PETA gets serious then lightens up
The first two offerings in the new season of the Philippine Educational Theater Association (PETA) feature familiar stories retold. They differ in how well they do so.
Running six weeks in July and August, Noli at Fili Dekada 2000, PETA’s season opener, calls itself a contemporary interpretation of Jose Rizal’s novels. Writer Nicanor Tiongson and director Soxie Topacio recast the novel’s narratives into one seamless story set in contemporary times in an unnamed province in Southern Tagalog. They find a current issue to center the story on: illegal logging and the devastation it wreaks. The familiar panoply of characters is updated for the new century: Crisostomo Ibarra is now Ibarra Marasigan, an idealistic but naive town mayor. Maria Clara is Clarissa, his fiancée, who is snatched away by the villainous Colonel (no longer Padre) Salvi. Padre Damaso is a bishop with a sordid secret. And so on.
The play begins with an impressive set-piece: a tableau of five people huddling in darkness relate the story of a great flood that swept away their homes. A man looked behind him and found his brother gone; a woman loses a baby. Thunder rumbles, and it isn’t just a natural catastrophe. What we hear are massive logs, hundreds of them, falling on their huts. Water pours from the ceiling and drenches the wretches. For 10 minutes we are caught in a spell of pity and fear, and outrage, too, at those who have caused their misery.
But then the scene ends, the familiar story begins to unfold, and our interest begins to flag. Why? The production makes a fatal mistake: it retells Rizal’s narrative as no more than a melodrama fit for a telenovela. Perhaps the idea was to dress the old story in modern garb and bring it closer to a young audience. But Rizal’s novels are propaganda literature, which is powered by the twin engines of earnestness and inevitability. Prop-lit of this kind is dead serious, and deflating irony kills it. By making the story not any different from one we might catch on late afternoon TV, the show provokes laughter or groans when it should induce grave empathy and assent. The production robs the story of its power to move.
We see this misguidedness in the dialogue. Some exchanges are no better than soap-opera fare. (Example: “If you leave me, I’ll shoot you!” Salvi tells Clarissa. She retorts “I dare you!” then turns on her heel.) At other times the language is baldly schematic: “Drastic surgery ang kailangan,” Ibarra as Simon the rebel leader says, “hindi panacea o painkiller.” It may have been better to render the dialogue in a more formal and stately Filipino, which could have given the subject the freight it lacks.
What makes things worse is the production’s attempt to draw literal parallels between the fiction and current events. The production’s strength is its evocation of the rot at the core of the body politic, which corrupts the limbs. But because it insists so emphatically that its story is about matters of the moment, we balk at its earnestness. “Their greed cannot be moderated!” Ibarra shouts at someone who pleads with him against blowing up the bishop’s residence. It’s heart is in the right place, but we feel resentful at being pushed down a road we have already chosen to take. The play feels like so much screeching at the choir.
In the end PETA’s Noli at Fili is a good example of political art that forgets to be artful — a grave disappointment from a company with an illustrious four-decade history of merging political commitment with theater art.
For its second offering, PETA turns to another familiar story: Puccini’s popular opera Tosca. A collaboration between PETA, Black Tent Theater of Japan, and Theatre Company Nottle of Korea, Tosca went on a limited run one weekend late in August.
The production presents two interpretations of the Tosca story (based on Puccini’s opera, which itself is based on a French play). The title role is played by five actresses (Lee Ji-Hyun, Kiritani Natsuko, Hiraiwa Sawako, Motoki Sachiyo, and PETA’s Bernah Bernardo) varying in age from mid-twenties to late forties. A prologue kicks it all off in which the five women appear on stage as actors and speak to Tosca, asking her permission to tell her story. The show could have been subtitled, Pirandello-like, “Five Actors in Search of a Character.”
Then we have the Japanese and Korean take on the story. This first interpretation takes the familiar narrative apart and puts it back together in startling ways. The program notes tell us that their approach is “experimental.” By this they seem to mean a mixture of styles and idioms. But first, a word about the minimalist set. It’s essentially the Noli at Fili set stripped down, with translucent scrims acting as separating panels between the front half of the stage and a substantial back area and also as a video projection screen.
They present the different scenes in the story but in a jumbled order. First, a silent scene in which Scarpia the villain (Kota Kadoaki) and one Tosca dance the scene in which Tosca kills Scarpia. In the other scenes the performers speak in their own languages, but every once in a while they mix in a sentence or two in English (such as “Let’s talk business” or “The time has come”). Summaries of the action and brief exchanges of dialogue in English are flashed on the fabric above the stage. (The translation could have been better, though. The written text included sentences like “Help me dying!” and “A trap is setting by Scarpia”). These, plus the expansive gestures of an exaggerated acting style, make the action easy to follow.
The music is also a mixed bunch. The actor playing Mario Cavaradossi (Hattori Yoshitsugu) plays a piano just off the stage on the right, then a saxophone. Later one actress sings a bluesy tune. One of the Toscas is a soprano and sings the aria Vissi d’arte from Puccini’s opera (though she doesn’t get to finish it). Yoshitsugu himself sings E luceven le stelle, though not in full throat, to the accompaniment of electric instruments.
The overall effect: We ponder not just Tosca’s story but also the telling of it. She seems far from us, and our necessarily limited attempts at narrating her story fall short. When we reach for her she eludes our grasp. The conflation of time periods and cultures suggests timelessness and universality, yet she feels like a spirit, a ghost. Early on we are shown a video image: a woman’s outline in laser-light running in slow motion. Later we see the actresses behind a scrim lit eerily, running slowly in place. Tosca is imagined frozen in time running from the dead body of Cavaradossi, her lover, chased by guards to the castle ramparts before she jumps to her death. Tosca becomes the emblematic woman caught between two detestable fates, the one who chooses to end her life rather than live with either. She wanders eternity a restless soul.
The Filipino segment follows, directed again by Soxie Topacio, and it couldn’t be more different. Tosca has just jumped; she and the other characters are already dead. We expect solemnity, but it breaks out into wildly satirical comedy. It feels reassuringly Filipino; we can’t resist poking holes in anything that takes itself too seriously, and after an hour of high seriousness, the PETA segment provides us the welcome chance to mock what we have just seen. It takes aim at many targets: the opera’s flimsy plot; Tosca’s silliness in believing Scarpia’s promise that he will spare Mario’s life; the actress’ Pinoy features; Mario’s self-importance.
Scarpia (now played by Raffy Tejada, who speaks with a cartoonish Japanese accent) can’t believe he was killed by a woman, then prepares to commit seppuku (forgetting that he’s already dead); as he does so, he sings the love theme from Daimos while throwing in words like “tonkatsu” and “sashimi.” Mario (Nor Domingo), wearing a coat with bullet holes and blood, enters and challenges Scarpia to a fistfight; then they do the zombie dance from Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” The play descends into knockabout farce in which the Japanese and Korean actors gamely join. Tejada mocks Yoshitsugu’s graying hair (“Mario, bigla ka yatang tumanda!”). Domingo gives the young Japanese Tosca a few kicks in the derriere. Then Tejada and Bernardo do their own dance that sends up the one that began the Japanese-Korean segment. It’s all delicious fun, thanks in large part to Tejada and Domingo, who chew up the stage with their robust comic skill.
The two segments form a whole that sometimes look as if it will melt into one gloopy mess, but the disparate parts end up hanging together well, if tenuously. The show has the feel of something slender pursued too intently, as if an echo were followed to the farthest reaches of a room long after the sound that made it had died. Wise, then, that the show ends in a mere hour and a half sans intermission, before it has the chance to wear out its welcome.
Perhaps the best way to retell the Noli and Fili is to create a side story that casts light on the shopworn works from a different and unusual angle. This is what Batang Rizal, one of the highlights of last year’s theater season, does. PETA brings Christine Bellen’s play, about a young boy who travels back in time to meet the young national hero, back to the stage. Presented in tandem with Mga Kwento ni Lola Basyang, Batang Rizal runs from September 19 to October 19. Call 410–0821 or 725–6244 for details; send email to petampro@yahoo.com; or visit http://www.petatheater.com.
Another theater company that tries to look at Rizal’s works anew is Dulaang UP. The company stages Isang Panaginip na Fili, a musical written and directed by Floy Quintos based on his own stage play. The concept: His first novel already behind him, Rizal has trouble finishing the second until he strikes up an unlikely friendship with a libertine. It goes on stage September 10 and runs until the 28th at the Wilfrido Ma. Guerrero Theater, Palma Hall, UP Diliman. Call Dulaang UP at 926–1349, 433–7840, 981–8500 loc 2449, 0922–8206224 or 0917–6206224 for details.
One more announcement (and this one has nothing to do with Rizal). The Philippine Opera Company presents its 2008 season lineup: The Magic Flute, Mozart’s fantasy masterpiece, from September 19 to 27 at the CCP Little Theater; then Puccini’s well-loved opera La Boheme on October 3, 4, and 5 at the CCP Main Theater; and finally, Terrence McNally’s Tony Award-winning play Master Class, starring Cherie Gil in the role of legendary diva Maria Callas, from October 9 to 25 at the Carlos P. Romulo Theater, RCBC Plaza, Makati City. Call the POC at 892–8786 or visit http://www.philippineoperacompany.com.
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