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.

Diarist Review: 'A Chorus Line' by Theatre Group Asia

 Me? Praising a TGA show? So, like, I'm not actually out to get them? The website version here.

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A Chorus Line: I was five feet away from Conrad Ricamora

Sucks that they're seemingly having a hard time filling these seats, though.

It’s not every day you get to watch Conrad Ricamora absolutely act his ass off five feet away from you.

But that was exactly my experience at the March 19 performance of A Chorus Line, the Tony- and Pulitzer Prize-winning Broadway musical now in the thick of a rare three-week stint in the Philippines—47 years after it premiered in the country under Repertory Philippines. Running until March 29 at the Samsung Performing Arts Theater, Makati City, this iteration is presented by Theatre Group Asia (TGA).

Followers of American TV might recognize Ricamora from How to Get Away with Murder, the legal drama series headlined by Viola Davis from 2014 to 2020. But if you really know your anglophone theater, you’d know that the actor has appeared in some of the most notable Asian- and Asian-American-centric productions of the last decade and a half in New York: the disco-pop Imelda Marcos musical Here Lies Love, the last revival of The King and I on Broadway, David Henry Hwang and Jeanine Tesori’s Soft Power. Last year, he received his first Tony nomination playing a closeted Abraham Lincoln in the hit comedy Oh, Mary!.

It wasn’t until four years ago, however, that I first watched Ricamora perform in something. That would be Fire Island, the 2022 film adaptation of the classic Jane Austen novel Pride and Prejudice, directed by Andrew Ahn. Fire Island basically reimagined Austen’s novel from a queer lens, setting the story in the eponymous gay haven in New York. Austen’s band of romance-hungry English sisters was now a group of gay friends on holiday in contemporary United States, their problems cast against the larger tapestry of LGBTQIA+ issues surrounding sex, intimacy, and romance.

Ricamora had relatively few lines in the film—or so I remember. He played the counterpart of the novel’s Mr. Darcy, the aloof male hero who, despite himself, eventually ends up with the heroine Elizabeth. Ricamora’s take on the character more or less followed the mold of the original. He brooded—a lot—acted rude, and came across as repulsive most of the time, so clumsy was he in the language of love. But, oh, how he smoldered! In his quiet, he was the sexiest presence in that film, his coldness a strange form of hypnosis. He made you want to follow his love—no matter how inarticulate—to the ends of that sweet earth.

It’s this same brand of magnetism that Ricamora now brings to A Chorus Line. The 1975 musical, widely hailed a landmark piece of theater, is perhaps most famous for having an entire ensemble as its stars, all of them more or less accorded the same level of stereotypical stardom (in contrast to the traditional show structure top-billed by a clear leading man and/or lady, followed by featured performers, and then the ensemble). That atypical structure is in service to the story: The musical is a show within-a-show, taking place at a fictional audition for Broadway dancers.

Ricamora plays Zach, the stern director and auditions overseer of the fictional show. Interestingly, it’s a role without its own solo number—all the other notable characters, the “audition hopefuls,” each have their big song, or at least share a prolonged moment in the spotlight with someone else. So it’s a testament to Ricamora’s skills as an actor that Zach has unexpectedly become one of the two most compelling presences in this production.

As written, A Chorus Line is like one long therapy session with multiple patients: Zach is the therapist, and the auditionees are his patients. Trying to get to know his potential dancers better, Zach would call them one by one and throw them basic-sounding questions: “When did you start dancing?” “Why are you in this business?” “What was your family like?” As each auditionee gets their turn answering a question, they would eventually segue into song and dance. The playwriting technique is rather on-the-nose here. If auditions really went like this, shrinks might just become passé.

The beauty of Ricamora’s performance lies in his voice: It’s just truly outstanding voice work. Zach basically sets the mood for most of the songs, and Ricamora aces all that, conveying with the slightest changes in tone, inflection, and volume entire backstories, and a multitude of emotions. It’s the art of speaking at its finest. You do not doubt for a second that this director is not messing around, but you also feel it in your bones that he genuinely cares for his dancers.

One sly trick up its sleeve

This production has one sly trick up its sleeve: It makes Ricamora roam the theater, talking to the auditionees from the orchestra section, among the audience members, then later, from the loge, one level up. The device elevates the musical’s audition conceit—now the whole audience has become the casting director, watching the auditions alongside Zach.

That’s essentially how I came to witness Ricamora’s work up close. Seated at the loge, I couldn’t always see the actor when he was roaming the orchestra section—and the effect was uncanny, that authoritative voice echoing throughout the theater now akin to the voice of God, an unseen omnipresent master. Later, he was only two seats away from me as he administered the auditions from my section. It didn’t really make much sense why he’d be so high up—the Filipino phrase “trip niya lang” comes to mind—but who cares? It’s a fun gimmick, and it’s also a welcome, zoomed-in view of one of Broadway’s finest, underrated actors literally in the thick of his process. 

As a whole, this production of A Chorus Line is terrific—a welcome addition to a so-far exciting and promising year in Manila theater. For one, it has given us some of the most intoxicating dancing in local musical theater in recent memory, joining the likes of last year’s Shrek the Musical by Full House Theater Company and Bar Boys: The Musical by Barefoot Theatre Collaborative, Newsies by 9 Works Theatrical, Ang Huling El Bimbo at Newport World Resorts, and Ang Nawalang Kapatid by Dulaang UP. 

Truth be told, it’s a bummer that the show seems to be playing to many empty seats, if only to go by the performance I attended (and the status of other performances on Ticketworld)—and especially following the sold-out success of TGA’s Into the Woods last year. (In this vein, I am reminded of the international touring production of Chicago at The Theatre at Solaire in 2014—another unjustly poorly attended affair that similarly featured go-for-broke, backbreaking dancing.)

In A Chorus Line, the choreography (by Emmy winner Karla Puno Garcia, who also directs) results in one scintillating, breathtaking sequence after another that all feels fresh, modern, hip. I wouldn’t have expected anything less; A Chorus Line, after all, is renowned for being a dance musical. To pull off its dance-auditions milieu, it needs to cast really good dancers, first of all, who can also act and sing well.

The elevated vantage point of the loge section affords the perfect view to appreciate Puno Garcia’s heady terpsichorean concoction, enhanced by set designer Miguel Urbino’s play with moving mirror panels, frequently bordered with bold lighting by Cha See. That Act I ender (Gimme the Ball) is the literal definition of sensory overload, the dancers (with a standout Rapah Manalo) assembling and disassembling themselves in various configurations like an eternally oscillating entity—at one point, a triangular formation that’s thoroughly electric and unmistakably alive—invoking the thrill of celebration, the ecstatic riot of a fiesta, as if these auditionees had all landed the job. And that finale—One—is simply glorious, with the entire cast now garbed in shimmering tuxedoes and top hats, their golden attire striking against the stark black background, the choreography a mesmerizing symphony of lines and lights. It’s honestly one of the most spectacular endings I’ve seen in my years covering the theater.

 

Apart from Ricamora, the other compelling presence in this production is Lissa deGuzman as Cassie, the veteran dancer now in the throes of a slow period in her career—and downgrading herself by vying for a part in this dance ensemble just so she could have a job. DeGuzman is maybe the most expressive presence on that stage, in arguably the show’s meatiest role: a whirlwind of pathos and rugged resolve that all but drives home the musical’s point that a dancer’s life is hardly one of luxury. When deGuzman sings The Music and the Mirror, it’s a wistful vision of many Cassies reflected in Urbino’s mirrors, evoking the veteran’s many past lives.

An embarrassment of riches

The entire cast, in fact, is an embarrassment of riches—many of them hardworking regulars of Manila’s ensembles through the years. Notably, Mikaela Regis—a Gawad Buhay-nominated playwright for Unica Hijas—makes her mark as the spunky Sheila, while Universe Ramos is revelatory as Paul, delivering a performance of arresting minimalism and emotional clarity.

I found the supposed dramatic climax of the musical sort of a letdown, though. Late in the second act, Ricamora’s Zach loses it with deGuzman’s Cassie—by then he’s spent a good amount of time pointing out one tiny error after another in her dancing (deGuzman, for her part, is very good in playing up these small yet noticeable imperfections). Then, the “big” revelation: The two have a romantic past, and, at one point, even lived together. It’s all very melodramatic—an “ungkátan ng past,” to use the Taglish expression, that makes you wonder why it’s worth our time in the first place. In Filipino, “Ano ba ang problema ninyo, at bakit kailangan may paké kami?”

From there, I briefly zoned out and started thinking about the current state of global affairs, about the genocide in Palestine, Zionist expansionism in West Asia, and the relentless bombing and ecocide in Iran; about the skyrocketing fuel prices in the Philippines, how oil conglomerates in the country are getting away with disgusting profiteering amidst the lack of legal regulation; about the sheer fact that not one bigwig politician has been jailed from the scandal surrounding flood control projects last year. Amidst such a desolate reality, the problems of these fictional dancers suddenly seemed so…trivial. Banal. Small. It’s that “Kim, there’s people that are dying” meme from Keeping Up with the Kardashians made manifest.

But then that glorious, ovation-worthy ending rolled around, and I was back in that theater, completely alive as I beheld this singular sensation of a cast. A sold-out run would have been well-deserved.