Although Pasiya seems, on the surface, to be preoccupied with law, its main interest clearly lies in history. Or, to be more precise, in situating law within moments of historical rupture—whether real or imagined—and recasting them as moments of melodrama.
The latest offering from The Corner Studio, Pasiya is a twin bill of one-act plays: the first, a new work titled Every Male or Female, and the second, the returning People v. Dela Cruz, which made its premiere in January this year. Both are penned and directed by Eldrin Veloso, who also acts in the second.
In both plays, Veloso places the audience in a sort of fork-in-the-road situation, in a time framed as historically significant and therefore necessarily imbued with the weight and gravity of such a temporal juncture. Then he zooms in on the human element, imagining how ordinary people come to terms with that juncture: How does one grapple with a time preordained as important?
To go by Veloso’s characters, there’s never a more perfect moment to be small and subsumed by the fallibility of human emotion.
Every Male or Female
Of the two, Every Male or Female is evidently the more successful work. Set on the day of the 1935 constitutional plebiscite, which eventually ratified the new Constitution and established the Philippine Commonwealth, the play dangles a lose-lose situation to its three women characters: Voting yes in the plebiscite will bring the country one step closer toward independence, but it might also mean losing their hard-won right of suffrage as women under a largely Pinoy-run Commonwealth (which was exactly what happened at the start of that era); voting no, or not voting at all, will preserve their right of suffrage—but keep them shackled as subjects of America.
The play is a breezy 30 minutes—and in that half-hour span, a lunchtime gathering predictably, and deliciously, devolves into chaos. Veloso uses his three characters as avatars for conflicting—but no less valid—points of view, all of which bring the present-day audience closer to understanding the fears and anxieties that women at the time might have harbored. Hilda (Rain de Jesus) is a staunch non-voter; Esperanza (Althea Aruta) is a sunny yes vote; and caught in between are the elder Pacita (Carla Martinez) and Hilda’s daughter Felisa (Vea Noroña), who has a new suitor. (That the presence of this suitor in their lives inevitably influences the characters’ stances should go without saying.)
To a certain extent, the play succeeds in evoking a harmonious look and feel—the 1930s rendered intentionally anachronistic through occasional contemporary slips in language and the acting styles of its ensemble, in a way portending the slow, winding road to genuine progress in women’s rights. De Jesus, in particular, can be quite gripping in her best moments: a visibly modern woman paradoxically chained to the past.
On the whole, however, the play still feels too loose to be truly compelling drama: more a surprisingly effective first stab at the material than a cohesive work of art. It has many things to say, a lot of them meaningful, but it’s still working toward becoming the best speaker in the room.
People v. Dela Cruz
This looseness in theater-making is even more glaring in the second, and longer, play. Whereas Every Male or Female casts its gaze toward the past, People v. Dela Cruz looks to the future, imagining a Philippines with a jury system. The story itself is set in the backroom discussions of the country’s first jury trial deliberations, revolving around a case of Duterte-style nanlaban that makes the play seem as though it were unfolding in the present.
Judging by TheaterFansManila.com editor-in-chief Nikki Francisco’s review of the original run, little has changed in the play. It’s still Veloso “staging a room full of people he clearly doesn’t think could jury a case… and letting them confirm his suspicion.” In fact, the existence of the jury is only a device; the real priority of this play lies in corralling a group of problematic individuals, each with their own stereotypical quirks and assigned issues, and watching them explode in this pressure-cooker scenario.
Francisco describes the play as “headed for a mistrial,” but to my mind, it’s already a mistrial from the start—the point being the gradual uncovering of the loud, wearying whys over the course of an hour. That resort to comfortable narrative predictability unfortunately proves to be the play’s fatal flaw.
The Corner Studio and ‘small’ theater
Hopefully, neither play—particularly the second—represents its definitive version. The productions themselves are also staged with the kind of spareness that detracts from the world-building—not so much a lack of design as a distracting absence in areas where it is most needed (for instance, sound).
But there’s also something meaningful to be gleaned from this spareness: Pasiya is staged in a space that was obviously not intended to be a theater. The venue is a mixed-use site serving other purposes during the day, an office or function room and shelves housing interior-design bric-a-brac. And the production company itself has been staging theater for only two years, this twin bill being its third offering.
If anything, this scrappy, DIY-coded brand of ‘small’ theater is not only a welcome antidote, but an indispensable complement, to the mainstream, with its flashy venues and splashy production values. Here, The Corner Studio has much in common with the likes of Artist Playground, Mad Child Productions, Scene Change, and Company of Actors in Streamlined Theatre—for whom experimentation is not treated as a gamble to be altogether avoided, and testing new material is second nature.
In a landscape constantly pulled between the imperative to make consequential theater and the practical need to make, well, money, these small companies have never been more essential—almost an existential lifeline, to be honest, if only for the kind of liberating spaces they afford artists.
In this sense, at least, one can deliver a fairly firm verdict on Pasiya.
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