PDI Feature: 'Laro' and Pride Month with Artist Playground

Any Floy Quintos play is an event. The website version here.

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Floy Quintos' 'Laro' kick-starts Pride Month at Arts Above

Pride Month at Arts Above? That's the idea behind Artist Playground's (AP) programming for June--well, sort of.

"There was this group that planned to put up a pink theater festival, and the organizers wanted AP to host," says artistic director Roeder Camañag. "But for some reason, this is no longer pushing through."

Enter Floy Quintos' "Laro," an adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler's "La Ronde," which consists of 10 interlocking, amorous vignettes set in late-19th-century Vienna.

Quintos' version, however, transports the story to present-day Manila and turns all the characters into male homosexuals.

"A bracing meditation on identity, longing and survival" was how Gibbs Cadiz, Inquirer's theater critic at the time, described "Laro" in his review of the play's premiere more than 14 years ago. Among other things, that production, directed by the playwright himself, was defined by "dialogue that's remarkable for its clarity as for its casual, if bitter, truth," exposing the "small but volcanically complex gay society [as a place where], for all its surface urban freedom, tribal passions still reign and the terrain of kindred connections often feels like a battlefield."

Same struggles

For John Mark Yap, director of AP's "Laro," that terrain has remained more or less the same. "It's quite alarming, to be honest, that the gay community is still experiencing the same challenges and struggles from more than a decade ago. The issues discussed in the play such as sexual predation and power play are still very prevalent."

Staging the play is a wish fulfilled for Yap, who was still a minor when "Laro" premiered in late 2004. "I played the role of the Young Gentleman when Tanghalang Ateneo staged "La Ronde" in 2010," he says. But he only got to read Quintos' adaptation in 2014, when he served as project manager for the book launch of the playwright's two-volume collection of plays.

"I first worked with AP in 2016 as a graphics designer, and in one of our encounters, Paul Jake Paule and Sir Roeder said I should direct for their company. I was honestly very hesitant since I'm more known in the industry as a stage manager, and it was only last year when I told them I was finally accepting the challenge of directing."

For "Laro," Yap has assembled, through personal invitation, what he calls "an all-star cast"--a mix of stage veterans such as the multihyphenate Vincent de Jesus and Phi Palmos, and relatively fresh products of the campus theater circuit like Jon Abella and Vincent Pajara.

The creative team includes Io Balanon (sets), Nicolo Perez (costumes), Miggy Panganiban (lights), Arvy Dimaculangan (sound), JM Cabling (movement) and Gian Nicdao (graphics).

Following "Laro's" two-weekend run, AP will stage "Roses for Ben," which the company bills as the first HIV-awareness gay musical in the country, with Camañag directing.

"'Laro' should serve as a prelude to 'Roses for Ben,'" Yap says. "June is Pride Month so it's definitely the best time to stage these plays about the gay community."

PDI Opinion: Nice

Today, I make my Inquirer-Opinion debut! The website version here.

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Nice

Days before the midterm elections, the worst kind of pictures popped up in my Facebook feed: this lady I knew relatively well, posing with her grown children, all of them sporting gray shirts imprinted with the face of that Davaoeño ex-cop with dramatic proclivities. By now, said ex-cop is set to join the Senate, if we go by the Commission on Elections' count, and that Facebook friend is off gallivanting in some European capital.

It was very tempting to comment on that post; I was thinking something short and sweet, like "why"--lowercase and unpunctuated for a touch of genteel curiosity. But after verbalizing the idea, I was told, as I'd been told many times before, to "be nice." Was it really worth the trouble--this vaguely aggressive comment and the arguments it would conceivably entail, the feathers it would ruffle?

As that trending Twitter photo proclaimed, "It's just politics. Don't let our political preferences destroy friendships and relationships."

Sure thing. Social media, after all, is just one huge echo chamber, full of paid trolls, manicured profiles and like-minded people following and preaching to each other. Beyond our screens, we have real lives to lead and real people to interact with. And being nice--which, in our patriarchy- and hierarchy-obsessed society, often translates to smiling pretty, staying silent and bottling up one's political feelings in favor of preserving the peace--has always come in handy.

They didn't give out medals for the "most polite" kids back in kindergarten for nothing. It's simply the way we're conditioned: grandparents doting on grandchildren who are "obedient"; parents handing out easy rewards for "doing what we say without question." And for the grownups, being nice sweetens the parties we throw, expands our businesses through newfound acquaintances, and flavors random incidents with a more palatable taste for the purposes of memory. Why bother rocking the boat of shallow, civil conversation?

I'm neither parent nor aspiring New-Age life coach, but it's a mistake to confuse nice with nonconfrontational. Only a fool would think collective, courteous silence has ever helped anyone.

Nice gets you children who grow up to become adults bereft of the ability to engage in intelligent, insightful discussion on politics, religion or any other "sensitive" subject--or worse, adults who think discussing such matters in places other than the classroom is at the very least inappropriate, the doings of a party pooper.

Nice means making excuses for those friends or family members who openly and vocally support the government's "war on drugs" (after three years, it's amazing how some people still buy this story), thinking, well, there's more to these persons than just their morals or stand on socioeconomic issues; that anyway, they have raised loving families and have known yours for the longest time--plus bonus points for being devout churchgoers--so they must certainly be better people than their poorly crafted Facebook posts make them out to be.

Nice means just keeping quiet and walking away after an elderly relative tells you he's not voting for Samira Gutoc because--and I kid you not--"she's a loud woman," and that Neri Colmenares is a "threat to businessmen," which makes sense only in the context of said relative, who happens to be richer than probably half the people in your hometown combined.

The ending, of course, is that nice helps get elected to the Senate people like that Davaoeño ex-cop, or that photobombing former aide to the President, who, it should go without saying, is all sorts of unqualified.

In some way, this must feel kind of a reach--to say that our individual upbringing is the reason we now have plundering actors, fanatical boxers and theatrical policemen to write the laws of the land. But grand, disastrous endings can somehow all be traced back to the subliminal cracks at the beginning, to minds tenderly kept shut and mouths demurely kept closed.

So while majority of Filipinos, the ones who don't have the luxury to care about "Avengers: Endgame" or "Game of Thrones," eke out a living on a day-to-day basis, the privileged few--the ones with access and the linguistic faculty to read this piece--continue to be nice to each other. There's always church for our weekly dose of thanksgiving and social media for the occasional, intellectual rant.

Maybe what we need is some plain, blunt thinking to reflect on what the American master composer Stephen Sondheim wrote: Nice is different than good.

PDI Review: 'Saltik: Isang Laboratoryo' by FEU Theater Guild; 'Unperfect' and 'A Doll Life' by Ateneo Fine Arts; 'Marat/ Sade' by UP Dulaang Laboratoryo

I have to say, the thesis season this year has been quite wonderful. My latest say on the matter, via the Inquirer website, here.

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Ambitious student theater performances from FEU, UP, Ateneo

The aftermath of "Marat/Sade."

The past weekend of theatergoing can be summed up by the words of the esteemed playwright Glenn Sevilla Mas, who, in an exclusive interview last year, had this to say about the state of Filipino theater: "The future is bright because the future is here."

Take, for instance, Far Eastern University Theater Guild's "Saltik," a collection of eight one-act plays, many written by student-members of the company and all of them directed by Dudz Teraña.

The production as a whole commits the rookie mistake of equating noise with emotion, and some of the plays can get quite derivative and gimmicky. All understandable: The show, after all, is billed as a lab, meaning it is the proper, if not the only, place for such faults.

It is also an ideal place to push boundaries, which is exactly what "Saltik" surprisingly does. For example, Marielle Barrios' "Daungan," despite being in need of much tightening, manages to give the classic father-and-son tandem a welcome speculative-fiction twist.

Hanna Pelobello's psychodrama "Rachel" is a display of bravura staging, as Teraña anthropomorphizes the various voices and past lives inhabiting the disturbed titular character's head.

The best of the lot is "Proposal," a Bisaya monologue written by Teraña himself (and here, one suspects it's a case of the director knowing exactly what to do with the material). Mapping out the rise and violent decline of a relationship from the woman's point of view, the play is told with admirable clarity, largely thanks to Karyl Oliva, in a flat-out delightful performance.

'G/irl/'

At the Ateneo de Manila University, another monologue gave birth to a star: Maia Dapul in "Unperfect," a devised performance piece directed by Jerry Respeto that culled existing songs from the likes of "Next to Normal," "Kung Paano Ako Naging Leading Lady" and "Real-Life Fairytales."

It was essentially a skeletal rendering of a woman's life from womb to tragic tomb, a musical exploration on the damage wrought by being brought up under the concept of perfection and having that concept somehow taken away later on.

The piece itself stood out for its economy of words, its translation to the stage acquiring a sort of poetic quality, as well as for the way it reinterpreted the selected songs to fit its female-centric narrative. Dapul was a blazing, transfixing presence, her delineations of character and setting clear-cut, her performance a fiery announcement of a serious new entrant to the world of musical theater.

"Unperfect" was one of two thesis plays lumped together under the twin bill titled "G/irl/." The other was "A Doll Life"--the more ambitious but less focused piece--starring Alyssa Jamille Binay, Senanda Gomez and Chrisse Joy delos Santos (with further input for the play from Iman Ampatuan).

The feminism was more accessible in "A Doll Life," where the trio of student-actresses played dolls that somehow come to life (or something akin to it). But the play, in extensively critiquing women's roles in society, also involved a lot of sidetracking and fun but unnecessary banter.

It was strongest--both in terms of writing and performance--when it reached its culminating monologues, which allowed the actresses to be their own persons and enchantingly deliver their respective texts.

'Marat/Sade'

The pinnacle of ambitious student theater, however, was unquestionably UP Dulaang Laboratoryo's "Marat/Sade," the Tony Award-winning Peter Weiss play now translated by Gio Potes and Guelan Luarca to become "Ang Pag-uusig at Pagpaslang kay Jean-Paul Marat Ayon sa Pagkakatanghal ng Mga Pasyente ng Asilo ng Charenton sa Ilalim ng Direksyon ni Marquis de Sade."

On several levels, the play was a challenge: Its dialogue was laced with cerebral polemics on matters such as revolution and class struggle; and its play-within-a-play setup required a cast that could pull off playing asylum inmates struggling to play relatively sane people.

It also had to be staged in a way that combined elaborate, period-drama flamboyance with low-key horror-house theatrics, while somehow making the intellectual back-and-forth less esoteric for the viewer.

None of which the production, directed by Joy Cerro, surmounted unequivocally. And because this was a play that, when steered inadequately, became even more perplexing, it was obvious to the viewer whenever the production sagged.

That also means that whenever the production soared, it was an enthralling sight to behold. It knew horror and gore better than the other dramatic elements, and that translated to the staging and the acting, such as that scene when the seams between reality and make-believe first gave way, or in that horrific denouement.

The only ones among the cast who were believable asylum patients were Xander Soriano (commanding as Marat chained to a bathtub), Sheryll Ceasico (her affectless, almost-wordless turn a lesson on consistency) and Hariette Damole (incandescent, gripping, almost pitiful as the unfortunate, internally splintered soul tasked to play the murderous Charlotte Corday; an acting thesis that clearly deserved a 1.0).

The inadvertent runaway star of "Marat/Sade," however, was Adrianna Agcaoili. As the bourgeois hospital director's wife, she had zero lines, but her face was worth a thousand GIFs. And if the students learned a thing or two from her about silently running the show from the sidelines, that could only be for the better.

After all, for these theater kids, the real show's just getting started. 

PDI Feature: Audie Gemora and Teroy Guzman on 'The Dresser'

I honestly had lots of fun writing this for-theater-nerds advancer feature. The website version here.

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'The Dresser' brings three theater stalwarts together for the first time

The cast of "The Dresser" at curtain call.

At the Peta Theater Center in 2012, Nonon Padilla directed a production of "King Lear," now "Haring Lear" through "brilliant, exceptionally vivid Filipino prose by National Artist for Literature Bienvenido Lumbera," wrote former Inquirer Theater editor Gibbs Cadiz. The titular role--a "sonorously voiced, charismatic [and] highly physical" interpretation, to go by Cadiz's review--was played by Teroy Guzman.

Guzman now finds himself taking another stab at Lear. This time, however, he's playing an actor playing Lear--in Loy Arcenas' production of Ronald Harwood's "The Dresser," which opened last night as Repertory Philippines' (Rep) third production for the year.

Set in the backstage of an English theater in World War II, "The Dresser" chiefly revolves around the relationship between an aging actor, referred to only as Sir, and his personal assistant, Norman. The story takes place in the course of an evening, where Sir, plagued by senility, if not dementia, struggles to get through a performance of "Lear."

Debuts for Rep

In this Rep production, Norman is played by Audie Gemora, who returns to the 52-year-old company after his Gawad Buhay-winning turn as the flamboyant director Roger de Bris in 2013's "The Producers." And with both Guzman and Arcenas making their acting and directorial debuts, respectively, for Rep, "The Dresser" marks the first time the three stalwarts of Filipino theater are working together.

Gemora was actually the one who recommended the play to Arcenas, when the latter directed the former in Tanghalang Pilipino's (TP) "Eurydice" in early 2017. By then, Arcenas had been back in the country for a good six years, having spent most of his working life as a New York-based director and designer, and was only about to release his biggest film to date--the Metro Manila Film Festival Best Picture "Ang Larawan," his cinematic take on the musical adaptation of Nick Joaquin's "A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino."

"Loy put a lot of value in studying the book [for 'The Dresser']," Gemora says. "A lot of time was spent dissecting the script and the characters. It's a tedious process which led to intimidating photo-finish run-throughs, but by opening night, the cast was good and ready."

"At first it was a bit confusing," Guzman says of Arcenas' process, "but when I slowly deciphered things, I began to figure out where he was coming from. He took the time to sit down and discuss the character with me throughout the rehearsal process."

It was only a year before "Eurydice" when Gemora and Guzman appeared in the same production for the first time, playing Oberon and Theseus, respectively, in TP's "Pangarap sa Isang Gabi ng Gitnang Tag-araw," a Filipino adaptation of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" using the late National Artist for Theater and Literature Rolando Tinio's translation.

Intrigued

"I first saw Teroy in Red Turnip Theater's "33 Variations," says Gemora, referring to the 2015 production that won Guzman his first Gawad Buhay Award for Featured Actor in a Play for his turn as a fictionalized version of the composer Beethoven--"Lear minus the bitterness and cosmic rage," wrote former reviewer Exie Abola of that performance.

Gemora continues: "I was so intrigued by him. I remember commenting, 'Who is that guy and where did he come from?' He's been in the theater for about as long as I've been, yet our paths never crossed because he acted mostly in UP [Diliman] while everything I did was down south."

"Tita Joy [Virata, Rep's associate artistic director] called me last year and asked if I would play the title role [in 'The Dresser']. When Tita Baby [Barredo, Rep's artistic director] asked who could possibly play Sir, I threw in [Guzman's] name."

Guzman, of course, is no stranger to titanic roles. Apart from Lear, he has also essayed Othello (for Tanghalang Ateneo in 2008); Richard III--the first time under Dulaang UP back in 2000, where he met his wife, Shakespearean scholar Dr. Judy Ick, and again last year, in a Duterte-era adaptation titled "RD3RD"; and Macbeth, for World Theatre Project's "Screen: Macbeth," opposite Ick as Lady Macbeth.

"Sometime ago, I was offered to do ['The Dresser'] with a university company," Guzman says. "But that didn't push through, so I'm very lucky to get another chance to do this."

"'The Dresser' is all about the relationship between the two main characters," Gemora says, "so it is so crucial for Teroy and I to establish rapport between Sir and Norman. It's like a ping-pong match. I am yin to his yang."

PDI Review: 'Makinal' by UP Dulaang Laboratoryo; 'Red' by Ateneo Fine Arts

I have an omnibus review in today's paper--here. How many of us were there during "Red"? Ten, 12, maybe? And three of those were already the Ateneo Fine Arts triumvirate of Glenn Mas, Guelan Luarca and Charles Yee.

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'Makinal' and 'Red': Student theses-plays that rate full points

The set of "Red."

In the pre-Holy Week stretch, Katski Flores (in Tanghalang Ateneo's "Alpha Kappa Omega") wasn't the only actress bringing the house down with a brief but explosive featured performance.

Karen Romualdez gave a similar ephemeral, force-of-nature turn, in a one-weekend-only thesis production of Sophie Treadwell's "Machinal," now "Makinal" for UP Dulaang Laboratoryo through the prolific Eljay Castro Deldoc's adaptation.

In her singular scene early in the play as the female protagonist's mother, Romualdez sharply laid out a life of frustration and resentment through an expert blend of anger and comedy, her toxic, nonstop verbal barrage calling to mind Mona Lisa's titanic performance in the classic Lino Brocka film "Insiang."

This was the decibel level adopted by the rest of the production, a kind of assault-on-all-senses that furthered its depiction of wretched womanhood and female repression. This unrest was expressionistic, sure, but it could also get literally distracting and overwhelming.

So, for instance, you had Rachel Jacob as the female protagonist--her capable, if unexciting take on a difficult and potentially unexciting role sometimes getting drowned in the action, and all but swallowed whole by her onstage mother in that key scene.

Jacob fared better in her scenes with Jack Yabut, appropriately slimy as the supervisor who lusts after and marries her character; and with Vincent Pajara, bringing an electric freshness as the young man who leads her down an adulterous path.

Vibrant energy

But what really stuck with you to the end was Nour Hooshmand's direction--how she injected this production with vibrant (if occasionally uneven) energy, how her command of feeling and sense of theatrical style allowed this play about people living like machines an ebb-and-flow that still sustained the viewer's attention.

Much of what was stylish and theatrical about "Machinal" came from Steven Tansiongco's projections--whether they be a play of cubist graphics on otherwise plain wall posts or a splatter of blood on white cloth, the red seemingly washing over the stage. Splashy as his designs were, they never overwhelmed the text; they even heightened the grim, immersive atmosphere.

Atmosphere was also what the thesis production of John Logan's "Red" at the Ateneo de Manila University earlier this week got right.

Perfect setting

The production, the directing thesis of Avery Nazareno, had, for starters, the inadvertent perfect setting--the university's old Black Box Theater, which was believably designed by Ohm David and Leo Rialp to look like a skeletal studio, with its easels and paint cans and unfinished overall appearance.

The play, which imagines the painter Mark Rothko's time working on the Seagram Murals in the late 1950s, was locally premiered in 2013 by The Necessary Theatre, in a "first-rate treatment [anchored by] the crackerjack tandem of Bart Guingona [as Rothko] and Joaquin Valdes as his (fictional) apprentice," as former Inquirer Theater editor Gibbs Cadiz wrote in his year-end roundup that year.

Nazareno's "Red" not only survived comparison with that production; in some way, it even bettered it.

Sure, this new production lacked a worthy opponent for Rothko to verbally spar with: André Miguel's portrayal of the apprentice, Ken, came across as too insolent and detached for any serious painter to even take seriously.

But it also had a sense of intellectual calm and rigor about it that wasn't very evident in the 2013 staging. (That one felt consumed by high emotion and sometimes bordered on the polemical, not that those qualities diminished the experience in any way.)

Nazareno's "Red" knew to take its time--to land appropriate pauses and allow the hyper-intellectual conversations room to breathe. You weren't just watching a pair of brains at work; you were also doing the thinking alongside them.

The great injustice of this production was that very few people saw Rialp in the role of Rothko. Because his was a performance for the books--intelligently layered, commanding in its sobriety, a believable balance of wisdom and self-doubt that must plague many an aging artist. Rialp himself is a painter in real life, which must partly explain the effortlessness of his characterization; to see and hear him in the role was like watching a master at work--the cadences, and especially the comedy, down pat.

In hindsight, a lot of this production's success had to do with Rialp's professional touch. But it's also important to remember that "Red" was first and foremost a student thesis. Like "Makinal," it was mounted with a limited budget, raw skill and only the guidance of its program's professors.

That both challenging plays were honestly more satisfying experiences than some of the full-blown, professional productions we've had this year should be reason enough to earn those involved in them top marks.