Way back in 1947, a young and newly-married Naty Crame-Rogers was sheltering herself from the rains when a stranger materialized from nowhere and asked politely, “May I share your umbrella?” It was none other than the playwright-director Wilfrido Ma. Guerrero who soon became National Artist. That was the start of Naty’s acting career when Guerrero cast her in his play Forever that recognized the rights of women, a breakthrough in the history of Philippine theater.
Much later, as a student at UP, pursuing a degree of Bachelor of Arts, we chose as our thesis the works of Nick Joaquin (also known as Quijano de Manila) and those of Lamberto V. Avellana and the unforgettable Portrait of the Artist as Filipino which he directed and Joaquin wrote. Naty portrayed the role of Paula.
Today, both Avellana and Joaquin have gone to the wide blue yonder, as well as many in the cast of Portrait, but Naty hasn’t stopped dreaming up more and more projects. She has suffered many changes in her life, spent over a year in the hospital after suffering from a fall at home, moved from her residence of over six decades, but her spirit has remained un-trampled. We wrote about her in Live Feed when she was awarded the Natatanging Gawad Buhay by Philstage and one day, out of the blue, we received a call from her.
Naty asked us to visit her in her new home, now only a stone’s throw away from us. We took along Miguel Castro, our singer-painter-actor friend, confident that he would enjoy the company. We were right. Naty welcomed us, smiling broadly, giving Miguel an interested look and asking us what he did for a living. We told her he was a jack-of-all-trade — doing a little singing, some acting etc., etc. Naty was ecstatic. “I want you to join our company,” she told Miguel. At the time, she was busy rehearsing Panhik Ligaw, the Filipino adaptation of Anton Chekov’s The Marriage Proposal which a budding writer, Felizardo Habito, had given to her.
We became busy for several months and it was only recently that we were able to see Naty again. And again, we continued our marathon discourses on life and art, life and drama which had been her mantra all her life. “I have been telling people for such a long, long time that a teacher and a philosopher are one and the same. If drama is life and life drama, I want to stick to that. But now this concept has been partitioned with monetary concerns coming in. That’s why I am writing a book that will show the wholeness of life and drama. After all, drama is the culmination of the seven fine arts,” she explained. This, she continued, would comprise her memoires.
Going back to her childhood days, Naty recalled how she had always been interested in the various arts including music. At the age of 11, she would watch rehearsals of Cinderella in Flowerland directed by her aunt, then pretend she was Cinderella who met her true love through the slipper she had lost.
We don’t exactly recall how and when we finally met Naty Crame-Rogers in the flesh. All we know is that it had to do with Portrait of an Artist as Filipino that is possibly the greatest Filipino play that was ever written, that broke the popularity of foreign material in our shores. During our last encounter with Naty, she was speaking of ghosts that lived in the old house used as location for the filming of Portrait.
We loved these sessions with Naty that always revealed some of her aches and pains, but more of her dreams. She spoke of once being nominated as National Artist, then of being stricken off the list. On the day of our visit, she mentioned an invitation from the Ateneo Fine Arts Department to an event billed Contra Mundum to celebrate a revised version of Portrait. Participating were Irma Adlawan and Banaue Miclat-Janssen as Candida, and Liesl Batucan and Delphine Buencamino as Paula. Direction is by Dennis Marasigan. Naty was asked to deliver a reading of the last paragraph from Portrait.
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