What makes theater "Filipino"?
This was the accidental question unifying three shows I saw in Manila in August—incidentally, the long-appointed month for celebrating the national language. Collectively, the three productions—Into the Woods, Quomodo Desolata Es? Isang Dalamhati, and Nobody Is Home—invited audiences to ponder exactly how the very notion of ‘Filipino-ness’ could look and sound like onstage these days.
For Theater Group Asia’s (TGA) Into the Woods, the answer was all about its shining, shimmering surface.
In media interviews, Tony-winning designer and TGA cofounder Clint Ramos—who served as this production’s overall creative director—stated that their goal was to stage a show that “actually considers the Filipino condition.” Director Chari Arespacochaga separately said that a central preoccupation of this Into the Woods was refracting the musical “through the lens of… our histories, our resilience, and our storytelling [as Filipinos].” These statements aligned with TGA’s proclaimed mission to flesh out the figure of the so-called “global Filipino” on the Manila stage.
But statements are one thing; execution—and, more importantly, essence—is another.
In this Tony Award-winning musical, the writers James Lapine and Stephen Sondheim have borrowed popular fairy-tale characters from the Brothers Grimm and placed them inside a multiverse of sorts: Cinderella, Rapunzel, and Little Red Riding Hood existing alongside the new characters of a childless baker and his wife, in a story that imagines what happens when happily-ever-afters go awry.
TGA’s Filipinized Into the Woods confined the story to a stage designed like a báhay na bató, the traditional Spanish-era stone house. Draped in fabrics and weaves drawn from different Philippine cultures, the characters were made to work with “local” accoutrements: Cinderella wore a gown with the distinct, butterfly sleeves of the terno; Little Red Riding Hood fought the big, bad wolf with a balisong, the folding knife from Batangas; the singing harp stolen by Jack (of the beanstalk fame) from the giant was now a Mindanaoan sárimanók. And the giant was now evidently an American speaking with a Southern drawl.
Honestly, these ornamental touches were a feast for the senses. But situated within Sondheim, they rang hollow, false, unnecessary. This itch to Filipinize the musical only demonstrated the production’s lack of trust in the already-airtight material. (Consider, for instance, the giant as an American “colonizer” who terrorized the “Filipino” characters after Jack stole from her? What a way to bungle the musical’s subtexts.)
In Ramos and Arespacochaga’s Into the Woods, the global Filipino was one whose idea of nation circulated around rudimentary images of mangoes and coconut trees, rice fields and carabaos—while refusing any deeper engagement with the homeland it constantly waxed poetic over. Sondheim was almost an afterthought.
No wonder the cast—arguably the starriest assembled by any production in Manila in recent memory—felt unmoored, acting in different registers, as if appearing in different plays. Even Lea Salonga (playing the witch) was disappointingly reduced to just her crystalline voice: peerless singing, inchoate characterization.
In fact, the only truthful performances came from Nyoy Volante (as the baker), Teetin Villanueva (as Little Red Riding Hood), and especially Mikkie Bradshaw-Volante, who, as the baker’s wife, perfectly epitomized Sondheim’s wit and theatrical genius, further proving that nothing can compare to the warmth and honesty of homegrown Filipino talent.
Watching this show, I was reminded of what the poet Conchitina Cruz wrote about the local literary and publishing sphere in the seminal essay The Filipino Author as Producer: “What’s worse than a Filipino poet in English who does not in her poetry speak on behalf of fellow Filipinos is a Filipino poet in English who does.” So it goes, apparently, with Filipino theater makers in English.
Overall, TGA’s Into the Woods shed no new insight on the musical, only squeezing Sondheim into an ill-fitting conceptual shoe: a show that was generally well-sung, but sorely lacked passion and emotional depth. In this sense, it was rather anti-Filipino.
Over at the Ateneo de Manila University, a far more sincere and theatrically innovative explication of Pinoy selfhood unfolded: Quomodo Desolata Es? Isang Dalamhati, Guelan Luarca’s adaptation of the Nick Joaquin classic A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino, using Jerry Respeto’s Filipino translation.
The new play (also helmed by Luarca) retained Joaquin’s original narrative structure. This was still about the sisters Candida and Paula Marasigan, their ailing artist father, their crumbling house in pre-World War II Intramuros, and the unseen titular painting that could make or break the sisters’ fortunes.
But watching this play, one easily forgot about Joaquin. Luarca’s Portrait magnified the madness swirling within and beyond the Marasigan household, its Intramuros in a state of heightened decay, the better to reflect the looming horrors of both the Second World War and the sisters’ possible impoverishment. In so doing, it gave life—and voice—to all that was ostensibly unseen, and left unspoken, in the sisters’ stories: the follies of the past, the ghosts of the present, the omens of the future.
The result was a play with a confident grasp of time and place, identity and history. So assured was its hand that one’s mind frequently wandered beyond the action unfolding onstage, taking the play up on its invitation to ponder the kind of nation the story intimated; how similar those narrative trajectories might be to the 21st-century Filipino reality. Joaquin was now both chronicler and prophet.
More noteworthy was the production’s interest in dissecting our “Filipino-ness,” which was nothing if not genuine. Rather than conforming to staid, colonial visions of what a “Filipino” play should look like, it instead challenged the norm, seeking to rethink form and the possibilities of storytelling. To be a Filipino theater artist, this production asserted, was to be capable of radical imagination.
Thus, its use of a Greek chorus, for example: an intelligent, effective reinterpretation of the device, the chorus as both literal and figurative ghosts in the story. Or consider how the design elements all worked in total harmony: a set (by D Cortezano) that made sensible use of native elements, lights (by Jethro Nibaten) that evoked the plot’s changing moods with precision, costumes (by Ali Figueroa) that betrayed a cohesive artistic direction. Even during the final technical rehearsal that I caught, the show’s vision was already crystal-clear.
During that rehearsal, Delphine Buencamino was already unimprovable as Candida, her bravura portrayal of a woman slowly crumbling from within and desperately clinging to her sanity certain to go down as one of the year’s most unforgettable. Vino Mabalot was an explosive Tony Javier, the wannabe-musician living with the Marasigans, while Maita Ponce was an utterly commanding presence as the siblings’ more affluent sister Pepang.
Meanwhile, at the Philippine Educational Theater Association (PETA) Theater Center, the premiere of Liza Magtoto’s Nobody Is Home heralded a return to form for the 58-year-old company best known for its brand of socially conscious theater.
Collaborating with the Mecklenburgisches Staatstheater, this new play focused on the plight of overseas Filipino workers (OFWs)—in particular, those working in the health care sector and in the context of Western society’s rapidly aging population. Co-directed by Nina Gühlstorff and PETA Artistic Director J-mee Katanyag, it was billed as documentary theater, the play deploying various strategies like interactive segments and lots of fourth-wall breaking to engage the audience more directly and move beyond the usual tropes seen on our stages.
By no means was this play flawless. It could be quite earnest to a fault, the parts that were overwritten did feel overwritten, and the production was far from polished. In the larger scheme of things, however, this was all silly nitpicking: Nobody Is Home was the kind of play that knew exactly what it wanted to say, how to say it, and whom it wanted to listen.
While plays like Care Divas (also by PETA) have shed light on the realities faced by OFWs, Nobody Is Home felt like a welcome breath of fresh air: It found comfort in ambiguity. The Filipino carers in the play, and the German patients and family members they worked with, never once seemed less than real, nor were they made to face situations that offered an easy exit. At the same time, in acknowledging that these were real people with real problems and ambitions—and being comfortable with the limitations set by that acknowledgment—the play was able to imbue its theatrics with a softening touch, thereby enhancing its dramatic plausibility.
My one hope for this play is that PETA tours it around the country. The production itself was quite uncomplicated, and one can imagine it being staged in all sorts of community and educational venues. One main challenge would be filling the vacuum left by the actresses playing the German characters (assuming they won’t return): Susi Wirth and Ute Baggeröhr, as the ailing mother–exhausted daughter tandem, were just wonderful to witness, turning in performances that were never less than truthful; it would be a shame if more people didn’t get to see them, and the delightful chemistry they had with the Filipino ensemble led by the reliable Meann Espinosa.
When I saw Nobody Is Home during its invitational one-weekend run, the theater was filled with young people, presumably students. Watching them engage with and respond to the work was a timely reminder of why exactly theater should never cease to exist. Here was an unpretentious play about real, global Filipinos—about stories many among the viewers no doubt resonated with, told without a shred of hubris by theater makers who clearly understood their Filipino audience.
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