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.

Diarist Review: 'Emilia' by Tanghalang Ateneo

New favorite show of 2026--my review in The Diarist here.

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Emilia: Theater that leaves you on a high

Curtain call during media night of Emilia.

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.

Diarist Review: 'Ang Linangan' by Scene Change; 'Mula sa Kulimliman' by Ateneo Fine Arts; 'anthropology' by Barefoot Theatre Collaborative

This was a good Sunday. The website version of this article here.

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Must-see theater this weekend: From promising to phenomenal

Ang Linangan curtain call.

There’s nothing quite like a marathon weekend at the theater, especially if all the shows you watched ranged from promising to phenomenal.

Such was my Sunday at Ateneo de Manila University last March 22, when I caught three productions in succession: at 2 p.m., a translation of a relatively new American work; at 4:30 p.m., a thesis performance of a Virgin Labfest entry from 2016; finally, at 8 p.m., a straight play about artificial intelligence (AI) that was, more than anything else, an acting tour-de-force. 

Ang Linangan 

The first is Ang Linangan—Davis Alianiello’s The Farm, now rendered in Filipino by Guelan Varela-Luarca and produced by Scene Change. It’s a pretty straightforward, 90-minute piece about a fraught reunion between two siblings, Tyler and Sasha, two years after the former ran off to join a cult and live in an isolated settlement in Italy (hence the title).

There are many reasons not to miss this play, which is running for two weekends only until March 29. Chief among them, I’d say, is that this is a new piece by Varela-Luarca.

That’s not a biased take; by now, the prolific 34-year-old has more than earned his place in the pantheon of must-see Filipino theater artists, akin to how a new play by the late Floy Quintos always felt like a never-to-miss event: You ran to get tickets the moment they were available. Especially in the post-pandemic stretch, Varela-Luarca has just been putting out one banger after another, as Gen Z would have it: 3 Upuan, Kisapmata, Dagitab, Quomodo Desolata Es? Isang Dalamhati, Nekropolis.

So stacked is his body of work, in fact, that his critical hits before COVID-19, like Desaparesidos, Batang Mujahideen, and Alpha Kappa Omega, feel like they belong already to another era of his career, and his days as student actor—he was heartbreaking as the lead in Tanghalang Ateneo’s (TA) Middle Finger in 2014—a completely different lifetime.

Without doubt, Ang Linangan lives up to the standard set by its predecessors. It’s a work of limitless patience and compassion, insisting incessantly on stretching our human capacities to understand, to forgive, to let go and let live.

On Instagram, the equally prolific Nelsito Gomez describes it as “life-affirming theater,” and that’s an accurate assessment: The play unmistakably feels like part of the continuum of Varela-Luarca’s recent work, in conversation with 3 Upuan and Dagitab, probing the myriad permutations through which we—fragile, imperfect mortals—err in the tiniest, most mundane ways; inflict hurt upon ourselves and those around us, oftentimes with such crippling banality; and, in the most theatrical, almost spiritual manner, rise above it all—or at least, make peace with it.

Varela-Luarca’s translation is easy to follow, but fertile with stunningly evocative passages. Witness Sasha telling Tyler about a recently deceased, dear friend of hers: “Siya ang taga-imbák ng buhay ko”—a person as repository of an existence, the custodian of memory, the keeper of another, the ultimate witness. Indeed, is there a kinder, more human gesture?

Almost the entire play is set during the car ride home in the ungodly hours of a wintry pre-dawn, with Tyler newly arrived in America and Sasha at the wheel. And like the best pieces of theater, Ang Linangan takes you on a complete ride, doling out its tricks and secrets bit by bit, keeping the audience guessing all the way to the end. The central mystery—and the reason for Tyler’s return home—involves a pregnant woman in the cult, and without spoiling anything, I’ll say that the beauty of this play is in how it keeps the viewer thinking that its tricks and secrets are somewhere within the realm of the mystical and otherworldly.

Of course, they aren’t; everything is as real, concrete, and logical as can be, the repercussions all very tangible, crashing down with such force that one instantly abandons all belief in the mystical and otherworldly. Cults aren’t called cults for nothing.

Scene Change’s production, working with the tiniest of spaces, is a marvel of precision. John Lucing’s movement design, Cholo Ledesma and Uriel Tibayan’s sound design, and D Cortezano’s set and lights all coexist within a sort of square corner of the repurposed classroom that serves as the theater—and yet, together, their greatest achievement is in the inversion of scale: a whole distinct universe, complete lives, and decades of personal history bursting forth from this little pocket of the Philippines.

Varela-Luarca, by the way, also serves as director here—and from actors J-mee Katanyag and Brian Sy, he has coaxed a pair of towering performances. Sy is great—pitiful, even—in embodying the disillusionment of Tyler, and portraying a man harboring one too many secrets—but acting like he has none.

Katanyag is exceptional. Now artistic director of PETA (Philippine Educational Theater Association), she is rarely seen onstage as an actor these days, and Ang Linangan only underscores what we’ve been missing out on. As Sasha, Katanyag is very, very good at fleshing out that very tricky attribute: frustration. She scours an entire, volatile psychological landscape, becoming the harried wife and mother, abandoned sibling, and exasperated and furious voice of reason throughout the play, and just when you think you already have the rhythm of her work down pat, she surprises you ten more times.

Mula sa Kulimliman

The second show, the thesis performance, also had a surprise—in the form of the student actress. The play: Carlo Vergara’s Mula sa Kulimliman, to my mind the best of the 12 new one-acts that premiered during Virgin Labfest 12 almost a full decade ago. It’s a comedy centered on a stressed-on-all-fronts housewife who slowly discovers her husband isn’t exactly the ordinary, normal person he presents himself to be. Like many of Vergara’s works, this can also be easily categorized as a superhero play.

The thesis, which closed March 22, was directed by Cholo Ledesma, who also helmed TA’s Paano Man ang Ibig—Shakespeare’s As You Like It—last year, with a cast largely composed of newbie student actors. Between these two works, it’s clear this relative newbie director has a knack for somehow getting young, non-professionals to cohere onstage and nail a specific overarching mood as an ensemble.

Ledesma’s Mula sa Kulimliman lacked the chop-chop, frenzied rhythm of this comedy. But he brought out an aspect to the play I hadn’t considered: His production felt more maternal, attuned to the unhurried pace of a living, breathing household in all its unglamorous imperfections. And he also guided the thesis examinee to a performance worthy of top marks: Nicole Chua, playing the mother and housewife with such believable warmth and groundedness like a pro. It’s always a pleasure witnessing student actors ace the assignment, and here, Chua had me looking forward to her next work.

anthropology

To cap off my Atenean Sunday, I saw Barefoot Theatre Collaborative’s first offering of the year: anthropology (the lowercase title a stylistic choice), a play by Lauren Gunderson, whom we previously encountered in Manila through Silent Sky, The Revolutionists, and The Half-Life of Marie Curie. Like Ang Linangan, anthropology also closes on March 29.

The selling point of the play is the prominent role of AI in its story. AI is all the rage nowadays: Academic conferences are full of papers about it; classrooms have been infiltrated by it, and thrown into existential crises as a result; entertainment industries have been ground to a halt debating its use, as we saw during the Screen Actors Guild–American Federation of Television and Radio Artists strike in 2023.

In Gunderson’s play, a programmer, Merril, creates an AI version of her missing sister Angie as a way of coping with grief, only for this avatar—refined many times over since inception—to reveal the true fate of the flesh-and-blood Angie.

Speaking as an anthropologist, I don’t find anything particularly groundbreaking or profound in how the play weaves AI into its study of what makes us human (hence the title)—nothing that hasn’t already been tackled by other works, often with greater insight. Alex Garland’s Ex Machina, Spike Jonze’s Her, and, of course, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey immediately come to mind. In fact, the play feels reluctant to really go all the way as a piece about AI. (There’s even a bit here about the AI turning sort of malevolent that only invites comparisons to Kubrick’s film.)

 

Unsurprisingly, anthropology is far more successful—and compelling—as an anthropology of grief. It’s fully realized as an exploration of the lengths to which one might be willing to go to make sense of sadness—or be rid of it, if only momentarily. In this regard, it’s a blood relative of those crime-drama thrillers anchored by a grieving protagonist, like HBO’s Mare of Easttown (starring a sensational Kate Winslet). The AI thing is little more than a front.

Director Caisa Borromeo seems well aware of this: Hers is a production of bracing emotional honesty, never less than truthful in how it portrays the many configurations of anguish brought about by the loss of a loved one. Aptly enough—given March is Women’s Month in the Philippines—Borromeo has conjured a portrait of artistic generosity in the fierce quartet of actresses she has assembled.

Jenny Jamora plays Merril, and Jackie Lou Blanco, her estranged mom—together they lay a sort of groundwork for the play, its terrain of unresolved heartbreak. It’s this groundwork that Mikkie Bradshaw-Volante (as Merril’s ex-girlfriend) and Maronne Cruz (as Angie) unsettle in their individual scenes; they tilt the axis of this already-tilted world even further, allowing the play to venture into yet-unknown realms of dramatic possibility.

In Cruz’s case, it’s literally a moment of rupture. For much of the play, she exists onscreen as the AI Angie, projected on four panels by video designer Steven Tansiongco (with CueCraft Studio). Then, in a final sequence that I won’t spoil with specifics, the real Angie bursts into the scene, a distant shadow of her AI self, less a hurricane than a snuffed-out meteor. It’s a welcome, destabilizing jolt to the system that Borromeo directs and Cruz executes to perfection. Only later does it dawn on you: That’s an actress at the peak of her abilities, giving one of the year’s most emotionally curious and empathetic performances. 

Last year, I wrote how the Ateneo has become the premiere hub for theater north of the Pasig River. This three-show Sunday at the Quezon City campus only reinforced that observation. And, with Katanyag in Ang Linangan, Chua in Mula sa Kulimliman, and the ladies of anthropology, it’s been a Women’s Month like no other.