There are fewer experiences in life more pleasurable—or transcendent—than watching a campus theater production aim for the proverbial big leagues—and completely nail the assignment.
Without a doubt, Tanghalang Ateneo’s (TA) Emilia is one such production: a fiery triumph of theatrical imagination that could easily give the splashier professional shows a run for their money.
By all accounts, Emilia belongs firmly to the subspecies of modern art preoccupied with turning the life of William Shakespeare into the stuff of telenovela, and furnishing a behind-the-scenes account of his genius and fame: a tradition upheld by the likes of Shakespeare in Love, the recent Academy Award winner Hamnet, even Roland Emmerich’s film Anonymous from 2011.
In Emilia’s case, its primary subject is one Emilia Lanier, the 17th-century poet long suspected to be the “Dark Lady” described in a series of the Bard’s sonnets, and, as the story suggests, the sort-of-basis for the eponymous major character in Othello. The play has a ball playing with these theories, smart enough—and current enough—to know that the best part about making a cinematic or literary work about Shakespeare is never Shakespeare himself.
In Emilia, the man is but a romantic interlude, a literate flirt who finds in the titular character more than just inspiration for his writing, eventually becoming the impetus for the play to dramatize that sagest of sayings, “Hell hath no fury like a woman plagiarized.”
In this sense, Emilia is a cousin to Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet and chatmate to Greta Gerwig’s take on Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, situating itself within a de facto middle ground between the former’s depiction of motherhood and feminine grief, and the latter’s exploration of female aspiration in a conservative milieu.
It’s a portrait of a woman on fire, set ablaze by a hunger and desire for success deemed appropriate only for her male counterparts, and constantly thwarted by the patriarchy in all its rancid, self-satisfied glory.
And, oh, what fun TA is having putting all that onstage!
The production directed by Sarah Facuri is a limber, elegant feminist study, buoyed by artistic work that, while not always clean or perfect, never feels less than intentional or meaningful. The whole thing simply bursts with the kind of energy one associates with erudite theater kids making a name for themselves and claiming their space in the crowded industry.
It’s literally the definition of “the little show that could”: a three-weekend affair mounted by a university organization, run by a team half-composed of students, playing in one of the older and shabbier venues of the Ateneo de Manila.
Facuri’s production uses a new translation of the original English-language play by Morgan Lloyd Malcolm—now rendered in lyrical, occasionally irreverent Filipino by Gab Mactal, Keith Bernas, and Meeka Sayaboc of the fledgling, all-student TA Dramatist Collective. It honestly sounds like it was penned by a pro.
The old and the modern converging
The writing pulls off a fine, balancing act that approaches something like temporal rupture: the old and the modern converging under the watch of this storied school-based theater organization. Early in the show, for example, when a mentor of manners instructs Emilia’s cohort of young women in the ways of the royal court, she declares, “Handa na ba kayong… pumakàk?” Drag Race-era gay lingo has never felt more at home onstage.
Indeed, Emilia as a whole feels less like a passing-of-the-torch moment and more a celebratory, cross-generational homecoming. As my fellow reviewer Rikki Lopez (a.k.a. The Knee-Jerk Critic) told me, the play succeeds in part because it has seasoned professionals buttressing the younger, less experienced artists and allowing them to shine. That’s mostly the obvious case with the best campus theater, but it’s somehow especially pronounced in this production; it’s collaboration in the truest sense of the word.
The design of the show hews toward minimalism, but the work is textured, efficient, and cohesive: the set by Facuri, who also oversees the precise movement, evoking a panoply of spaces with the barest configurations of bodies and two benches; the sound by Erika Estacio and Teresa Barrozo, who has also composed original music; the feast of gleaming oranges and morose purples by lighting designers Jethro Nibaten and Perine Nyssa Bianzon; above all, the sumptuous costumes by Hershee Tantiado that fulfill the production’s gothic ambitions.
Sweet, victorious irony
There’s also sweet, victorious irony in the fact that, at Ateneo, of all places, this Emilia is not only directed and largely designed by women, but also performed by an all-female cast.
The pros playing the men are an absolute hoot: Bea Racoma, as Emilia’s oafish husband, doing comedic wonders with a flute; and especially Joy Delos Santos, sinking their teeth into two meaty, vastly different male-identifying parts with effortless aplomb.
Above all are the three actresses—Chloe Abella, Francesca Dela Cruz, and Maliana Beran—tackling the three incarnations of the titular character, demarcated not so much by age as by a specific emotional fabric. All of them are marvelous, in their individual scenes as in the parts that disrupt, intersect, and realign their timelines (the Act I finale, in particular, becomes a thrilling piece of meta-theater, thanks to them).
It’s worth noting that Abella is apparently only a freshman—but already has two accomplished starring turns under her belt, after her revelatory take on Rosalind in last year’s As You Like It (now Paano Man ang Ibig) under TA.
Beran is an enthralling discovery for me: She doubles as narrator—and absolutely slays the part, spellbinding and commanding from start to end.
Watching these women and their castmates have a blast at Rizal Mini Theater, I couldn’t help recalling the most transporting moments I’ve spent in the company of largely student-led productions: the apocalyptic tempest of mud, fake blood, and sweaty bodies that marked the climactic battle in Dulaang UP’s Ang Nawalang Kapatid (2014); the near-hallucinatory terpsichorean fever of #R</3J (2015); the grove of conflicting truths in Dulaang Sipat Lawin’s Rashomon (2015); the sepia-toned paper wasteland and historical necropsy of Kalantiaw (2016); the conyo-infused bálagtásan of Antigone vs. the People of the Philippines (2019), to name a few.
Into that elite list, I’d add Emilia in a heartbeat: theater that leaves you on a high, overflowing with hope for the future of the art form.
