Time within a stage across performance is eerie time. This isn’t as complex as it sounds. Performance on stage, timed and exquisite, convolutes experience to spill over expanse, especially if a director’s intimation vaults seamless through a text’s stubborn arguments rendering it buoyant. For a playwright this buoyancy, this suspension, molts within its own eerie textual groove; however, a director’s sleight of hand hovers only briefly (suggestibility, maneuvering, a shift) in order to have actuality performed. Performers/actors, in turn, actualize this specific time.
Magiliw, a performer, and I discussed this briefly during set change; while performance art seems to want to actualize emotion by prolonging a moment to the point of obsession (diverted to something loosely called “conceptual”), what stage performances try to elaborate as its function is the restriction of time to allow scenes to play out.
The three plays in Virgin Labfest 18: Hitik’s Set D: Muwang makes fervent use of elaborate scenes once more, in what has been until recently a scarce occurrence in the VLF, and this time in captivating immoderate raucousness. Time controverted to unrelenting, transmogrifying scenes in Marjay Manalastas’ raging hybrid monologue Tuyom; how a brief historical replay in Shenn Apilado’s time capsule interlude Hawaii, Here We Come!, compartmentalizes our current agitation; while Jerry O’Hara’s gritty, eloquent nightmare O’Donnell suspends a minute detail both in time and space to deliver something that is neither shocking nor indulgent, but does more to amplify an irreversible, miserable human state, war.
Marjay Manalastas’ Tuyom speaks voluminous – how does one account for the heavy toll of being shattered by trauma, by the memory of actions and words indelibly inscribed onto consciousness? In this play, a child is abused and traumatized by his mother, and grows up picking up the pieces of being broken apart by such experiences; this is “M”. As this monologue of buhol-buhol ang dila unravels, we discover along with M that he is both a specimen of crippling depression and of some profound unnamed grief – (the next morning I asked B if he googled what tuyom means, and he said no, I’d rather it remains a mystery; I agreed).
For most of Tuyom’s wild syncopated wordplay, what delays the play’s momentum is the character’s coping mechanism which is to structure his scenic confrontations in what seems to be the only way he knows how, that is in the form of a play. M buckles at this countermeasure; words and its redundant recreations – vocabulary, grammar, poetry, literary passages, personal notes – become the multiplying corridors he cannot seem to escape.
Jude Matthew Servilla as M had all the wit not to give into Marjay’s disemboweling glossolalia, and instead lent levity and genuine tact to the character’s voluminous modes of grieving by imploring an impressive arsenal of technical control. It came in steady waves generating steady pulse. This was modulated further by the ensemble work of Opaline Santos, Serena Magiliw, Fred Layno, and Zöe de Ocampo – Opaline wrangling chaotic scenes with calm verve, as usual (as mother, as Sisa, as monster, as water riverine), and Magiliw glowing as the annoying teenybopper lover-narrator playing along M’s narrative of demise. Like the narrative itself, the one Marjay is telling actually, these embodiments of M’s neuroses with roles to play in perpetuity work alongside Marjay’s projections of authoritative narrative impositions – study, work, get married, have children, build a family, rinse, repeat. But he knows from that unnamed grief that the center cannot hold, so why fix something that is already broken? In full nihilistic form: why bother?
The despair in Marjay’s text is staggering it almost invalidates what it is striving for in its own ending. The stones M placed inside the pockets of his red amerikana is something that would ensure, in M’s projections, a proper ending for him, an absolute erasure; but instead, it is words once more, the element that forms the disruptive code that displaces all that was plotted. M’s child-self gives the advise that asking for help unburdens, and M asks for it with all the strength he can muster. There is no answer in return. However, the remoteness of an answer wouldn’t have made sense if not for Gio Potes’ heavy use of hard montage cuts that coheres up to a point but only as a conducive devise.
Whether this conducive devise works to amplify M’s coping mechanism, or to signal that the way M’s plea for help appear to go unanswered rebounds along all the smaller scenes that also presents no resolution, for they merely repeat or variate (the worst version of M’s life, a commercial), what Tuyom generates for M in return is appeasement – I might’ve mistaken him for a kaluluwa na hindi matahimik that needs appeasing. When it seems emancipation from trauma and autonomy from authoritative narratives is what M involuntarily yearns for. Suddenly against the current of the river, with stones in his coat pocket dragging him along the bottom, he announces, “Lalangoy ako.”
We are brought to a mansion, with an “M” emblazoned on a brocade archway in Shenn Apilado’s Hawaii, Here We Come! Servants are preparing for what seems like an arrival, huge suitcases, luggage, trunks are set down, dresses are hung in an open rack. Head maid Shirley, the punong-abala, prim and proper in her well-ironed uniform, holds a clipboard and oversees everything. Things must be packed post-haste; it isn’t an arrival apparently but a departure.
Shenn takes a moment in Shirley and her sister’s Angge’s busy day – played by Madeleine Nicholas and Sheryll Villamor Ceasico respectively – and captures a snapshot set in specific time. This time is set sometime in the very near past when a palace was stormed by an angry mob seeking rightful justice and its execution, and the residents of the palace were forced to flee, a first family, or else face the consequences of the crimes they have committed – plunder and corruption, torture, forced disappearances, among many other abuses and violations.
This is an historical fluency that we are all very much familiar with, already splintered in small anecdotes, some performing as hearsay, even seemingly escaping Joonee Gamboa’s stern, eerie narration in one of the most popular documentaries about the Martial Law years of Ferdinand Marcos Sr., Batas Militar. It has gone and pervaded our feeds and Youtube vlogs with many alternate, twisted, and convenient annotations, “Bakit ipinanganak ka ba no’n?” On one hand there is something comforting about these anecdotal passages even if it is brined with fiction containing insoluble amounts of facts because they sound outlandish – in Hawaii, Here We Come! Shenn plays out an Imeldific narration regarding US immigration finding diamonds in diapers; and on the other, the play is still able to wonder about the deeper consequences of this political tragedy that treated lives, our everyday lives up until now in fact, cheap – Shirley’s sister Angge is counting on her Ate Shirley’s employer, the lady of the house only known as “Madam” to help her find her disappeared activist son.
What happens to the sisters and their family, saan sila pupulutin, rests solely upon Madam’s magnanimity, and she did appear magnanimous in full Imeldific fashion, coiffure, butterfly sleeves, panyolito and all. This Imeldific figure in the stunning presence of Gem Padilla-Thomas could be interpreted in a bat as idol worship for she played the figure with such no-nonsense tack, and so redounding with weird grace, but the ploy becomes obvious because Gem was actually doing drag. Madeleine also played up the shtick as the hapless head maid whose only source of character buoyancy comes from the Madam figure, but did the character peeling so meticulously that it tapered towards the end to reveal that Shirley is more than a glorified servant, she is first and foremost an ate. The younger sister Angge completes this strangely mesmerizing triad with the smoothness of perception only Sheryll can bring as she grounded the play’s only pivotal moment; having been promised the help she was looking for, she does the most human thing she could do, help Madam pack.
However Mark Mirando wrestled with this brief moment of vulnerability, delivering Angge as from a character with conviction to a genuflecting wretch, the outcome is neither convincing nor does it give an added dimension to historical lamentations. The play doesn’t ask too much, its touches are light, almost too even, with the kind of bland predictability, but of course it is something you would expect from an historical footnote. What Mark did however is stick within these boundaries to come up with something cozy and that worked fine for the piece. Unironically, it warms the heart, sans campfire and marshmallows, and that is something to think about (I mean: within squares of opposition).
Amorphous eerie time creates both the vicious atmosphere and slow decay in Set D: Muwang’s last play, Jerry O’Hara’s tender period piece O’Donnell. I say tender in its material punch, and tender in its approach; it is a play full of bodies, literal desiccated talking rotting meat, and also a play that lends compassion and dignity to the characters that move within the play’s visual nightmare. It is about a group of Filipino prisoner-of-war soldiers, all from the same platoon, imprisoned in Camp O’Donnell, a military prison camp in Tarlac during the Japanese Occupation of the Philippines in World War II. After the defeat of Filipino and American forces in Bataan in 1942, the soldiers were forced to march 91 miles to the camp in what is now known as the Bataan Death March, where almost 70,000 POW soldiers were interned, and where almost 20,000 of them died from malaria, dengue, dysentery and other tropical diseases. Characters Peralta, Basa, Isleta, a soldier named Baliw, and Delfin were among those soldiers in the play.
The force which Issa Manalo Lopez’ ensemble soldiers wielded was nothing short of remarkable. Aldo Vencilao (Peralta, the soldier dying of dysentery), Miguel de los Santos (Basa, with a wounded right foot), Eshei Mesina (Isleta, the one trying to keep it all together), Joel Garcia (the Baliw), Johnny Maglinao (Delfin, the mortally wounded young man), and Ekis Gimenez (Idelfin, a higher ranking soldier) – all composed a riveting, moving mass of blood, spit, sweat, and shit that forged through the mire, delivering a mighty seamless scene in roiling dream pitch. Except it wasn’t dream, what transpired truly transpired. There is always a point in works suggesting dehumanizing brutality where it would somehow digress along flavorful spectacle, but Issa was able to contest this presentational mold: she did it through unwavering care. So did the actors. What they did was be precise, staying in tune to Jerry’s astute drama, bringing this particular war context into a larger node of understanding: while all war in its present state assume inevitability, it is the generations that follow that must recount its misery.
Issa particularly allowed this recounting of misery to play out in a slow-motion scene that paid attention to all the characters’ emotions as Aldo’s Peralta narrates a particular battle. This scene provided a tender and poignant contrast to the suffering being witnessed all throughout. And while suffering is what attenuates every work that tries to approach war, it was the members of the O’Donnell ensemble that demystified this recourse. It is important to mention that it was Aldo who took on the time honored VLF tradition of shitting blood on stage, but it was Eshei, always beguiling to watch, that was just so masterful in containing his role as Isleta, the main player tasked to congeal the roiling mass as the voice of reason (making the damning act he eventually committed even more substantial).
He could’ve stolen every scene as Isleta but Eshei’s ardent poise became the cantilever to Miguel’s Basa, whose character both demonstrated the hopelessness of their plight and possible escape, something Miguel composed in exact details and can only be described as cheerful despair; and something in the continuity of despair in O’Donnell that gave sheen to Joel Garcia’s Baliw, who played the soldier who lost his mind with commendable intuitive rigor. It is tempting to ascribe notes of Didi and Gogo to Isleta and Basa and all of the play’s composite characters but there is so much more going on in O’Donnell that in its stark disavowal to underscore the existential, it makes the actual existential threat of war closer, imminent. What are we to do in this precarious times? Basa attempts to escape despite Isleta’s stern warning; we hear gunshots followed by Basa’s laughter.
Muwang, consciousness, or pagkamulat. Basa’s laughter is conditional, that in order for kamulatan to arouse, it musn’t only recognize the triumphal light, but also, mostly, in this interesting times we live in, suffering and despair, hinagpis. In one of M’s mind scenes in Tuyom, mother and son don Sisa and Basilio. Rereading the chapter “Si Sisa” in Noli Me Tangere, Basilio lays out his brilliant plans for the future to his mother. Sisa replies yes to all of her son’s dreams, “Walang sinasabi si Sisa kun’di ‘oo’ sa lahat, sa kanyang akala’y ang lahat ay magaling. Unti-unting nanaog ang pagkahimbing sa pagal na mga bubong ng mata ng bata... at isinukob sa ibabaw niya ang magandang payong na puspos ng masasayang pintura.”
Sisa of course was lying, and Sisa knew more than she let on, she became conscious when her sanity teetered off the edge of the cliff following her children’s demise. We cannot go forth and say yes to a hopeful future, if only in united misery. For Set D: Muwang, it seems consciousness must rage in the dark stage for now, onto this charged changing airs, prop blood, line per line, spittle and all.
Set D: Muwang continues its run on June 15, 16, and 21; Virgin Labfest 18: Hitik runs from June 7-25, 2023 at the Tanghalang Ignacio Gimenez (CCP Black Box Theater), Pasay City
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