or a brief note on Chuck Smith’s Regine: The Fairy Gaymother from Virgin Labfest's Set A: Adulting 101
Stage performances that empathically allow audiences to experience and habitate for the meantime the interior space and time of a performance oftentimes tend to have two outcomes: one, that the performance recedes uncontrollably, typifying a sort of whisper, compacting itself into a confession; while on the other, it becomes expressively malleable that the performance induces an opening up.
Performances inhabiting interiority doesn’t just preclude the personal, it also maintains the structure of a myth. We create fictions regarding ourselves, something that has become incredibly ubiquitous through the exposure of the self on the Internet. But once these fictions wrap itself within a dramatic text, it cannot merely escape in the form of conversation for it runs the risk of too much exposition, or else why are they speaking too much? Expositions don’t stylistically upend the possibility of drama, and most invigorating dramas aren’t necessarily concerned with conflicts, but expositions can end up doing the talking itself, leaving the characters waiting to exhale. What’s more within the required density of a performance twosome, for instance, wherein the layering of personal myths rely on the coinciding distinctions of opposing accounts.
In Chuck Smith’s Regine: The Fairy Gaymother, part of Virgin Labfest 18’s Set A: Adulting 101, the form of the performance twosome takes on manifold configurations in the very able hands of Mark Daniel Dalacat, permitting the audience not only to experience in gradating motion the unfolding of Chuck’s straightforward and hilarious text, but also denuding it to create a breathtaking space of drama, decentering the otherwise cumbersome queer myth of coming out.
First, to get it out of the way. The myth of coming out is pretty straightforward, it’s been a staple in gay storytelling since the 90’s where mostly an upstanding cisgay man’s personal turmoil resides in the prescriptive gesture of him coming out to his immediate family members (what about lesbians, we don’t know). The dilemma of coming out revolves around maintaining a distinct status quo so that in order for the cisgay man to have a space within the cisheterosexual nuclear family unit, he must reveal his “true self” by going through the hoops of acceptance, acceptance that is either bestowed or denied. The cisgay man agonizes over this ordeal because his homosexual existence depends upon it – as it was then understood. And of course it had to be presentationally funny because then until now, within the spectrum of the visibly queer, the gays are and must be funny.
Regine: The Fairy Gaymother is hilarious. Mark Daniel draws specifically from popular presentational forms – the bar drag show, the song and dance number of the variety show – to round out the stark ridiculousness of the scenes, making the myth of coming out as the play’s take-off point. Mark Daniel enlarges the performance twosome to inhabit two scenes, one taking place in the sala, and one taking place in the bedroom. Diego (Adrian Lindayag), a 25 year old femme-ambiguous queer is being tasked by their parents Susan (Tex Ordoñez-De Leon) and Jun (Ron Capinding) to come out to them, that is, to admit and to confirm, in that strict order. As Susan and Jun objectify Diego’s possible queerness in full melodrama in the sala, Diego meanwhile is visited by their fairy gaymother, in the red luminescent spectre of Regine Velasquez/Anton Diva in an all out camp extravaganza complete with dancing little fairies, in Diego’s childhood bedroom.
This is where the myth of coming out begins to fall apart in Chuck’s text, but only to transform earnestly into a different narrative configuration. We expect a confession then a confrontation then acceptance as reconciliation but all that goes out the window. Instead, Diego interrogates the whole myth they find themself in up to its most succinct point: if they are indeed going to come out, it has to be in their own time, in their own terms. Adrian plays this out so vigorously as a refreshingly articulate and self-assured queer character. As they seemed at times in the play ready to brandish out a Power Point presentation on how not to come out, or somehow almost breaking out into a manifesto, what appeared most palpable and convincing was how Adrian’s Diego also embraced with such unwavering candor their own worst fear, the sheer uncertainty of possibly not being welcomed with open arms especially by, as everyone describes her in the play, their krung-krung mother Susan.
Actors Tex and Ron played out the John and Marsha duo of Susan and Jun in old-school comedy skit style with such generous fidelity it dispelled what may have been disastrously a phony outcome, but instead both delivered such open and sincere vulnerability. Chuck could’ve also just been doling out the tug-at-the heartstrings card for the conclusion seems so easy, Susan just wants her unico hijo to confess, while Jun wants nothing more than a non-confrontational confrontation with his son; it may even seem incredulous to a queer audience, closeted or not, or even to a non-queer one who just happened to be sitting in on the performance, that the nuance of familiar family drama just magically sorted itself out with a kiss and a hug in the end. Come on, Chuck and Mark Daniel, that couldn’t possibly happen in real life, queer and trans kids get disowned by their family all the time. But I suppose that isn’t the point of Regine: The Fairy Gaymother, it isn’t what Chuck and Mark Daniel want to underline in this finely tuned back-and-forth scenes of unapologetic kabaklaan.
The answer here is Anton Diva. Her presence onstage doesn’t only deliver a mode of impact because she is a drag performer through and through, nor does she appear as mere illusion of Regine Velasquez, and so as if only utilized as metaphor, say, for a grander landscape within Diego’s queerness acting out their anxieties. Anton Diva actually tips the popular presentational forms Mark Daniel chose to delimit the play’s vibrant sense of humour with, to then actually solidify Diego’s resolve.
A stage performer could’ve played it off as a drag performer, sure, but instead an actual drag performer occupied this particular stage performance, turning around what used to be the abject of queerphobia, the absolute obverse of the upstanding cisgay man and one of his constant source of terrors, and transfiguring them ultimately into an icon, a patron saint of valor. In full ultra colored gown and golden virginal halo reminiscent of Pierre et Gilles, Anton Diva sings Regine Velasquez’ “Shine” together with Diego, flurried with no less than fluttering, glittering butterflies. Regine: The Fairy Gaymother isn’t a coming out play at all. It is a celebration of the queer being, raging and longing not for acceptance, but for the full glow of life that surrounds them. Diego and Regine took us to church, into the interior illusion’s lounge to smash it; or like that age-old queer sage words: “Why you all gagging, we bring it to you every ball?”
Set A: Adulting 101 continues its run on June 22 & 23; 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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