Diarist Review: 'Endo.' by PETA Plus and Ticket2Me

It is impossible to find a copy of the film legally anywhere! The website version of this review here.

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Endo. The good news and the not-so-good news

Royce and Jasmine hugging during curtain call of preview night.

What is Endo. without, well, endo?

That appears to be the self-imposed challenge behind Endo., the new stage adaptation of the 2007 Cinemalaya film now running at the Philippine Educational Theater Association (PETA) Theater Center. Note the period in the play’s title: a brash stylistic choice most likely intended to set the offspring apart from its progenitor. And, boy, is there a world of difference between the two.

Directed by Jade Castro, who also wrote the screenplay with Michiko Yamamoto and Moira Lang, Endo (the film—no period) is a marvel of economy, deceptively simple in its use of a love story to critique the Philippine labor regime. It’s about two young lovers, Leo and Tanya, who drift from one contractual job to another—all while trying to make their relationship work—their inability to secure permanent, decent-paying employment being as much a consequence of their lack of privilege as it is a product of a system long gamed by big corporations.

In a survey by the website Pinoy Rebyu—now associated with the Society of Filipino Film Reviewers—Endo was ranked the 14th best Filipino film of the 21st century. (The survey was published in 2017 and involved 33 critics, reviewers, academics, and archivists.) The citation by Philbert Dy, former resident reviewer of ClickTheCity, lauded the film’s honesty (“you feel like everything’s coming from a genuine place”) and naturalistic aesthetic that mixes the political with the romantic (“Endo isn’t a very big movie, but it’s got a very big heart”).

Talking to Rappler about cinema as a gateway to understanding the state of Philippine democracy, Richard Bolisay provided a more incisive—and expansive—take on the film, highlighting what he believed to be a frequently overlooked aspect of it: It’s “the story of the working class; of those who are left out because of the limits of their material reality.”

Bolisay accurately identified how Leo’s life is in “a perpetual chokehold under capitalism,” his every human interaction—with Tanya, with past flings, with co-workers, with family—seemingly “transactional” in nature. In portraying how “love and romance serve as an escape” for these characters—not bourgeois indulgences, but a reprieve—the film becomes “a form of quiet yet powerful activism,” insisting on the constant need to extend “empathy and care for its characters” and the people they represent.

Sharpened the film's message

The good news is: The stage adaptation written by Liza Magtoto has, in some way, sharpened the film’s message. Endo. the play is definitely in touch with the plight of Filipino workers, fully cognizant of the longstanding ills preventing them from ascending the social ladder. (The possibility alone of the play fumbling this particular dimension is tantamount to heresy, when one considers the fact that the PETA Theater Center—this theatrical heartland of progressivism in Metro Manila—is its chosen birthplace.)

The not-so-good news: The major conceptual update used by the play somehow dims the fundamental power of the narrative from the start.

Endo is shorthand for “end of contract,” referring to the widespread illegal practice of terminating employees right before they hit the six-month mark—when they would have to be regularized by their employers under Philippine law and bestowed the mandatory benefits that come with that change of status. It’s one of the defining symbols of socioeconomic precarity in the neocapitalist country: low-income workers, imaginably minimum-wage earners, slogging it out at one menial job, with no certainty of a future in the workplace, and always haunted by the prospect of having to find another job before the year is even over.

One unstable job after another

That’s the grave reality lived by Leo and Tanya in the film’s early 2000s milieu: one unstable job after another, without which they would be deprived of their source of income and absolutely unable to survive the urban madness of the National Capital Region. There’s not even time for a lucrative side hustle simply because that one job already consumes so much of their lives.

Magtoto has made a consequential edit to the play: Endo. is now clearly set in the present. And it’s no longer exactly about endo, but about the gig economy. Leo and Tanya now juggle multiple jobs: the former, a luggage salesman, a ride-hailing app driver and courier, a traffic aide, a masseur; the latter, an online live seller, an English-language teacher to Korean nationals, a call center agent.

While the film establishes contractual work as a singular lifeline for the characters, the play subjects Leo and Tanya to the plight of working several jobs just to make a decent living. Needless to say, both are untenable predicaments.

Expert hustlers

Yet, one is not exactly like the other: The film will leave its characters penniless without that one endo job; the play grants them the latitude of looking for another source of income even while already holding two. By this play’s logic, no one here is at risk of becoming jobless—because its protagonists are apparently expert hustlers.

Gone is that legitimate, visceral fear that the next peso might not come at all—and with it, the very specific anxiety that elevates the film to dramatic heights. Even though these characters’ lives remain full of hardship, the stakes have been somewhat lowered onstage.

Magtoto’s update also renders the third character of Candy—Leo’s ex—largely irrelevant. The film makes Candy something of a poignant bookend: It begins with the bittersweet, flickering end of her relationship with Leo, then hurtles toward the credits with a sticky rebound situation. Candy in the film epitomizes the romantic reality made possible by the cruel constraints of endo: the shredding of relationships by the end of contracts and the need for lovers to move on to different, time-consuming jobs in different poles of the Metro—but also, the potential of rekindling that relationship through the possibility of working again under new contracts in the same workplace, or within the same area, even if only for five measly months.

Once again, there are stakes there—which are now absent in the play, in which Candy is much closer to an afterthought.

Upend the dramatic plausibility

Certain lines and plot points further threaten to upend the weightiness—and more important, the dramatic plausibility—of the play. In one scene, for example, Tanya remarks that she thought endo is no longer being practiced widely (“Akala ko hindi na úso ang endo”)—has she been living under a rock all this time?

There is also the matter of her future abroad: In a critical juncture in the film, she gets hired to work on a cruise ship. In the play, she’s now a non-practicing nurse who miraculously lands a position in Switzerland. As a health worker watching this, I had to suspend my disbelief to the utmost: Good for Tanya that she’s somehow able to edge out the über-qualified nurses from Philippine General Hospital, St. Luke’s Medical Center, and other leading institutions in the country for that prestigious spot in Europe, despite her credentials. (I suppose it’s a huge plus over there if you can multitask.)

But if Magtoto’s script is already a considerable departure from the play’s, the production directed by Melvin Lee deviates even further from the film’s sensibilities. Of course, adaptations are never expected to replicate their sources. In fact, deviations can make screen-to-stage transfers more interesting and worth checking out. 

Where the film is restrained, minimalist, and unmistakably brimming with a rich interior life, the current play is noisy, maximalist—to a fault—and teeming with all sorts of big, surface gestures. 

The noise and reliance on physical gestures are justifiable: Lee’s production is a movement piece, choreographed by Christine Crame. The gig economy is rendered in a whirlwind of action, the characters sliding in from one job to the next in near-robotic fashion. It’s basically Karl Marx saying that under capitalism, people become alienated from their inherent humanity, no longer fully alive but merely existing to survive. These characters are always on the move, pun intended. And the cyclone of huffing and puffing they find themselves in makes you understand why Magtoto might have chosen to update the story: They might as well saw parts of their bodies off just to accommodate the many jobs they are compelled to undertake to make a livable wage (that’s lagáre culture for you). The film threatens Leo and Tanya with poverty; the play offers them the alternative of amputation.

Onstage, the proceedings end up feeling exactly like that: rushed, breathless. I don’t mean this to be a good thing. Because it’s so intent on replicating the gasping rhythm of the gig economy, the production inadvertently makes it difficult for the viewer to anchor themselves emotionally on Leo and Tanya’s story. You see them hustling nonstop, squeezing themselves into a succession of roles—sometimes with precise, period-specific humor—but you can’t really enter their psychological worlds, so to speak. The whole thing is theatrical not because it draws you in, but because it almost jumps at you with verbiage and movement.

The set itself (by D Cortezano) is a curiosity: a platform that resembles a gigantic balance board, wobbling and tipping toward a particular side with every heavy motion, as if the actors were in the gym instead of the theater. Watching the cast maneuver that stage, you quickly understand the metaphor of precarity. But it also becomes tiresome, even an optical challenge for the vertigo-prone: a literal, physical distraction. There are ropes hanging from the ceiling that look stunning, especially under David Esguerra’s lighting, but how they are used in this production is the very definition of on-the-nose. And the props for the sex scenes—otherwise beautiful, balletic sequences to behold—border on the ridiculous (a billowing sheet as stand-in for a condom, really?).

A peculiar assemblage

The main cast for this production is also a peculiar assemblage: Royce Cabrera and Esteban Mara as Leo; Jasmine Curtis-Smith and Rissey Reyes-Robinson as Tanya; Iana Bernardez and Kate Alejandrino-Juan as Candy. All look like they could be models! In the era of the gig economy, it’s not hard to imagine they could make it as influencers in no time, contributing to the mindless content on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, while padding their pockets. All could be stars of Philippine Fashion Week, or sensations on the Bench runway, or even pageant picks. Rikki Lopez, the genius behind The Knee-Jerk Critic, might have been joking when he wrote in his review that the hunky Cabrera and Mara could have simply turned to OnlyFans—and raked in millions—but that’s actually a fair point. There’s something to be said here about believability and casting.

Among the six main players, Reyes-Robinson comes closest to succeeding in the age-old actorly challenge of looking ugly, and attaining a palpable sense of truthfulness and defiance in her portrayal of Tanya, in spite of everything. Mara also reaches for something closer to vulnerability—a sad, pitiful interior masked by a shell of muscle. Cabrera, on the other hand, is all brawn and audacity, and I never for a second believed he’d ever find himself stuck in the pits; he might stumble, but he’d definitely find a way out and be just fine, as far as fine goes for people like him.

Both times I saw this production, I was awash with the same mix of feelings by curtain call: gratitude, first of all, for the creators’ initiative to spotlight the insidious harms inflicted by the gig economy upon a generation for whom owning a house, having a fat enough bank account, or living free from the fear of going into debt is sadly beyond the majority’s grasp. Then, exhaustion (see the many preceding paragraphs above). Finally, wistfulness and longing for a more delicate work of art.

Diarist Review: 'Miranda & Yolanda' ('Evening at the Opera' and 'Ang Kalungkutan ng mga Reyna') by Encore Theater

My wish is for Encore to do "Collection" next, or "Ang Nawalang Kapatid"--now with an all-professional cast. How exciting. The website version of this article here.

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Miranda & Yolanda gives Floy Quintos back to us, even for couple of hours

Quintosian royalty onstage. 

Let me echo what just about every other reliable reviewer has already said: Miranda & Yolanda, the Floy Quintos twin bill, is a fabulous time at the theater. This is your cue to scramble for a ticket.

To borrow from Vladimir Bunoan, this twin bill only further cements production company Encore Theater’s position as “steward” of the late Quintos’ legacy. I’ve always maintained that, at this point in modern Philippine theater, any production of Quintos’ work is automatically an event in itself.

However, with Miranda & Yolanda—a double one-act affair comprising Evening at the Opera and Ang Kalungkutan ng mga Reyna—it’s not only because these are Quintos’ plays. More important, these are Quintos’ plays being staged by artists who knew him best.

Evening at the Opera returns with original cast members Ana Abad Santos and Frances Makil-Ignacio, 15 years since introducing their characters at the Virgin Labfest in 2011 (I saw them as part of the following year’s Revisited set). It’s a similar case with Ang Kalungkutan ng mga Reyna, starring Shamaine Centenera-Buencamino, who originated her role in the fourth Labfest in 2008. All three actresses are in magnificent, mesmerizing form.

Both plays are being steered by another Quintosian collaborator: Dexter Santos, who directed all the premieres of the playwright’s new work in the final decade of his career—Grace, The Reconciliation Dinner, The Kundiman Party, Angry Christ, Ang Huling Lagda ni Apolinario Mabini, Ang Nawalang Kapatid, Collection.

Suffice it to say, the entirety of Miranda & Yolanda—the title so named after the protagonists of each play—feels distinctly animated by Quintos’ singular voice. You can hear the playwright in every delectable line spewed by this parade of tragic-comic creatures of the stage. In other words, these productions have succeeded in distilling the very essence of his work, almost like he was still here—irrefutably here—with us, laughing and crying and having a ball alongside us. In the sense that, for a couple of hours in the dark, it has given the playwright back to us—ear for biting satire and “observant eye for the defining tropes and mindsets of the zeitgeist,” as Gibbs Cadiz put it, completely intact—this twin bill is a precious gift.

After watching both plays, I was struck most of all by how Quintos managed to anthropomorphize so eloquently the folly of vanity: This, I believe, is the unique thread tying the two, as staged and embodied by the people behind this presentation. In Evening at the Opera, we bear witness to the narcissism of Miranda (Abad Santos), the unhappy wife of a corrupt provincial politician; how she has used public funds, partly to spite her boorish husband, to bring a high-brow Italian opera with a price tag of P20 million to her rural town. In Kalungkutan, we must contend with the delusions of a president (Centenera-Buencamino) who has declared martial law and installed herself as monarch, her first move a literal, farcical makeover that reviewer Rikki Lopez has accurately described as a lost episode of Queer Eye for the Straight Dictator.

How unhinged these characters are—how conceited, detestable, out of touch—but also, how painfully, unmistakably human.

Possible vision of 2028

Kalungkutan is especially resonant today: You leave it with just the slightest lump in your throat, realizing you may have witnessed a possible vision of 2028 and beyond. I have it on good authority that, at the time of its premiere, the play was widely mistaken to be about former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo (Totel de Jesus wrote as much in TheDiarist.ph last week). Now, in Miranda & Yolanda, Centenera-Buencamino’s monarch is brash, vulgar, uncouth; clad in shades of green, and, at one point, attempts to punch an underling. You half-expect her to launch a Zoom meeting and issue death threats to other politicians there and then, or perhaps greet the Chinese president in Frankenstein Mandarin. Has she also pilfered billions of the people’s money? Assumed the post of Education Secretary with utter incompetence?

That right there is Quintos as oracle, the great chronicler of our troubled times rendered in the palpable present tense by theater practitioners who have his genius tattooed in their DNA.

We used to wait with tempered excitement for the next Floy Quintos play. Thankfully, at least now there’s Encore Theater to soften the fact of the playwright’s gaping absence.

Diarist Review: 'Cleaners' and 'Monit-oh! Monit-ah!' by PETA

I shall henceforth nominated myself for MSTR's Emerging Talent Award. The website version of this article here.

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How I ended up onstage at PETA's Control + Shift Festival

Immortalizing this photo courtesy of PETA.

Two weeks ago, I was supposed to review the opening matinee of Philippine Educational Theater Association’s (PETA) Control + Shift Changing Narratives Festival. By some farcical twist of fate, I ended up onstage during the performance.

 

Before I go any further, I’d like to put on record that I love a good audience participation bit. My fellow theater reviewers can attest to the boisterous fun I’d have—much to their long-suffering amusement—during the interactive segments of Repertory Philippines’ productions for children.

In Control + Shift, however, I’d planned to keep a low profile, discovering quite early on that I was the only media in attendance, amid a sea of high school and college kids, teachers, and company affiliates. Obviously, that plan didn’t last long.

My unraveling, as it were, began during the open forum that followed the afternoon’s first play, Jhudiel Clare Sosa’s Cleaners.

Cleaners was about a group of students who, while cleaning their classroom after hours, uncover some pretty diabolical secrets which could be linked to their dictatorial teacher. It was evidently new work, its many rough edges untrimmed—making the festival the perfect venue for public debut. While the production directed by Julio Garcia—a Gawad Buhay-nominated designer for Walang Aray—took some time to hit its stride, it also managed to serve outrageously good physical comedy.

In the ensuing open forum, it was clear the play had fulfilled its job as pedagogical theater, in keeping with PETA’s singular, time-honored mission. The audience engaged eagerly with the play’s parallels to the Duterte years, from the ethos of “cleanliness”—whatever it meant—that the fictional school forced upon the characters, to the gruesome, buffoonish unfolding of events involving a skeleton of sorts in the broom closet.

But I can pinpoint exactly when my brows first went up: Reacting to the play’s ending (spoiler alert), in which the students overpowered their teacher, possibly killing him, someone from the audience—not a student—said that PETA, or playwrights in general, should be more careful with depicting revolutionary action that ends in what that person termed a “bad cause”—in other words, that killing the evil teacher (or whoever this character symbolized) was—and will never be—okay, insofar as it’s meant to be a teaching moment.

Sheltered, privileged comforts of theater

In that instant, I couldn’t help flashing back to the most iconic works of Raffy Lerma, Ezra Acayan, and the other photojournalists who comprised The Nightcrawlers, who immortalized day after dreadful day some of the most abhorrent and horrific images of Duterte’s genocidal anti-drug campaign. Aren’t we lucky, I thought, to have the luxury of chest-beating for “moral values” from the sheltered, privileged comforts of this air-conditioned theater—while 30,000 or so mostly poor Filipinos were murdered during those six horrible years? Human rights workers like Reina May Nasino, whose infant died while she was wrongly imprisoned by Duterte, and the activists who were slain during Bloody Sunday of 2021 might have something to say about good and bad causes.

I swiftly shrugged the moment off, chalking my reaction up to the fact that I was not the target audience of the open forum.

Before long, it was time for the second play: Herlyn Alegre’s Monit-oh! Monit-ah!, returning from the previous year’s festival. Alegre wrote the play as forum theater, an interactive and participatory format wherein the audience has a say on how the play progresses, including by deciding what a character should do in crucial junctures of the story.

On the whole, the production directed by Norbs Portales was loads of fun. Monit-oh! Monit-ah! was preoccupied primarily with the inane behind-the-scenes of a food business. Jaylord, a probationary newbie, finds himself the witness to the petty little thefts that his co-workers carry out at the workplace, as well as a conflicted participant to the pálakásan culture that defines the existing relationships among his peers.

Every now and then, when a character (mainly Jaylord) encountered a moral dilemma, the moderator Zoe Damag would interrupt the proceedings and not only ask the audience what that character should do—usually a question answerable by plain yes or no—but also launch a mini-open forum tackling that dilemma. Should Jaylord accept a bribe from his manager? Should he snitch on a co-worker?

Here the audience was even more engaged. In a moment of peak comedy, someone suggested that the nosy, holier-than-thou character played by the wonderful Pia Viola should spy on a possibly consequential conversation between two other characters; Viola gamely hammed it up, not-so-innocuously stalking the peripheries of the conversation like a cross between Edna Mode from The Incredibles and Velma from Scooby-Doo.

Yet, I also quickly found the discussions borderline frustrating. And because of these protracted discussions, the play itself started to feel long.

In particular, I thought the debates lacked a general awareness of the concept of structural violence. Everyone was rather hyper-fixated on judging the actions of the individual for what they were—i.e., stealing from the workplace is always bad, accepting bribes is always bad, and so on—with no notion of the proverbial larger picture. There was little in the way of genuinely interrogating the contexts behind a character’s morally dubious actions, or even the very ideas of good and bad—especially since the play seemed intent on driving home a specific brand of morality. One teacher even said that we should always do the “right” thing: “I may be far from reality,” she said, “pero ‘yan dapat ang tama.”

She was not wrong; I thought her comment had a point—but was also pretty myopic in its lofty idealism.

In sociology and anthropology, structural violence is a central concept referring to the harms caused by the social, structural, and institutional conditions shaping people’s lives—a form of indirect and invisible violence inflicted by laws, policies, and prevailing norms. And because it is invisible, it is often overlooked, ignored, unlearned.

During the play, the discussion had apparently fallen into the trap of a mindset in our neoliberal age: Blame was always pinned on the individual, the concept of responsibility limited to the actions of exactly one entity. So, the minimum wage earner Jaylord, with an ailing parent and hardly any savings to speak of, had to be condemned for accepting a bribe, or turning a blind eye to a theft in the workplace due to pakikisáma—while the system of stagnant wages, flawed labor laws, and relentless corporatism in society was largely ignored. Judgment was passed only on the small man, and never the big, unseen forces surrounding him and tethering him to his woes.

Was it too much to have expected the discussion to dive into the sociological? Perhaps, given that this was a young crowd. However, especially since there were teachers in attendance, the play could have also been the perfect teaching moment, an opportunity to broaden the minds of the students by inviting them to imagine a world beyond the individual: pedagogical theater at its best. Outside, a fuel crisis was in full swing, a neocolonial war in West Asia showed no signs of stopping, and an impending impeachment trial loomed large over Philippine politics. And we’re supposed to hyperfixate on stopping Jaylord from doing something “wrong”?

Taking matters into my own hands

Tired of the quasi-sermonizing tone of the talk, I decided to take matters into my own hands, aiming to deliberately give an out-of-left-field answer to the next question and hopefully inject an audience-provided, moral gray area to set up the succeeding scene.

In the play, everyone’s “bad” deeds were now coming to light—and Viola’s nosy character was threatening to involve the company’s big boss and the Department of Labor and Employment. What should happen next, Damag asked as moderator?

“We find out,” I said, microphone in hand, “that the boss is actually the lover of the manager, and that he already knows about these petty misdeeds in his business.”

Unfortunately, Damag said, there weren’t enough actors in the production to play this new character of the big boss-slash-lover—which meant he who furnished this new character must come forward and play it himself. Of all the questions I could have answered, I somehow picked the one that entailed the cameo? Not for nothing did Norma Desmond tell Mr. DeMille she was ready for her close-up all those years ago.

Onstage, I found myself in a kind of out-of-body experience, realizing that I was suddenly appearing in the play I was supposed to be reviewing—must I now review myself as well? It was also distracting—in the best possible way—to watch the actors commit to the bit. One of them was Ash Nicanor, a riot as a TikToker housemaid in last year’s Let’s Do Lunch, who was now begging me to let her keep her fictional job. Viola’s nosy character was refusing to stand down, and I had half a mind to declare her fired. At some point, Gino Ramirez, who played the manager, whispered to me: “Sabihin mo na lang, alam mo na ang lahat ng ‘yan.”

Only two months ago, I was watching Ramirez in KOLABorador Co.’s Lamay in Malaya, where he played a grief-stricken man who sought temporary solace in rough sex. Now he was my fictional lover—a fact I’d actually forgotten by then, interpreting his words as him guiding me, the volunteer actor, to wrap things up. Maybe I should just fire Viola’s character and be done with it, I thought.

By the time the curtain fell, it was nearly 5 pm. As Portales later said in a Facebook comment, if not for the scheduled evening show, we could have gone on all afternoon. More airtime for the boss, to the confusion of those poor kids and their teachers.