Here is thy footstool and there rest thy feet where live the poorest, and the lowliest, and lost:
When I try to bow to thee, my obeisance cannot reach down to the depths where thy feet rest among the poorest, and lowliest, and lost.
Pride can never approach to where thou walkest in the clothes of the humble among the poorest, the lowliest, and lost.
My heart can never find its way to where thou keepest company with the companionless among the poorest, the lowliest, and the lost.
These same souls – the poorest, the lowliest, and the lost – Mother Teresa of Calcutta attended to with unerring devotion. She nursed the lepers, wiped away the pus from their sores. The world recognized her as a living saint.
You and I are a different breed. Oh, sure, we care about the sick and the poor. We donate to charity. We toss beggars a few coins. That should salve our conscience and allow us to sleep soundly at night. So long as poverty remains faceless…
Tanghalang Pilipino is presenting a play at the Tanghalang Huseng Batute, CCP, that is certain to foil our purpose. Ruwanthie de Chickera’s Middle of Silence (Sa Pagitan ng mga Piping Sandali) gives the poor and the sick names and faces that are certain to blow away the complacency that clouds our perception.
The setting is a slum area most likely in Colombo in the playwright’s native land, Sri Lanka, but it may well be in Calcutta or Manila for poverty knows no geography.
Ajith (Nonie Buencamino), a cripple, exists in a vermin-infested hovel with his wife, Nandha (Mayen Estañero). He came from a well-to-do family and was engaged to be married but a road accident crippled him from the waist down. He disentangled himself from family and fiancée and eloped with a neighbor’s housemaid. What little money he had was soon spent. Unable to work, Ajith, consumed by anguish, vents his spleen on his wife who suffers his verbal and physical abuse in silence. His despair is intensified by his impotence.
Being illiterate, Nandha can do no better than beg day after day for scraps of food from a vendor, Dias (Soliman Cruz). One day, this man and his cohort Rohitha (Francis Domingo), break into the hovel, and finding the invalid, humiliate him and beat him up with sadistic glee.
Without a word to her husband, Nandha makes her way to the house of his family. Ranil (Randy Villarama) disowns his brother. The sister, Kamini (Kalila Aguilos) shows a trace of pity, but eventually sides with Ranil. The destitute couple are totally pariah.
Another outcast, paradoxically, turns out to be their salvation – the prostitute Nireka (Mailes Kanapi). This fallen woman brings about the transformation of Nandha from a powerless creature to one who learns and applies her feminine force to subjugate the will of men to her own. In a karmic counterpoint, the browbeating brutish, Ajith, is reduced to a docile, domestic tomcat at the close of the play.
The projection of Buencamino and Estañero of their respective characters is profoundly moving. Ana Valdez-Lim’s insightful direction with the assistance of her artistic and technical staff makes this production of Middle of Silence something that will cause us long, sleepless nights, especially when we believe – you and I – that we are our brothers’ – and sisters’ – keepers.
Over at Rep’s Global Theatre at Onstage, Greenbelt 1, the attraction on weekends is Repertory Philippines’ production of Fame – The Musical. Jose Fernandez wrote the book, Jacques Levy the lyrics and Steve Margoshes composed the music.
"I Want to Make Magic" is what every student of New York’s High School of Performing Arts aspires to do. Dance, sing, or act is what each budding talent dreams of. To be a Rogers or Astaire, Garland or Sinatra, Helen Hayes or Olivier and "live forever."
The mentors are exacting but also inspiring: Ms. Esther Sherman (Jay Valencia-Glorioso/Marisse Borlaza), Ms. Greta Bell (Liesl Batucan), Mr. Myers (Miguel Faustmann) and Mr. Sheinkopf (Jeremy Domingo). They expect from their students total commitment to their chosen craft such that they can meet the demands of Balanchine and Alvin Ailey, of Rodgers and Hammerstein, of Thornton Wilder, if they are to pass all the grueling tests only by the skin of their teeth.
The play focuses on a few individuals: dancer Tyrone (Filomar Tariao/Ralion Alonso), the black rebel without a cause who needs to leap over his pride and a learning disability; his dancing partner, Iris (Cathee Lee-Roslovtsev), beauty and grace personified; the incandescent Carmen (Myrene Hernandez/Amparo Sietereales) whose fatal addiction causes her fall even before her star has a chance to rise; her admirer Joe (Arnel Carrion/Lorenz Martinez), a Chaplin in the making; Nick (Ariel Reonal/Topper Fabregas) who has a one-tract mind where his art is concerned – Broadway or bust; his stalker, love-lorn Serena (Charlie Barredo/Crisel Consunji/Shiela Valderrama); Mabel (Aireen Antonio), who is losing a battle with her bathroom scale; Schlomo (Angelo Paragoso/ Mackee Sera), the musician who cannot hope to outshine his famous father; and several others, who are all dreaming of the sweet smell of success.
The span of time covered by the action of this musical play is four years – from the aspirants’ first morning in the halls of NYHSPA to the evening of the Graduation Ball of Class 1984. Four years of "Hard Work", as the opening goes: "I’m alive and I will survive/ Show the world that I can make it/ When I hit the heights/ Put my name in lights/…by doin’ hard work/ Hard Work!
Dance, act, sing the body electric with Walt Whitman no less, and be the best. Second best is not acceptable. That is the height to which every student of the school aspires – as does everyone in the cast.
Baby Barredo says in her Director’s Notes: "The show gives us a very canny insight into what makes young people tick – their values and their relationships. So the young will take to it very easily. And for the adults who are not young at heart anymore, this show will certainly make them recapture what it was like when they were teen-agers."
Ms. Barredo and her artistic and technical staff deserve accolade for this grand production of Fame – The Musical. Applause, applause!
As an afterthought, this writer would like to ponder on the fate of the characters of the play. Their graduation marks only another beginning in their quest. What is their next goal? Broadway? Off-Broadway? Hollywood? Carnegie Hall? Lincoln Center? Or the dives in Greenwich Village?
The narrow road to success is littered with the torn diplomas of graduates of such institutions like the NYHSPA.
Does the name Irene Cara ring a bell? She was the star of the movie, Fame. Did she ever make any other film? Were her palms cast in plaster in front of that Chinese whatchamacallit theater in Hollywood? Had she won an Oscar or Golden Globe?
Who remembers these names: Lee Curreri, Eddie Barth, Laura Dean, Paul McCrane, Barry Miller, Maureen Teely? They were Irene’s co-stars in Fame. Whatever happened to them? Did they end up selling popcorn at the lobby of a rundown theatre? Or a bum in Bowery begging for alms to buy booze?
And this brings us back to the poorest of the poor. Yes, you find them in the Big Apple, too, among the bag ladies sitting by the fountains in front of the Metropolitan Opera House. Do they know that tonight soprano Teresa Stratas is singing Nedda in I Pagliacci?
When her family immigrated to Canada from Greece, Stratas had to borrow a pair of shoes. Through hard work, she won acclaim as a leading soprano of the Met. She had a special passion for the plays of Bertolt Brecht and the songs of Kurt Weill, and she worked closely with the legendary Lotte Lenya to record their works. Every year, after the opera season, she would fly to Calcutta to join the Sisters of Charity of Blessed Teresa, her namesake, in administering "to the poorest, the lowliest and the lost." This is one way of coping with fortune and fame.