Of brawls between beauty and brain

The Owl and the Pussycat went to sea
In a beautiful pea-green boat;
They took with them some honey and plenty of money
Wrapped up in a five-pound note… – Edward Lear

He’s a bookshop clerk, a sanctimonious scumbag, who snoops into a neighboring apartment with a spyglass. She’s the cutest commercial model-cum-hooker this side of the Golden Gate Bridge. He is pounding away on his typewriter the opening paragraph of (what he thinks is) The Great American Novel: "The sun was spitting on his face …" She has only 72 cents in her purse after being thrown out of her pad by the landlord. He is roused from his privacy in the dead of night by a gentle rapping on his front door. She storms into his living room like an avenging Fury hell-bent on kicking his ass for her eviction.

The clash of personalities between these two characters is of the same intensity as the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906, if you’ll pardon the hyperbole.

The Owl is Felix Shermann (Paolo Fabregas) and the Pussycat is Doris Wilgus (Miren Alvarez) in Bill Manhoff’s romantic comedy, The Owl and the Pussycat, the last production of Repertory Philippines’ 64th season. The play is onstage week-ends at the William J. Shaw Theater, Shangri-La Plaza Mall up to May 19 and then it will move to the Carlos P. Romulo Theater, RCBC Plaza, Ayala corner Gil Puyat Aves. on the last two week-ends of its run.

Felix is a reluctant host and Doris is a demanding guest and it’s rough sailing all the way on the "beautiful pea-green boat." She annoys him no end with her quirks. She has to watch her favorite tearjerker on TV. She needs to be lulled to sleep with a bedtime story. She needs him to give her a shock to rid her of her hiccups. She keeps calling him a fink, fag and fungus. Felix tries to make amends by allowing her to spend the night on his sofa and offering to help her look for a decent job.

No two people could have been more mismatched but before the night is over, Doris moves from the couch to his bed. Nature takes its course. His iceberg thaws in the warmth of her embrace. And this might have already provided the comedy its customary happy ending, but it’s only the end of Act I.

Act II is divided into seven scenes.

By the following morning, the Pussycat has fallen head over paws with the Owl. Her claws have withdrawn into her paws. Felix has frozen into ice again, much to Doris’ confusion. By the time the play gets to its concluding scenes, he has become suicidal. He tries to choose from sleeping pills, poison, gas, and hemlock to make a forceful philosophical statement of his self-immolation leaving this world with his last testament, "Goodbye, Gomorrah!"

By the time the play ends, the lovers have undergone a sea-change. Felix has learned to respect emotion and Doris — well, Doris has learned more than her cuss-words: she has enlarged the range of her vocabulary.

Director Michael Williams could not have chosen a better pair of players than Fabregas and Miren who could give George Segal and Barbra Streisand, who starred in the movie, a run for their five-pound note. And this is no hyperbole.

The conflict of personalities between Felix and Doris pales in comparison with that between Don Badoy and Agueda in Nick Joaquin’s short story, "May Day Eve."

Mirror, mirror,

show to me

him whose woman

I will be.

Thus chants Agueda at midnight before "the antique mirror with a gold frame carved into leaves and flowers and mysterious curlicues" as Anastacia, the maga who had tamed seven husbands, has instructed her if she wishes to conjure the face of her future husband. The setting is the ancestral house of the Montiya’s in the Walled City in the year 1847.

Joaquin’s short story is the basis of Fides Cuyugan Asencio’s libretto for the opera Bisperas ng Mayo. The music drama was featured in "Concert Nights at the Old Walls," in a production by the Music Theater Foundation Philippines sponsored by the Department of Tourism in cooperation with the National Committee for Culture and the Arts. It was staged for one evening at the Tanghalang Leandro V. Locsin, NCCA Bldg., Intramuros.

The opera opens with a gay reception at the Montiya manor to welcome the young illustrados who have just come home from their studies in Europe. The young bucks (played by Nazer Salcedo, Raymond Roldan and Jonathan Badon as Salvador " Badong" Montiya) emboldened by wine and the spirit of a sultry summer night flirt outrageously with the señoritas (played by Deeda Barretto, Cynthia Culig-Guico and Lorna Llames as Agueda). The girls implore old yaya Anastacia to tell their fortunes. When Agueda’s turn comes to show the old woman her palm, Anastacia falls into a trance and moans of dark days to come.

When the clock chimes midnight, Agueda steals with a lighted candle into the unlighted hall now emptied of the merry-makers, peers into the mirror and utters the incantation. She starts in alarm when the face of Badong materializes in the glass. Still intoxicated from the wine, Badong taunts Agueda for admiring herself in the mirror. She blazes with fury at this suggestion of her narcissism. Now, he insists on dancing the polka with her. She refuses and takes a step to flee to the stairs. He reaches out to restrain her. She sinks her teeth into his hand and escapes.

The intensity of this moment cannot be recreated more vividly than in Joaquin’s own words:

"…She pulled his hand to her mouth and bit it — bit so sharply into the knuckles that he cried with pain and lashed out with his other hand — lashed out and hit the air, for she was gone, she had fled, and he heard the rustling of her skirts up the stairs as he furiously sucked his bleeding fingers."

The opera could not have intensified this domestic sexual conflict even with the added force of music. Instead, librettist Asensio raises the conflict to the political level by making Agueda join the insurrectos, fight against Spanish tyranny and die a martyr for her country. She has also opted to write the libretto in Pilipino to make the nationalistic intent of the opera more emphatic.

Only, one misses the power and intensity of Joaquin’s language.

"For a moment he had forgotten that she was dead… her broken body set free at last from the brutal pranks of the earth – from the trap of a May night; from the snare of summer; from the terrible silver nets of the moon. She had been a mere heap of white hair and bones in the end; a whimpering withered consumptive, lashing out with her cruel tongue; her eyes like livid coals; her face like ashes… now, nothing – nothing at all! was left of the young girl who had flamed so vividly in a mirror one wild May Day midnight, long, long ago."

With a more dissonant musical score, with greater concentration on the sexual conflict, with more focus, the opera could have the magnitude of a classical tragedy. Nevertheless, it is a valuable contribution to operatic literature.

The Owl and the Pussycat and Bisperas ng Mayo both dramatize the eternal battle of the sexes wearing complimentary masks: the comic and the tragic.

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