PDI Review: 'Kisapmata' by Tanghalang Pilipino

Last review for a while--I'm in Sydney until end of July-ish! Anyway, this play will go down as one of the highlights of my theatergoing life. Website version here.

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TP's 'Kisapmata' delivers chilling, powerful adaptation

Watching Tanghalang Pilipino’s (TP) “Kisapmata,” one easily forgets the film on which it is based. In a way, this is the ultimate compliment.

“Kisapmata” the film, directed and cowritten by Mike de Leon, is widely considered one of the greatest contemporary Filipino works of art. It is about a household under the suffocating spell of its patriarch—a horror film about the systematic erosion of a person’s ability to say no, to the point that constant obedience becomes their only idea of dealing with reality. At the time of its premiere at the 1981 Metro Manila Film Festival, the film became the perfect allegory for the preceding, diabolical decade of martial rule under Marcos Sr.

In “Kisapmata,” retired policeman Dadong dominates his wife Dely, daughter Mila, and son-in-law Noel with an iron fist (sometimes literally). His word is law; going against him is wishing for death.

De Leon depicts the terror permeating Dadong’s household in a straightforward manner, the man’s quiet evil—and his family’s inability to escape him—laid out in plain sight. The result is a kind of cinematic claustrophobia. The doom that befalls the characters feels obvious and inevitable, and one leaves the film shaken yet also seething with frustration at their choices.

“Kisapmata” the TP play retains the film’s story, but somehow takes it all a notch higher. To say it improves upon the film is downright inaccurate (not to mention heretical); instead, the play is its own creature.

Evil transcending time

As written and directed by Guelan Luarca, TP’s “Kisapmata” seems to reach for another kind of horror: something atavistic, an affliction embedded in the deepest recesses of the human psyche. The evil the play portrays is one that seemingly cannot be named—naming it might as well incur the most devastating fate. It is evil that, as in the film, exists in the present in broad daylight, but it also appears to transcend time: reaching heavily into the past and carrying with it the trauma of generations, while also portending an unspeakable future.

No wonder the characters often speak in whispers, as if scared they might be heard by the devil himself. Dely, in particular, has become a kind of Cassandra; she is the audience’s eyes and way into the world of the play, her murmured pronouncements—interjecting the action every so often—becoming omens of the characters’ unchangeable ends. “Whisper and cast your troubles to the grass, to the wind, to the night,” she advises Mila, and so the daughter does.

As simple as it seems, this acting motif of whispering is essential to the atmosphere Luarca has built for the play—one that thrives in abstraction, but is no less fatal. This “Kisapmata” means to throttle the viewer and take the breath out of them bit by bit. And it is unrelenting in this pursuit, the whispered moments becoming intermittent reminders that the characters already exist in a diseased household but have yet to face the worst. Nothing is more frightening than the unseen.

Combined, the design elements fulfill Luarca’s vision for the play: the bareness of Joey Mendoza’s set (mainly a raised platform surrounded by some talahib), like space for an ancient ritual; D Cortezano’s deployment of light not just to illuminate the action, but envelop the stage in shadows; Arvy Dimaculangan’s intelligent use of silence as soundscape; the way JM Cabling lets the actors navigate the spaces of the stage, stalking its “passages” and inhabiting its “corners,” such that moving in and around this imagined house becomes an evocation of the slowness of terror itself, a sort of prowling in the dark.

Story stripped bare

With the actors performing barefoot and in the same costume throughout, the production feels not just like a back-to-basics, but something akin to classical myth, a story stripped bare to expose the evil at its narrative core, poisoning its very bones.

In more than one occasion, in its scenes of violence, this “Kisapmata” unironically becomes “peak theater,” so to speak: as when one character “falls down” a flight of stairs, or when another gradually realizes he’s been deliberately locked inside the house.

Exhuming its characters’ fundamental fears alongside the patriarch’s deep-seated depravities, this “Kisapmata” also renders its political analogies crystal-clear. (In fact, a moment toward the end when overhead projections flash images of certain historical moments in Philippine history feel unnecessary.) In its portrayal of Dely, Mila, and Noel’s inabilities to escape Dadong, and especially in the women’s rationalizations of their choice to stay with him, the play becomes a piercing depiction of the Filipino people’s Stockholm syndrome with their strongmen.

Collab of a lifetime

How apt that the production should be running right now, when Duterte loyalists are making fools of themselves before the International Criminal Court and the rest of the world in the wake of the former president’s arrest and extradition.

And how lucky Manila audiences are not just to be living in the same timeline as Luarca, but also to be able to witness the TP Actors Company senior members in what feels like the collaboration of a lifetime.

Jonathan Tadioan (Dadong), Lhorvie Nuevo-Tadioan (Dely), Toni Go-Yadao (Mila), and Marco Viaña (Noel) have appeared together in TP productions for at least a decade now. The variety is staggering: to name a few, “Ang Pag-uusig” (Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible”), “Pangarap sa Isang Gabi ng Gitnang Tag-araw” (Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”), “Katsuri” (John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men”), and last year’s “Balete” (based partly on F. Sionil José’s novel “Tree”).

In “Kisapmata,” the four actors are each never better, but their work also collectively feels like a culmination of sorts. Each is giving a performance that evinces total mastery of craft, from physicality to emotion, from groundedness in the present to evocation of a character’s past. Yet, they also feel like a single organism, the years somehow having honed their discrete abilities to “feel” each other, such that now they breathe and move and live as one with ease.

In a year that has so far witnessed many new, big-name productions come up short, Luarca’s “Kisapmata” is a force to be reckoned with—truly best-of-the-decade material—and its four actors, epitomes of generous theatrical performances.

PDI Review: 'Anino sa Likod ng Buwan' by IdeaFirst Live

 This was bad. Inquirer website version here.

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'Anino sa Likod ng Buwan': Tonal whiplash

In theater, tone is paramount. It sells the piece to the viewer and makes whatever the play is going for believable, regardless of genre. So what happens when a production bungles this most crucial of artistic elements?

You get something like “Anino sa Likod ng Buwan.” Thirty-two years ago, in 1993, Jun Robles Lana wrote “Anino’s” original iteration, a play that won first prize at the Bulwagang Gantimpala competition. In 2015, his screen adaptation of that play hit the cinemas. Now, Lana has written “Anino’s” third incarnation, adapted from his film script and brought to life at the Peta Theater Center by IdeaFirst Live (its maiden theatrical offering).

The story has remained unchanged, apparently. Emma and Nardo are introduced to the audience as a couple living a life of minimal means in 1990s Marag Valley in the northern reaches of Luzon. They are friends with Joel, though they shouldn’t be—he’s a soldier, part of the military forces patrolling and terrorizing the Philippine countryside in their mission to quash the communist insurgency.

Within an intermission-less 100 minutes, this friendship between the soldier and the couple is revealed to be a con played from both sides. Emma and Nardo are no ordinary couple; they are actually (semi-spoiler alert) part of the resistance. And while all the characters believe they are fighting for what’s best for the country, the larger, moral picture is never less than certain: One side is fighting on behalf of elite capture and the oligarchy; the other, for the displaced, the landless, the land itself.

Lana—inarguably more famous nowadays for his films—writes all that in language that betrays a fondness for poetry and an eye for gritty realism. His technique occasionally heightens the imaginative qualities of the play, but more often results in abrupt shifts in tone. Nevertheless, it’s also language that evinces the writer’s flair for the theatrical, as in some of his recent work: that bravura, 14-minute, one-take scene in the Vice Ganda vehicle “And the Breadwinner Is…”; the doppelgänger device in “About Us But Not About Us,” for example.

Love and desire

Moreover, it’s not difficult to appreciate the dramatic heights to which Lana’s writing for “Anino” aspires. As much as the play is about the politics of state-sponsored conflict in the countryside, it is also about the politics of love and desire, its three characters weaponizing their bodies and urges to wage a war much bigger than themselves.

When the characters talk about bloodshed in the community, then suddenly wax lyrical about love—for a partner, for the nation—it kind of makes weird, imperfect sense.

It’s an entirely different story when Lana’s script is situated within this production directed by Tuxqs Rutaquio. Unable to tame the playwright’s random shifts between metaphor and the literal, such moments simply register as whiplash by way of language. For lack of a subtler phrase, this “Anino” is a tonal mess.

Nowhere is this theatrical schizophrenia more conspicuous than in the fact that the three actors spearheading this production each appear to be inhabiting a different play on their own.

As Joel, Martin del Rosario (in his stage debut) has the complexion of one who has never spent enough hours outdoors and the build of an urban gym rat. When he speaks—whether he’s justifying the army’s actions or defending the government’s atrocities—he frequently does so in an oratorical manner that would make him a promising period-drama star (think Vicomte de Valmont in “Dangerous Liaisons”). He’s a could-be Shakespearean in a play that wants nothing to do with the classics.

As Emma, Elora Españo has such a pinched presence that her crucial big moments later in the play feel disjointed, like the work of another. Lately, Españo has been a darling of the screen, churning out excellent turns in at least three films that premiered locally last year (Lana’s “Your Mother’s Son,” Sigrid Andrea Bernardo’s “Pushcart Tales,” Dominic Bekaert’s “An Errand”). But in “Anino,” Españo is just… small, and also ungrounded. In fact, sometimes she almost floats into the background.

Firm grasp

Only Ross Pesigan, as Nardo, shows a firm grasp of the grammar of theatrical performance. Unsurprising, given Pesigan is a native of the stage (his excellent turns in Dulaang UP’s “Fake” and “Ang Nawalang Kapatid” paving the way, nine years later in 2023, for a Gawad Buhay-nominated performance in Barefoot Theatre Collaborative’s “Laro”).

Yet, his Nardo is not entirely convincing, either; there’s not enough gravity, cunning, or weariness in his portrayal of a secret agent of the revolution.

Let loose onstage by Rutaquio like clay figures in a creation myth, the three actors brave scene after scene—and mood after mood—the best they can. One moment they’re approximating Samuel Beckett’s existential poetry; 10 minutes later, they are starring in an afternoon soap; another 10 minutes and they’re doing realism by way of Lino Brocka.

No wonder the audience is equally unmoored. Consider the play’s second “act”: With Nardo momentarily gone, Joel and Emma reveal the sick game of lust and power they have been playing behind his back; they have rabid sex repeatedly, then make professions of love to each other, all while trying to get the other to submit.

On opening night, this whole portion of the play turned the theater into a comedy bar; people kept laughing because the action became unreadable, and therefore unbelievable and downright silly.

Misogyny

Sadly, the tonal contradictions are not the last of this production’s problems; they only make two other things more glaring. One is the perverse misogyny of the play. In “Anino,” the female body (Emma’s, to be exact) is both object of worship and weapon of war. Consequently, there is a lot of nudity here. What’s troubling is how all this is handled: in perhaps the most male gaze-y way possible, the naked body and the sexual act spectacularized and intended only to shock, their necessity to the story chucked to the sidelines. Has Rutaquio’s production heard of an intimacy coordinator?

Relatedly, this misogyny also shapes the play’s imagination of the revolutionary movement, and women’s roles in it. Here it all goes back, yet again, to the female body, and how Lana imagines its purpose—its uses, in the most utilitarian sense of the word—in realizing ideology. Without spoiling anything, I will say that somehow the play appears to be so enamored with the spectacle of melodrama that, in the end, it comes off as hollow histrionics — quite a disservice to the movement and all its women martyrs.