Diarist Review: 'Fiestas y Muertos' by Dulaang UP

Really starting to wonder if I'll ever get to see a great DUP production again...  The website version of this review here.

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Dulaang UP's Fiestas y Muertos: An overgrown forest of words

Dulaang Unibersidad ng Pilipinas’ (DUP) Fiestas y Muertos takes over three hours to retell Jose Rizal’s Noli Me Tangére. Yet, by the end of it, you barely gain any new insight into the seminal novel. Worse, the play muddies the clarity and brilliance of the national hero’s writing.

If you went to high school in the Philippines within the last 70 years, you’ve probably read Noli as part of the curriculum (or at least skimmed through its pages). It’s likely the most famous and most familiar piece of literature in the country, its characters long ingrained in everyday Filipino culture: Young girls are told to emulate the graceful piety of Maria Clara long before they hit their teens; lecherous priests are compared to Padre Damaso. Not for nothing is it considered our national epic, alongside its sequel, El Filibusterismo.

Dulaang UP uses Andrew Estacio’s adaptation of National Artist Rio Alma’s Filipino translation of the original Spanish-language novel. And rather frustratingly, the play doesn’t seem to trust the viewer to immediately grasp what it wants to say all the time.

Estacio’s script is a wearying, undisciplined thing, an overgrown forest of words. The expression siksik na siksik comes to mind, and not in a good way. This adaptation seems so deferential to its source material, it can’t muster the nerve to edit itself. So much scene-setting occurs in the first 30 minutes that comes across as extraneous fat; what would probably be enriching and illuminating on the page only detracts from getting the point across onstage. For example, Doña Victorina’s dinner-table outburst over the chicken parts in her serving of tinola hardly deepens our understanding of that character—by then we already know she’s an uncouth elitist snob, just from actress Kiki Baento’s boisterous laughter and gaudy outfit alone—and for the rest of the play, she’s relegated to enacting variations on snootiness.

For all its fixation on small details, most of the time this adaptation just goes through the novel’s chapters in rote succession, without fleshing out the larger psychology of things. Repetition is a recurring motif, lest the audience miss what’s already obvious; scenes can’t help explaining themselves, and neither can Estacio’s characters. Pilosopyo Tasyo, now the gender-bent Teodora Anastacia (Peewee O’Hara), doubles as a narrator the play doesn’t even need.

Director José Estrella steers the production with a lot of signaling that her characters are from an olden time—perhaps the adaptation’s attempt to mirror the elevated writing style and give Noli a genuinely classical spin in the vein of Shakespeare or the ancient Greeks. But this stab at elevated performance is far from a success: What comes out of it is a lot of stilted, soulless, shouty vocal projection—again, as if the actors are afraid the audience won’t get what they’re saying or performing. A clandestine meeting in the cemetery among townsfolk sympathetic to the hero Ibarra’s cause unfolds at decibels that would wake the whole town. Jojo Cayabyab’s Padre Damaso bellows his way across the whole of fictional San Diego.

Estrella is essentially powerless in the face of the writing’s faults. Take Maria Clara’s revelatory monologue in Act II, in which she reveals to Ibarra who her biological father is: As the heroine, Justine Peña can only do so much with the fickle, excessive language, but at the pivotal moment, she’s made to drop her voice in the most unconvincingly self-conscious and cartoonish manner, and whisper the name in her lover’s ear. Talk about a big reveal.

In fact, among the cast, only Jerom Canlas (Ibarra) and Elora Españo (Salome) make you believe in the elevated nature of the proceedings: They at least make the language sound like it is coming from within them, and not merely a playwright’s overindulgent ramblings. Even better, they yank that lofty language straight back to earth, transforming it into the stuff of visceral, compelling drama. Canlas, in particular, is really good in his final monologue, which lands like a Marvel-esque “Ibarra will be back” moment, even if he’s sporting a crossbody bag that belongs on a department store rack.

Which is to say, the design elements, too, are a mixed bag. So many scenes are lit in bland, unappetizing yellow, almost as if lighting designer Barbie Tan-Tiongco had given up trying to design the show. Angel Dayao’s atmospheric sound keeps getting hushed or altogether disappears when it matters. Al Bernard Garcia’s movement design has exactly one standout moment—the crocodile attack in the lake, summoned to life with innovative use of a billowing cloth. And one can’t help feeling like the production has been directed and choreographed only from a particular side of the theater, even though the performance area is essentially a thrust stage.

Still, there are two moments when this production actually succeeds as both a play and an adaptation, in that every element completely coheres with the rest, hinting at an altogether different, far more persuasive life for this iteration of Noli. The first is Ibarra and Maria Clara’s meeting in the azotea, the lovers reunited for the first time in seven years. With very little words, the production makes something truly romantic and lyrical of this scene.

The second is the Act I finale—a protracted finale, it must be said, but one that justifies its length. Here, at last, is the play at the peak of its theatrical capacities, doing a fine job of dramatizing the material. Padre Damaso’s long-winded sermon is interspersed with different scenes collectively encapsulating the novel’s themes: Peña’s Maria Clara showing radical kindness to a visibly diseased person; the pomp and noise of the fiesta juxtaposed with depictions of social maladies that earn the play its title; and all of that culminating with an instance of true-blue satire, in keeping with the essence of Rizal—Cayabyab’s Damaso screaming at the somnolent parishioners, with all the whiny bitchiness he could muster, that they will always be indios. Nearly two hours into this eternity of a first act, Fiestas y Muertos finally feels like encountering Rizal anew.