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.
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