There isn’t a moment in Yemaya that feels like it hasn’t been meticulously thought through. The latest offering from 9 Works Theatrical—and undoubtedly the company’s best work since the pandemic—it uses Eljay Castro Deldoc’s new Filipino translation of Quiara Alegría Hudes’ Yemaya’s Belly from over two decades ago. The play has all the qualities of good poetry; the production helmed by Ed Lacson Jr. conjures that poetry into incandescent, almost numinous life.
Hudes’ original play is a Latino Bildungsroman set against the American dream: An impoverished boy from the Cuban hinterlands travels to the big city, learns of the vast country across the sea, then sets his sights on meeting the big man in the White House. And because this is about the American dream, he naturally loses some of those most dear to him, as is the customary fate of those who reach for the self-touted land of liberty. The United States giveth not, and the United States taketh away.
Not too long ago, the news was filled with images of migrants and refugees crammed into unsafe, overcrowded boats trying to land on European shores; of Black and Brown bodies from capsized vessels floating helplessly in the Mediterranean. Now, across the Atlantic, something slightly dissimilar but no less horrific has been unfolding in the era of Donald Trump’s ICE. One can only imagine what awaits Yemaya’s protagonist at the end of his journey, were he to complete it today. For better or for worse, the play never gets to that point.
That’s as much of the plot as I’m comfortable divulging. And, anyway, who needs humdrum, racist America when you have the kind of world Lacson and his creative team have imagined in The Black Box at the Proscenium Theater—one so attuned to local culture and bursting with intoxicating life, yet constantly teetering on the brink of the dangerous and fantastical, in keeping with the play’s magical realist bent. Wherever exactly this world is, you can almost touch the stalks of dried grass, feel the scorching sun and cool night, lose yourself in the lights and noise and slow chaos of a town in perpetual decline.
First between different locations on land, then eventually on water, the story of Yemaya not so much unfolds as meanders, echoing how its protagonist moves through life deliberately without what modern, urban audiences might label “direction.” Its hero, Jesus (alias Mulo), endures several departures before the final, most consequential one, weaving in and out of the lives of his worldlier uncle, a coconut vendor, a shopkeeper, and the girl who draws him to the sea. In this meandering, the play forces the viewer to really sit with it—to live in its prolonged pauses and its uncomfortable silences: to be in communion with Jesus himself, see the world at both its most exhilarating and its most barren, and hopefully arrive at the realization that the American dream, in all its myriad permutations, will always find a way to kill you. Patience has rarely been more of a virtue.
And how it rewards the patient viewer with scenes of phantasmagoric beauty, each as visually stunning and sonically intricate as they are suffused with pure emotion. A simple game of dominoes becomes a balletic dance lit like a fiery hallucination. A countryside inferno leaves behind only a corpse wrapped in a blanket, the fact of death creeping in like an epiphany slowly breaking the stillness. The hero’s brief descent into the underworld ignites a horror-house carnival onstage. And—in what may very well qualify as the pinnacle of theater design for the year—a storm in the middle of the sea approximates Turner or Rembrandt turned tropical. (Truly, lighting designer Jethro Nibaten and sound designer Teresa Barrozo are a match made in heaven.)
If anything, this is why Manila theater needs a show like Yemaya: It is the farthest from a straightforward crowd-pleaser, or a big musical, or one of those flashy productions that move from scene to scene as if high on heroin. In an age of endless social media scrolling, when audiences just jump from one reel to the next, consuming only content that’s shorter than a minute, and increasingly rendered incapable of devoting time and attention to long-form writing and “difficult” art, Yemaya is a balm—a welcome what-if, an invitation to once again take up the skill of thinking and return to a more literate existence.
When I saw the play during its first preview, Tommy Alejandrino played Jesus. I’d only ever seen Alejandrino in the movies—in the gay odyssey Some Nights I Feel Like Walking (2024) and, more notably, as the lead of The Baseball Player (2022), for which he won Best Actor at Cinemalaya. In Yemaya, Alejandrino cuts an exciting, electrifying presence—a Peter Pan-esque hero hardly equipped to confront life itself, yet seemingly oblivious to the very concept of misfortune in the way he charges into the unknown with a bravery that borders on recklessness. Orbiting Alejandrino is a uniformly excellent ensemble, which includes Ness Roque (as the girl Maya), Herbie Go (as the coconut vendor Tico), and Anthony Falcon, who plays Jesus’ uncle with such convincing earthiness that he seems less a fictional character than someone you might pass in a dank alley or along a dimly lit street, whether in Cuba or Cubao. That right there is one of our great character actors back onstage at long last.
Only a preview then, Yemaya was already more than ready to open. I can only imagine how good it must be now, halfway into its four-weekend run. It’s an absolute stunner from start to end, and as ravishing and intelligent a piece of theater as we’re likely to see this year.
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