], knows why she wants to tell this story: “[The play] explores mythical creatures—often culturally regarded as evil and as troublemakers—and portray them as indigenous guardians of this reservoir of life confronted with difficult choices as they interact with ‘outsiders,’ the humans. They bear local wisdom that has sustained them for generations because of their ethics of care for each other and the natural world. But their values are tested because of contesting ideas, interests, and possibility.” This goes to show the many layers Pulang Langob offers as a story, and it is quite providential that Ms. Quesada-Palm is the one to take the lead in realizing it for the Luce stage. She is very much a sensitive helmer of this story, and she gives it the necessary textures to make the play more meaningful, and impactful in all the necessary places. Judging from the audience reaction on opening night to specific scenes and to specific dialogues, that impact is assured. [She also appears in a brief role at the play’s prologue.]
But singular props—all the flowers in the world!—must be accorded the teller of the tale, both as composer and as librettist. Everyone knows Hope Tinambacan as a musician, him being the lead singer of HOPIA and the founder of the Belltower Project. He is also known for his zany TikToks and social media presence, where he nurtures a persistent—and politically discerning—liberal voice that is, for the most part, unafraid. His work as a literary artist [he writes balak] and as a theatre artist [he is a director and an actor and a playwright and the founder of D’Salag Collective] are not as well known, but this is where I actually find him to be in his most well-rounded artistic mode, where he takes the rhythms of his musicality and the convictions of his social media postings and the expressive forms of his literary leanings, and distills them all in the form of a play. He has done as much for earlier plays he has written, like Wanted: Boarders and Alkansing Alkansiya, but in Pulang Langob he has taken greater artistic risks to tell this story about destiny and purpose and environmentalism and folk mythology and inhumanity and greed.
It took Mr. Tinambacan fifteen years to write this story, which was first drafted under the working title of Isla Tawak. The painstaking writing of it was guided through the years by many mentors, including Neomi Gonzales and Jeff Hernandez in the beginning, and later shaped by extensive workshops at PETA with Vince De Jesus, Upeng Galang Fernandez, the late Jojo Atienza, and Meann Espinosa. It finally made its premiere last year at the Luce, and by popular demand, is now back for a restaging, complete with new songs, all of them arranged by his brother, Juni Jay Tinambacan.
What also makes this production special is the way it connects various theatre artists from across the Visayas and Mindanao, truly making Pulang Langob a veritable Southern Philippine theatrical project. The choreography is by Nikki Cimafranca of Dumaguete; the set design is by Ted Nudgent Tac-an of Ozamiz City, executed by Aziza Daksla; the lighting design is by Anj Enriquez of Iloilo, executed by Keith Marvin Delgado; and the costume design is by Marvin Ablao of Bohol, executed by the cast. The excellence in the various crafts has to be noted, because—the play being the product of community theatre—it is the embodiment of YATTA’s testament: “Community theatre is excellent theatre.”
Still there are things I wish were better in this production: I wish the sound design was better executed—sometimes the mics fail, and the actors’ voices are not loud enough to be served well by the Luce’s otherwise excellent acoustics; I wish the set design—here made very impressive by the central presence of a gigantic balete tree that is also a cave—was movable enough to make way for other visual elements required by specific scenes [like the awkward insertion of a sala scene, when Belma confronts Jong and asks him to take a side]; and I wish there was more economy of characters—Vanessa Santuryo as Cousin Hannah is gone too soon and never returns for the remainder of the play, and I seriously do not get where Mateo comes from, even though he is played by one of my favorite young actors, Sean Montebon. This is nitpicking, however, and does not really distract from the beauty of the play’s unfolding.
One strength that Pulang Langob has is in its ability to evoke emotion. There are moments of laughter, where the audience finds joy in the characters’ playful banter, and moments of palpable tension, where the weight of impending conflict hangs heavy in the air. But perhaps most striking are the moments of collective silence, where the shared experience of the narrative creates a bond between the performers and the audience, a testament to the play’s profound impact.
In the end, I must say that it is the songs that reverberate. The ballads truly break our hearts, from Jong’s plaintive “Liwat Ka sa Imong Mama” from the beginning of the story, to the three duets in the second act: “Ang Kasingkasing Mobalik” with Jong and Kasing, “Nahadlok Ko” with Tang Tasoy and Lukas, and “Sa Damgo Mo” with Kasing and Lukas, which also becomes the play’s musical motif, appearing here and there to underline the emotional gravity of certain scenes.
Then there is the scary undercurrents of Act II’s opening crowd song, “Adlwang Domingo,” which gathers in one space both wakwak and tawo, the latter incisive in their corruption of the former. And finally there is the martial beats of the two villains—Belma and Magal—singing “Bahala Na!,” which is the very embodiment of greed and evil in a song.
In the end, when Lukas realizes what he must do in light of a certain sacrifice, he sings “Lisod Huna-hunaon, Sayon Sabton,” a beautiful song that is both about bewilderment and understanding:
Lisod hunahunaon, apan sayon sabton
Unsa ang buhaton?
Ako bang matuman gibiling katungdanan
Sayon sabton, apan lisod hunahunaon
Unta naa ka sa akong kiliran
Unta naa ka aron ako magiyahan
Lisod hunahaon… apan sayon sabton.
Pulang Langob is the second musical spectacular produced by YATTA, following the success of Scharon Mani, which took Dumaguete by storm in 2016. Both musicals are astounding testaments of YATTA’s growth, with this year being the celebration of the 20th anniversary of its founding. Both are also testaments to Dumaguete’s nascent claim as a City of Stories. The plays say, we are capable of excellent theatre; they say, we have a community of artists whose talents are worldclass; they say, we celebrate this rich tradition of storytelling we have in Dumaguete. Padayon.
I just finished editing and preparing a packet of full-length plays by Silliman writers [most of them Palanca winners] for Dessa Quesada-Palm’s directing class next semester. Was happy to note that three of them are comedies, and one — Lemuel Torrevillas’ Enter Edison, or What’s the Name of the Guy Who Invented Something — is an absolute farce of the first order. I also loved the pre-colonial shenanigans of Leoncio Deriada’s Maragtas: How Kapinangan Tricked Sumakwel Twice, the Basay-set agrarian reform family melodrama in Bobby Flores Villasis’ Eidolon, the rape legal melodrama of Elsie Coscolluela’s Original Grace, and the forbidden love sarswela of Rolin Migyuel Cadallo Obina’s San Nicolas. [There is another musical in the mix: Lakas ng Mahirap by Rosario Cruz Lucero.] Three are by former students of mine: Mike Gomez’s Tirador ng Tinago, Beryl Andrea Delicana’s Mango Tree, and Jireh Catacutan’s Una't Huling Gabi sa Ramona Disco. I have nine in all so far, and waiting to source out three more [one by Edilberto Tiempo, one by Linda Faigao-Hall, and one by Krip Yuson]. This really should be an anthology.
9:00 AM |
A Second Homecoming for Elsa Martinez Coscolluela
She is one of the best writers I know—although when you mention that to her, Elsa Victoria Martinez Coscolluela would demur. Once I remember her referring to her brother, the late David Martinez, as the better writer in the family. Granted, he was also a Palanca winner—he did the astonishing double whammy in 1997 by winning the Palanca first prizes for both the short story and poetry. But I think Ma’am Elsie is in a class of her own, and I will always be her grateful reader.
Admittedly, I first knew about her from two things. First, in high school, I came upon her short story “After This, Our Exile,” which won third prize at the 1972 Palanca Awards. I did not exactly know the import of her name yet, but I remember being blown away by the story’s instinctive feel for hacienda life in Negros, able to look beyond the gloss and see the rot behind the glitter of sugar. Second, when I knew more about her upon entering college at Silliman University, I learned that she was in fact crowned Miss Silliman in 1964—and I was quite astonished to realize one can actually be a great writer and also be a campus beauty queen. [Alas, when you’re younger, you tend to pigeonhole people into specifics. I later learned beauty queen writers were actually not uncommon. The equally great Dumaguete writer Rowena Tiempo Torrevillas was crowned Miss Negros Oriental in 1970. There’s also Jacqueline Veloso-Antonio who was Miss Dumaguete in 1985 and Miss Negros Oriental in 1987—and while she would not really call herself a writer, she is in fact a fascinating essayist, usually writing about local culture and heritage.]
Ma’am Elsie is still a beauty after all these years, and I have always taken to her as a kind of long-distance mentor. We chat often on Messenger, and the last time I was in Bacolod early this year, she went out of her way to take me out to dinner. I find this personal relationship with her very humbling. It is an honor to be friends with one of Silliman’s greatest writers.
The thing about Ma’am Elsie is that she is prolific. She writes poetry. She writes essays. She writes short stories. And she writes plays of various kinds—theatrical ones, of course, but also ones written for television and film. In the late 1960s until the 1980s, she was so prolific in her literary output that eventually she was elevated to the Palanca Hall of Fame in 1996—for the feat of having won five first prizes. Which is not something very easy to do. [For the record, she has won a total of 24 Palanca Awards.]
I love her plays. Her subject is so varied, but she returns often to the Negros of her childhood—which is in Dumaguete; and her adulthood—which is in Bacolod. That she is considered one of the foremost writers of both Negrense capitals means she has the pulse of Negros in her writings. And thus she is able to write truthfully about the place, and about us.
The thing about her plays, however, is that they’re seldom performed, if ever, even if they have won awards. The recurring joke about winning the Palanca for the play is that, after the awards ceremony, these plays find home not on the stage but in the drawer. But not for lack of trying by these playwrights; who wouldn’t want to have their plays staged? The simple reason is this: theatrical productions of local plays are very rare—unless you’re Nick Joaquin, Rene O. Villanueva, Nicolas Pichay, Floy Quintos, or Rody Vera, or, of late, Vincent de Jesus, Carlo Vergara, Dustin Celestino, Joshua Lim So, Guelan Varela-Luarca, or Eljay Castro Deldoc. You will notice a preponderance of Manila writers. The seeming exception seems to be Glenn Sevilla Mas from Iloilo, but he does work and live in Manila. Even in regional theater, play selections tend to favor Manila writers. How many times have we seen Marcelo Agana Jr.’s New Yorker in Tondo in Dumaguete? Or F. Sionil Jose’s Progress in Cebu? Too many times. They’re classics, of course—but their constant rotation in terms of local production seems to come at the expense of local writers.
One of Ma’am Elsie’s most famous plays is In My Father’s House, which won the Palanca in 1980. This is a Dumaguete play, based on the lives of her father and uncle who lived through World War II in Dumaguete, and who suffered tragically during the Japanese Occupation of the Oriental Negrense town. [Dumaguete would only become a city in 1948.] After the play won the Palanca, it was performed everywhere—at the Cultural Center of the Philippines in Manila and at the University of the Philippines-Diliman in Quezon City; in Singapore; in L.A.; even in Tokyo. But it was never staged in Dumaguete. Here it was, a quintessential Dumaguete play, but never performed in Dumaguete itself.
That is until 2013, when the Silliman University Culture and Arts Council took the chance of bringing it back home, under the direction of Amiel Leonardia. I was part of that cast at the Luce Auditorium, and we were honored to be part of that history in the making.
And that’s the thing. There are so many playwrights from Silliman and/or Negros Oriental. We have Ricaredo Demetillo, Bobby Flores Villasis, Linda Faigao-Hall, Rosario Cruz Lucero, Roberto Ponteñila Jr., Lemuel Torrevillas, Alfred Yuson, Leoncio Deriada, Edilberto K. Tiempo, Luna Griño-Inocian, Dessa Quesada-Palm, Rolin Migyel Obina, and many others. Ang among the younger set, we have Beryl Andrea Delicana, Earnest Hope Tinambacan, Karla Longjas, Junsly Kitay, Michael Aaron Gomez, Benjie Kitay, and Jireh Catacutan. Their plays keep winning plaudits everywhere—but they remain unstaged.
Which is why last year, Dessa and I took the initiative to start staging Palanca-winning plays by local writers, to be directed by our student directors at the Speech and Theater Department of Silliman University as part of their senior thesis productions. We thought this would give their works a chance to come alive. We started with the Palanca-winning one-act plays by Bobby Flores Villasis last year. This year, we have continued this project with the Palanca-winning one-act plays by Elsa Martinez Coscolluela. Staging In My Father’s House in 2013 was her homecoming to Dumaguete; this play festival should serve as the second one.
Last November 28, we finally raised the curtain on the first playdate of the Elsa Martinez Coscolluela Play Festival at the Woodward Blackbox Theatre at Silliman University. We knew the endeavor is partly to honor our beloved Dumaguete [and Bacolod] playwright, but we also were aware that the project is still essentially a laboratory for Silliman’s theatre students. We were going to watch student-directed plays, not professionally staged ones—and for that, we knew it will mostly be a hit or miss affair depending on the strengths of the student director involved. [You take these things with a grain of salt, always hoping for the best.]
Which is really to say: I was awed by what I saw of the Set A plays that night—with Bret Bonnie Ybañez directing Japayukisan, the opening play, and Francis Esguerra directing Blood Spoor, the final play for opening night.
Mr. Ybañez took the melodrama of a young woman arriving home from abroad to attend her father’s funeral and keeping fiercely the secret that she works as a Japayuki [or nightclub entertainer] in Japan, and staged the play with surprising restraint and subtlety. [Even with a delicious catfight involved!] Even with a forlorn scene of having closure with an old boyfriend! [This scene actually made me tear up.]
What made the production work was that Mr. Ybañez knew how to get to the interiority of the story; he also knew that good casting for our protagonist would be enough to telegraph the emotional core of the story. Mass Communication student Joriz Angel Palermo as Mayang the Japayuki truly gets to the heart of her character so well: we commiserated with her when she grappled with her secret; we ached for her when she confronted her sister and mother about having to support her family while her siblings got the privilege of going to school on her dime while she stripped away her dignity in a mob-controlled bar in Japan; and we rooted for her when she was tearing the hair out of a nosy “family friend.” When she is later confronted by her ex-boyfriend to get to the heart of their breakup, we finally comprehend where she is coming from and the extent to which she has arrived at a hard-earned worldly wisdom: “We don’t always get what we want. Plans miscarry, feelings change, dreams die—.” Heady stuff, and yet I like that at the end of it, the two characters choose to be kind to each other, to say goodbye in tacit understanding of their parting. Powerful stuff.
Mr. Esguerra, on the other hand, has the luckier hand in directing a material that invites the epic and the atmospheric. But he also shows that he knows what exactly to do with every beat of the story: he begins the play with bird sound in complete darkness, then with the actors coming in from the direction of the audience, screaming incoherent pain in that darkness—until suddenly, a shaft of stage light shows us a woman on centerstage cradling a dying, bloodied girl. Then we get a sense of the other characters in the melee, all looking bloody, and then we understand that this is a community of Mindanao lumad, their homes having been randomly attacked by the military. There is much wailing, and recrimination, and later on, some quiet moments when the characters ponder their fate with each other. And then all of that gets embraced with some uncanny use of supernatural elements—fog and chanting and blinking lights do the trick—which are somehow tied up with the age-old beliefs and rituals of the hurting tribe. It is a very serious play, but it works. It is also very bloody and deadly, although all the violence occurs off-stage. I quite liked it. I admired how Esguerra knew how to pace the material, how to block, how to use music effectively, and how to detonate the drama with eerie silence. I like that he has a good sense of stage spectacle, which is rarely achieved by most student directors.
As of this publication, Set A [Japayukisan and Blood Spoor] would have finished their two-day run. You can still, however, catch Set B [First Fruits and Late Journey Home] on December 2 and 3, and Set C [The Captive Word] on December 6 and 7. The first two plays were more than the worth of the measly P200 ticket. If you are in Dumaguete, do yourself a favor and catch the remainder of the festival. This is truly a celebration of Dumaguete’s literary heritage.
This year, Dumaguete City is the official Philippine endorsee to become a UNESCO City of Literature in 2025, and it deserves that distinction truly. Doing this kind of theatre festival, of putting life to the literary works of our local literary artists, is very much a part of that effort.
Tonight, we celebrated Dessa Quesada-Palm's 60th birthday, in a lovely dinner and program with her friends of a lifetime at Essencia — and it was, to be honest, one of the most meaningful birthday celebrations I have ever come to witness. By the end of it, I was teary-eyed [and I never usually get teary-eyed at birthdays]. In occasions such as this, it's usual to have birthday greetings and speeches dedicated to the celebrator, but in the hands of a consummate theater artist like Dessa, each speech came at suitable intervals in a perfectly directed biographical narrative [with a good Powerpoint show to guide everyone]. And each speech was given by a perfectly handpicked friend or family representing an aspect or a major episode in Dessa's fruitful life — from her days as a member of the Quesada household [speech by sister Mae Quesada-Medina], from her life with PETA [speech by film director Avic Ilagan], from her days studying in New York [speech by composer Lerrick Santos], from early days in Dumaguete doing theatre workshops with the Divinity School [speech by Jean Cuanan-Nalam], from her almost two decades of mentoring YATTA [speech by Mellard Chiong Manogura], and from her love life [speech by her husband Colby Palm], interspersed with a monologue from Dessa's play Rape Buzz performed by Mayumi Maghuyop, improv comedy from the YATTA OGs Hope Tinambacan, Junsly Kitay, and Nikki Cimafranca, and music with the Quiz Family Singers, and the trio of Sharon Dadang-Rafols, Jean Nalam, and Dessa herself. At the end, she considered everyone in attendance and how each one has come to mean something significant in her life [it is at this point that I would finally break down and cry], and ended the evening with a song that she uses as her answer to the question: “What makes a meaningful life?”
Mother, you make 60 look fabulous. You have touched so many lives, and thank you for making Dumaguete your home, and the base of your theatrical gifts.
A few weeks ago, I flew in to Manila with some high school friends to watch the touring production of Hamilton, the smash Broadway hit from Lin Manuel Miranda that has galvanized American theatre since it debuted in early 2015 and won a slew of awards—among them the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Tony Award for Best Musical—in the process. Hamilton injected new energy to the Broadway stage, but above all, it also reconfigured our way of thinking about history—specifically, how our received narratives about who we are as a people and where we come from are often cast in stone [or on the graying, unimpeached pages of history books], but also how also in our retelling of these stories we can resort to imaginative reinvention [without necessarily rewriting history] to be able to speak to broader, more contemporary concerns. Coming off the show at Solaire, I had to think to myself: I guess that’s one way of making history that’s so far removed from us become alive. Miranda did it by casting the play in diverse colors, to make an on-the-nose point about the pallor of history made up mostly of white men; and making it sing in a contemporary voice, and in this case, having a musical about Alexander Hamilton, one of America’s founding fathers, be told to the tune of Broadway melodies infused heavily with hiphop.
The result will not always be to everyone’s liking. I have heard contemporaries of mine agonizing over the rapping, and I have seen white nationalists go up in arms over the “wokeness” of Hamilton’s intensions. I like Hamilton, but this is not my favorite musical—I’ve never taken to it like many of my friends have done, who I knew to have waxed rhapsodic over the original Broadway cast recording some years ago, many committing entire songs to heart and memory. [I guess, in the way I did for Les Miserables or Spring Awakening, or ehem, The Sound of Music or West Side Story when I was much younger.] But I like it. I know snatches of lyrics [“I am not throwin’ away my shot”], I have seen the film recording of the Broadway production on Disney Plus, I know many of its original stars and have followed their careers since then—but I went to Solaire knowing I was not exactly its audience [fine, let me admit it: I do not get hiphop, but my partner schools me about it constantly anyway—in fact, he wooed me using lyrics from Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy].
But when the curtain came down on the Solaire stage with that last spotlighted look on Eliza looking up and shouting in revelation, I was in tears: I liked that by the end—after a whirlwind of an epic retelling of the American Revolution and the subsequent hard work [and political manipulations] of nation-building—we get three confessions in two songs:
Hamilton, dying in slow motion after a duel, lamenting: “Legacy, what is a legacy? / It’s planting seeds in a garden you never get to see”; Aaron Burr, the man who killed Hamilton in that duel, prophesying: “History obliterates, in every picture it paints / It paints me and all my mistakes / When Alexander aimed at the sky / He may have been the first one to die / But I’m the one who paid for it / I survived, but I paid for it / Now I'm the villain in your history”; and Eliza, Hamilton’s widow, feeling the full weight of history on its great men: “It’s only a matter of time / Will they tell your story? / Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?” And the answer to her questions? “Time,” the song goes.
The power of stories and the privilege of narratives have always been things I think about constantly, even in my creative work: I have written lots of stories about the writing of stories, and I have written stories about reseeing history with new lenses, often to give voice to the muted. So that ending in Hamilton—more powerfully received live on stage than on a recording—really got to me. I teared up.
But this essay is not a review about Hamilton.
It’s about how, a few weeks later, after getting back to Dumaguete from that Manila trip, I come home to the news that the director of the touring production of Hamilton was going to be in Dumaguete to give a workshop on November 6! It felt like coming full circle for me as a new fan of the material, to actually be able to meet with the Australian director Dean Drieberg, in my hometown no less.
His workshop’s official title was “Theatre-Making Workshop and Technique Masterclasses for Theatre Performers and Practitioners,” and what participants—which included theatre artists not just from Dumaguete and Negros Oriental, but also from Cebu, Bohol, Negros Occidental, and Panay—got was an in-depth exploration of inclusive theater practices, and above all, making any material become relevant to the contemporary. That last one is particularly important, with Mr. Drieberg saying right from the get-go: “Theater has the ability to change the way we see the world. It normalizes the way we look at the community, and it is important that we see ourselves onstage.”
He began the workshop by demonstrating to participants how he exactly goes about directing his performers tackle the music they have to interpret for musicals. First up, we had Louise Remata Villanueva performing “With You” from the musical, Ghost—a lovely rendition from Wowie, and which Mr. Drieberg workshopped with a series of probing questions: Who is this song for as a character? What do you think your character has to gain by singing this song? What has just happened just before the first lyric was sang? What happened in the moment? (In other words, ask: “What am I doing?”) Why do you think your character sings this part? Why does this song exist? “Emotions [called for in the scene] are too high that you can’t speak about [them],” he reminded the participants, “[but at the same time] we need to sing about this.”
He asked Wowie to explore key changes, to investigate why certain choices are made, to see the moment of acceptance after the peak of release, to breath [and to reset], and even to speak of the song as if it was a monologue. “What word is mostly sustained?” he asked.
“[The word] you…,” Wowie replied.
“Underline that word, [that’s] who she misses.”
She sang the song one more time, differently this time. More felt. More real.
Next up, we had Jon Riam Quizo, singing “Being Alive” from Company. Mr. Drieberg asked him: Who is this song for? “Picture a mirror in front of you,” Mr. Drieberg said. “There’s just a mirror confronting the character. Don’t play the room too much.” He asked JR to delve into the “moment before”: “That feeling of being cornered, suffocated, ganged up on,” he said. And then, other questions: Who is this character and why are they singing this? Why is this a song, and why is this not just a written text? What is the character doing in the scene?
“Play the punctuation mark,” Mr. Drieberg reminded everyone. “Or is it a question mark? Is the comma a pause? Read the scores, because there are notes there you can’t see in lyrics alone.”
Later, he delved deeper into actors as theatre makers, and the challenges of staging stories for contemporary audiences.
“We can all create theatre, we can all put an idea together,” he said. “The type of theater that I really love, what I like to create, is about reimagined stories—taking an existing show and reimagining it for a contemporary audience.” For him, re-imagined stories tackle best social issues, even politics; re-imagination can make an old story still relevant today. Which was why he was eager to do production work for Hamilton—and he noted that the casting alone can really be powerful thing to wield, because presence on stage is a form of activism, a bold statement. “[Imagine seeing on stage] people of diverse cultures [become the] Founding Fathers.”
He cited that other Broadway shows have taken this tack, especially Six, which chronicles the stories of the wives of Henry XIII, set to contemporary music, remaking the historical into pop, recalling Beyonce and Adele.
He also cited recent productions of older shows, which are now being revived with a fresh outlook of adaptation. “Why must we restage them the same way many years ago?” he asked. “I like to watch revivals that are reimagined, and made more relevant. Like the 2019 Broadway revival of Oklahoma!”
Revivals are important, according to Drieberg—but the adaptation must answer three basic questions: Why this? Why now? What are the parallels happing to the world now?
With that in mind, he put the participants, divided into four groups, to task: to reimagine three old tales—Goldilocks and the Three Bears, The Pied Piper of Hamelin, and Hansel and Gretel—choosing just one, or several of these choices, and to work around the material(s) with respect to the culture, to people, and others. “What is integral to the storytelling without perpetuating stereotypes about culture and gender, and other such things?” Then he told them to put on a showcase of their adaptation with only an hour of conceptualization and execution and rehearsal.
All the groups turned in fantastic productions—some even with music and choreography—but the efforts of two groups are burned into my mind. One group called their piece, “Burn the Bodega,” and in it, they retold the Goldilocks story as the [often funny] story of a strike—eventually leading the characters to call for the titular act, and ending their strike with a grand conflagration, only to be provided with a twist: an innocent girl trapped in the flames. Which begged the question: what are the lines dividing social action and crime? In another quick production, one group presented “Influence”—a deeply disturbing story, following the conceit of the Pied Piper story and told mostly in mime, which follows a young woman trapped in COVID-19 quarantine. She finds a way to alleviate her boredom with social media, and soon she develops a growing presence on TikTok. She becomes so influential that when she dares her followers to do challenges, they do them without any question. And then one day, she dares them to go to high places, and jump. And they jump.
4:57 PM |
The Secret Lives of Oriental Negrenses as Drama
For the longest time, whenever I see senior directing students at Silliman University put on a play, I’d discover that the invariable title would always be a play from Manila, by Manila authors. And I’d go: “Manila na pud…”
Quite frankly, it irritated me, given how I vent about the Manila-centric nature of our culture.
It also regularly pained me because Dumaguete is supposed to be a City of Literature, and we do have an abundance of writers and playwrights here—but their plays don’t seem to get any traction about being staged locally!
Case in point: In My Father’s House by Dumaguete playwright Elsa Martinez Coscolluela. A play about a Dumaguete family torn apart by World War II, it won the Palanca Award in 1980, but was first staged not in Dumaguete but by the University of the Philippines Playwrights’ Theatre at the Faculty Center Studio [and then later at Teatro Hermogenes Ylagan in UP Diliman, and at the Cultural Center of the Philippines’ Tanghalang Huseng Batute] in 1987. In 1989, they restaged it at the Wilfrido Ma. Guerrero Theater, but with a Filipino translation, Sa Tahanan ng Aking Ama, by Raul Regalado. That year, it became the country’s official entry in the 11th Singapore Drama Festival. According to the CCP Encyclopedia of Philippine Art, its productions in the United States included one at the Astor Place Theater in New York by the Ma-Yi Theater Company in 1990, and then at the Hudson Theatre in Los Angeles by Stage West in 1996, both directed by Chito Jao Garces. In Japan, it was presented in 1995 at the Clapbard Garden Theatre in Kyoto by the Kapatiran-Kyoto, co-directed by Matthew M. Santamaria and Josefina Estrella. In 2010, a new translation in Filipino by Jerry Respeto was presented by ENTABLADO at the Rizal Mini Theater at the Ateneo de Manila University, co-directed by Respeto and Jethro Tenorio.
That play was being staged everywhere except the place it truly belonged to: Dumaguete. Only in 2013, thirty-three years after it won the Palanca, did the play see production at the Luce Auditorium, with Amiel Leonardia directing.
Many other award-winning plays by Dumaguete and Silliman playwrights—Lemuel Torrevillas, Leoncio Deriada, Edilberto Tiempo, Aida Rivera-Ford, Linda Faigao-Hall, Luna Griño-Inocian, Ephraim Bejar, Beryl Andrea Delicana, Michael Aaron Gomez, and so many others—suffer from the same oversight.
I understand why: Manila plays have the most recall power especially among younger theatre artists because they are constantly being staged and talked about, especially on social media. And they’re also accessible. Whereas, with Dumaguete plays—where can we even begin to get hold of copies of these plays? And how come nobody talks about them? It’s a conundrum.
It’s not that there is no universality in locally-set plays: the playwright Alexandra May Cardoso took my short story “The Sugilanon of Epefania’s Heartbreak,” set in Bayawan at the turn of the last century, and adapted it into the fabulously written Ang Sugilanon sa Kabiguan ni Epefania, and that play, which started its journey at the CCP’s Virgin Labfest in 2016, has been performed everywhere—and people seem to love it.
Which is why I was delighted that Dessa Quesada-Palm came to me months ago to hatch a plan: why don’t we ask our senior directors to stage plays by Dumaguete playwrights, and why don’t we begin with Bobby Flores Villasis? I jumped at the invitation.
When the Dumaguete writer Bobby Flores Villasis passed away on last May 2 this year, he left behind a great array of literary works and books that defined a life dedicated to creative writing. He was also a persevering cultural worker, having spent most of his working life as the cultural officer of the Negros Oriental Provincial Tourism Office, but it is his poems and his short stories and his plays—which chronicle the storied lives of Oriental Negrenses from Bayawan to Dumaguete—that would come to be the foundation of his legacy.
In his 1998 book Demigod and Other Selections, Villasis first gathered together a sampling of his oeuvre, anthologizing plays, poems, and short stories that showed his unique worldview, crafted with obvious mentorship from teachers like Edith Tiempo, Edilberto Tiempo, and Albert Faurot. In his 2001 short story collection, Suite Bergamasque, he embarked on an even more ambitious literary project: gathering interlinked short stories that told, as a whole, the dazzling and devastating lives of the denizens of Dumaguete’s Rizal Boulevard, particularly the families of local sugar barons whose mansions—colloquially called the Sugar Houses—line the seafront. The book became Dumaguete’s answer to James Joyce’s Dubliners or Carlos Ojeda Aureus’ Nagueños.
Of particular interest, however, are his plays, for which he won an impressive number of Palanca Awards, seven in all, which include Vigil [first prize for one-act play, 1978], Demigod [second prize for one-act play, 1979], Fiesta [first prize for one-act play, 1987], Salcedo [first prize for one-act play, 1988], Brisbane [second prize for one-act play, 1989], Eidolon [honorable mention for full-length Play, 1990], and Caves [third prize for one-act play, 1994]. They are a mix of historical and domestic dramas, but all of them invariably dramatize the secret lives and public sorrows of privileged Oriental Negrense families. These plays were acclaimed in their time, but they have never been staged, even during Villasis’ lifetime.
For the first time ever, four of these Palanca-winning plays will be performed in Dumaguete in a festival at the Woodward Blackbox Theater in Silliman University, on select dates from November 8 to 18. The productions are all under the auspices of the Speech and Theatre Department of the Silliman University College of Performing and Visual Arts, in cooperation with Artista Sillimaniana, the Silliman University Culture And Arts Council, Youth Advocates Through Theatre Arts, Buglas Writers Guild, and the Dumaguete City Tourism Office. The event is also one of the highlights of the 75th Charter Anniversary of Dumaguete City going into its Diamond Jubilee Year.
Opening the festival is Vigil, directed by Andrea Nazareno, which bowed November 8. I had a raucous good time watching it, and guffawed at the unexpected queer sensibilities. I had no idea! I could see traces of Nick Joaquin’s Portrait of the Artist as Filipino [the unseen father in the next room, plus the bickering women, plus the strapping young man in their midst], and the glorious madness of women in Tennessee Williams’ plays, with the paraplegic plot of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? [the one with Joan Crawford and Bette Davis] thrown in for good measure. That’s a lot of queer ur-texts to see limning the lines in this play about a nun named Manul [played by Lady Elmido] who comes out of the convent to take care of her overbearing paraplegic mother [played by Jecho Adrian Ponce]. Things go awry when the father comes home to die after leaving them eight years ago for another woman, and as if that is not enough, the other woman [played by Rhayana Marie Dalisay] enters the picture during a stormy night—and soon secrets and hijinks are revealed!
That ending, which involves an inevitable sexual romp that happens right in front of a paralyzed woman who is all but forced to get out of bed in sheer horror, was something else: it is the definition of choice, and I am glad Villasis chose to end the story this way.
Then there’s the fact that Nazareno had cast a queer man [Ponce] in the role of The Mother, which made everything all the more camp. Dalisay acquitted herself well as Ponce’s foil, but what would have completed the whole draggish illusion Nazareno [probably unwittingly] started would have been to cast another queer man as The Other Woman. Because for these two, to borrow from drag terminology, the “library” was way wide open, and they were reading each other to filth! [Ponce’s exquisite line reading of “I ... hate ... you” or his “You haven’t even begun to work on anything successfully!” deserves a Tony Award.]
It was all melodramatic fun, for sure. It was not perfect—the production design needed a more imaginative rendering, the sound design was deeply wanting, and sometimes the actors’ voices could not be heard because of challenges of projection and enunciation—but I have no deep complaints. Some might even say the play is dated—but I think literature that provides a snapshot of olden times and olden ways is its own valuable thing. True, the English deployed in the dialogue [“Husk and chaff!”] had an unreal quality to it that I somehow liked, although I also kept wondering: what if this play was translated to the Binisaya/Kiniray-a of Tolong Viejo [the old name of Bayawan], which is the setting of this overheated drama? The impact would probably be more considerable, but I can appreciate this play for the gifts it brings, foremost of which is recalling the unique voice of Bobby Villasis. He died early this year, and his birth anniversary is next week [the 16th of November]. I like to think of this festival as a good birthday gift. He would have been happy.
The rest of the festival showcases the following plays:
Demigod, directed by Elouise Zapanta, on November 11, Saturday at 8 PM. In this play, we are transported to Bacong, Negros Oriental in 1898. It has been 300 years since the start of the Spanish colonization of the Philippines, and discontent is everywhere. People are starving and guardia civiles are watching. A revolution has started, led by none other than Pantaleon Villegas, a.k.a. Leon Kilat, and no one can catch him. He is quick like lightning. But too much light can blind you. Be careful who you trust. In these trying times, faith will be tested and love will be questioned.
Salcedo, directed by Gillian Inocente, on November 15, Wednesday at 7 PM. The play follows the members of the Salcedo household, Lourding’s family, along with their close friends, the Bouffards, who are mourning the loss of Lourding’s husband, Pedrito. Amidst this period of grief, Lourding grapples with the challenges she encounters in her relationship with her daughters, and the Salcedo retainer leading to a surprising revelation.
And Fiesta, directed by Neve-Rienne Fuentes, on November 18, Saturday at 7 PM. The play takes place during fiesta in Bayawan, which is something everyone looks forward to, except at the Ragada household. For twenty years, Ines Ragada has been a thorn in the side of Corito, Manuel, and Soling. But everything changed with the arrival of Lucia Solon, and dark secrets and big revelations are revealed.
I do hope more people in Dumaguete will come to enjoy these plays, because these are our stories, penned by one of our best writers. Long live Dumaguete theater!
I needed this theatre break, away from all things Dumaguete for the weekend, with a thousand thanks to my high school friends Eugene Kho and Niña Christine Miraflor-Kho [and Lance!] who made this happen. I love Hamilton, but I was never a die hard fan of the material unlike most of my friends, until now. Found myself blown away by the magnificence of Act II, and teared up many times at various points of the concluding scenes. The duel, Burr's "I'm the villain of your story now" confession, the rousing legacy final number. The play's really a different thing when you see it live on stage.
12:51 PM |
A Grand Finale to the 2022 CCP Arts Academy
Have you ever had that feeling that you've done your best, and now it's up to the fates for that one last go to end up at least satisfactorily? We — the mentors for literature, dance, theatre, visual arts, music, and film — workshopped and workshopped and workshopped for five days straight, and now it came to this: a recital involving all the participants for the closing ceremony.
With barely half-a-day of rehearsals to iron out the kinks and to determine what needed to be done [choreography, choice of pieces, etc.], we were in it because everyone wanted it. In fact, we started the week thinking a final performance was going to be optional for each workshop. By Wednesday, all the mentors were keen to do at least something. By Thursday afternoon, we had some idea about what to do. By Friday morning, the rehearsals began. By Friday afternoon, the performances were on the slot.
AND IT WAS TREMENDOUS. It was like watching a concert of all the arts coming together in a spectacular and unexpected grand finale, with everybody doing their best to make everything work. You couldn't tell that most of the dances — sometimes paired with poets or with theatre artists — were improvised on the spot. It was just all seamless, certainly not without its flaws [a missing cue, a missing mic, etc.], but altogether fantastic. This is why in this video, as the last performers took a bow, we are all so generous with our applause, because we recognized that we just did something magical — and that all that hard work actually went to something tangible.
I think I echo my other co-mentors when I repeat what I said to myself at the end of the program: "Oh my God, they all actually learned something from us." We actually observed that our participants — 188 teachers from all over the Philippines — were hungry to learn, were willing to absorb something new and challenging, and most of all were generous to share their [sometimes newfound] talent in front of everyone. We made them dance, write, act, direct, make music, make art — and in the end, we were all very happy.
Thank you, Cultural Center of the Philippines Arts Academy [Chris Millado / Ron B. Mirabuena] and Silliman University Culture and Arts Council [Diomar Abrio] for making this possible. And congratulations to all my co-mentors [Dessa Quesada-Palm, Cheenee Vasquez Limuaco, Angelo Sayson, Aiken Quipot, Elvert Bañares, Juni Jay Tinambacan, Joseph Albert Perez Basa, W Don Flores, Ramon del Prado, and AK Ocol] for forming such a formidable group of resource speakers.
2:19 PM |
Dean Francis Alfar's 'Short Time' for 6200 Pride
PINK THEATRE presents a staged reading of Short Time, a Palanca-winning play by Dean Francis Alfar about friendship, marriage, and forbidden passion. Directed by Dessa Quesada-Palm, featuring Nikki Cimafranca, Rojan Bungcasan Talita, Jo Camille, and Mellard Chiong Manogura of Youth Advocates Through Theater Arts [YATTA]. Also streaming at 6200Pride!
The past week was incredibly heavy for me, perhaps a bit of a side effect of the second booster shot I had on Monday. Was sick, on and off. There was also a socials thing earlier in the week that drained all of me. And there was also the fact that it took me five — five — days total to download all the video files I needed to have to edit the Pink Theatre video I just uploaded.
Talk about frustrating: the worst wait was for a 6 GB file to download, and it kept encountering errors. The video editing itself, which I thought would be a nightmare [e.g., we didn’t get the venue we needed because of unavoidable circumstances, and had to make do with taping in Dessa’s house which had occasional sound disturbances (tricycles, planes, dogs, etc.)], only took a total of one day to do, so that was a surprise. Lesson relearned: it’s all about perseverance, even when the going gets tough. But I do think I deserve a massage.
Thank you, Dessa, Mellard, Nikki, Rojan, Jo Camille, Renz, Benji, and Renz for all your help and contribution to this project. And thank you, Dean, for allowing us to do your play!
You know how it is when things sometimes frighten us that our reflex is to laugh out loud, perhaps in an ironic attempt to keep the demons at bay? I have just seen the first important theatrical experience of our long pandemic season—and I found myself laughing in that painful, silent way when you try to keep your chortles in quiet mode.
Not because the play is funny, although there are certainly deft comic touches here and there, but because what you are seeing is so reflective of our everyday horrors, elevated to such absurdity, that the only way to process all that it presents is to recoil, then to reconsider, and finally to discharge a nervous chuckle or two. Catharsis is the end goal of Fighting the Invisible, opening on May 7, Friday at 7 PM at the Sidlakang Negros Village Function Hall, with another performance slated on May 8, Saturday. And catharsis is probably what we all need right now.
That said, it is quite vital that we see the play now, because the present—replete with lives on hold, on bankruptcy, on nervous bravery, or on the verge of lockdown madness—is its terrible, perfect currency. But while it does deal with contemporary travails in excruciating details, this is certainly not a realist play. In borrowing its staging from a wide variety of inspirations—from mime to Noh, from shadow play to Kuttiyatam—somehow the material feels elevated to a kind of modern mythology.
You can tell you are not seeing a regular play by how it opens: in the dimness of its performing space, four face-masked, white-faced figures congregate in the middle, all in a hush, all in a kind of trance, all attracted individually to low-key music, singular to them, which soon turn out to be varied, personalized ringtones from cellphones. Each clutches their own device like a leech, like how we all do in reality; each bump into each other; each regard the other with mistrust, and distance. And then they scurry to their specific spots onstage—with nary a dialogue—and the play begins.
That opening performance spiel in abstraction clues us in to how to embrace the play: everything is stylized, everything is pushed to a performative strangeness, and everything is metaphorical.
That could spell disaster in lesser hands. Often there is nothing as off-putting as material that spoon-feeds you earnestly with meaningful didacticism, especially when done in the bent of realism. But D Salag Collective, a new Dumaguete theatre company whose first full-length presentation is this play, is not a collective of “lesser hands.” Leading the group is Hope Tinambacan, the Hopia frontman, Bell Tower Project visionary, and YATTA stalwart, whose recent training at the Intercultural Theatre Institute [ITI] in Singapore—one of the most rigorous theatre programs in the world—has allowed him to shape, in collaboration with his fellow artists, a play that is beautifully performed, informed by Asian traditions of theatricality, with a gut punch for insights. Together with Nikki Cimafranca, Benjie Kitay, and Karen Silva, all co-directors, co-stars, and co-writers, and aided by a one-man stage crew, D Salag Collective invites us to consider carefully our current woes.
They do that by splintering the story into four vignettes that still somehow feel like parts of an organic whole, threaded together by a kind of a guide [played by Benjie Kitay] who fills the interludes with an earnest, audience-participatory yielding for time. Time eventually becomes one of the invisible antagonists of the play, but I’m getting ahead of myself. The coronavirus, too, is another one of the titular invisible antagonists—and Kitay’s guide also represents that, courtesy of a globular headdress that looks very much like the virus, with pencils, pens, cellphones, rulers, etc. in place of its spikes. That small piece of production design alone underlines so much what Fighting the Invisible wants to tackle.
In the first vignette, a man in a black raincoat [played by Tinambacan] struts around in weariness, opening his garb to reveal assorted items—socks, cellphones, teddy bears, etc.—all price-tagged for sale. To a haunting guitar accompaniment, he mimes again and again the concerns and desperations of the present, a feel of temperature and heartbeat, a demonstration of dwindling resources, punctuated regularly with a plaintive plea, “Ayaw pud tawon, Lord.”
In the second vignette, a figure in a tent [played by Cimafranca], shadowplays our daily anxiety-ridden ritual of waking up to the pandemic, presaged by a sigh, “Kanus-a pa ni mahuman?” We see his silhouette go through getting up, dressing up, all the while mumbling one horrifying pandemic statistic after another. When he comes out of the tent, the revelation is both a surprise and a reckoning.
In the third vignette, a woman in an apron equipped with cleaning paraphernalia [played by Silva] goes about household chores—but in donning an office jacket over that apron, we get the slap of the farce: how our personal and professional lives have blurred in the lockdown, and how that uneasy blurring, Zoom meetings, and the still constant demands by our economic overlords to produce, produce, and produce eventually lead to breakdowns of our body, sanity, and spirit.
In the last vignette, our guide is joined by the three others [who provide both musical accompaniment and reflective Greek chorus] in a wrenching portrayal of anguished mental health wrought by the pandemic. This is my favorite vignette, because raw and real. There is something to be said about Kitay’s frenetic eyes as he rails against pandemic time that is both deliriously slow and excruciatingly fast at the same time: “Dili puwede mo pas-pas!” To which the chorus replies: “Unsay adlaw karon / Asa ko paingon? / Unsa akong unahon… / Kapa! Gakapa! / Kape! / Bugnaw nang kape. / Gabii pa man ni…” The anxiety is real.
It all feels so strong, and moving—because the play allows us to be somehow seen.
This is not the first play Dumaguete has seen since the pandemic started. Last 26 November 2020, Artista Sillimaniana put on an intimate, health protocol-following staging of Karen Schiff’s Breakfast with Willy, starring Malka Shaver and Andrew Alvarez, and directed by Hannah Catacutan. It was a small comedy set in a grocery store, and its mirth and high jinx were what we needed in the dark depths of that uncertain year. A full year on, and with the end of the pandemic [hopefully] in sight, it’s time for our artists to take stock of our fragile recent past and still surging present, refracting our collective experience into a mirror of truth.
Cringe, laugh, cry—these are the measures of the catharsis we need. Fighting the Invisible paves the way.
Fighting the Invisible is slated on May 7, Friday and May 8, Saturday at 7 PM at the Sidlakang Negros Village Function Hall. Reserve a seat now at the D Salag Collective FB page. The production is limited to 40 seats per show. Safety protocols will be followed. A talkback session will follow after the show.
11:45 PM |
An Appreciation
