The ingenious lunacy of ‘Belong Puti’

I’m so happy to see director Nonon Padilla at it again. In my mind, he belongs to an elite group of Filipino artists who have absolute good taste, are talented, intelligent and intuitive to boot (I have three people in my list so far). I can imagine him laying in bed until 3 a.m. for weeks, thinking of his play and not allowing distractions. Brilliant ideas are lured and pursued every minute. Padilla knows this all too well and this is why his plays are full of surprises.

PETA’s Belong Puti, written by National Artist Wilfrido Maria Guerrero, who happens to be Padilla’s late uncle, is actually a dramatic play. Only Padilla’s mind can turn melodrama into an organized comic lunacy and make it work. Every minute is so hilarious you get tired laughing yet you end up thinking deeply about life.

The play is about a writer undergoing a wretched predicament in the face of impending death. He suffers from mental block as he works on a 10-year-old manuscript — a play about a man, Rondolf, and his egocentric wife, Annella. Annella returns home from an expensive facial surgery bandaged but brimming with confidence. She is eagerly welcomed by close friends, maids and a teem of guests in a homecoming party. Her husband, looking much older now, watches appalled.

As the writer entwines himself in the story, he is grossly affected by the flaws of his characters. He has allowed Annella’s conceit to steer her to immodest flings with her daughter’s boyfriend, her surgeon and their driver. Believing he is yet in control, Rondolf manipulates the scenes according to whim albeit with self-doubt and despair. The result is a mad but truthful concoction of human foibles.

The play begins with a tiny angel blowing soap bubbles, whom Rondolf mistakes as the angel of death. Strike one for neurosis: Mario O’Hara not only plays Rondolf but also his wife, the fiftyish Annella. How can this be possible? After he switches to Annella and convinces the audience that he is a beautiful woman, he picks up CB Garrucho from the audience to take over the role. Incidentally, O’Hara’s stage presence is so real you can actually slice it with a knife. He was in such command of the two roles that I worried about Garrucho taking over as Annella. But wait, she loses interest, goes back to the audience and O’Hara becomes the eccentric woman all over again. Madness.

Enter Lou Veloso. This actor literally stupefies the audience with comic timing. He really could have played all the roles with ease but Padilla gave him only six. Veloso weaves in and out as death, grandmother, mother, driver, hunk and doctor. He is so funny you don’t mind seeing him as anything, including a sexy hunk, err with the help of a blown-up photo. With face painted white and a basic skeleton-framed unitard costume, his presence in the scenes clearly suggests injury in every person… sharp, witty injury, that is. Confused already? For sure.

Veloso surrenders the 16 other roles to actors, most of whom play dual roles, who are just as first-rate as he is. Sherry Lara, Joan Orendain, Carme Sanchez and Sonia Valenciano as Annella’s friends add a hysterical punch to the cocktail. They use the Maryknoller, Assumptionista, St. Scho. and St. Therese collegiala-gone-50-to-60-something nuance extremely well yet each with a shining unique idiosyncrasy. I thought Vic-Vic Alaban and Upeng Galang-Fernandez were real maids and that is a huge compliment. Miles Pasamanero as the daughter has unsettling outbursts, maybe because her parents keep playing one another. The young Sherlyn Mae Cuare does not succumb to the adults but stands tall as the angel/beggar.

My favorite part was the last. Here, CB Garrucho uses that knife to slice anyone else’s charisma into smidgens and to spread her own mix of spicy theatrics on stage. That death scene of hers is to die for. No one has ever expired on stage with incredible dramatic and comic flair. Garrucho embraces the scene with such panache and succeeds in facilitating the important but complicated segue to the play’s ending. It is a tiring scene but worth every sweat. I might add that Garrucho and O’Hara stand to lose five pounds per performance with the amount of physical and mental energy required. Needless to say, they are superb actors who should do the play again and again even as they shrink to size four.

Belong Puti reveals the bane of artists who are haunted by the questions: am I in control of my art? Is my art in control of me? Or, is anything in control at all? The amazing thing about Padilla is his control of Belong Puti even as he, without doubt, began by allowing its vast possibilities to control him. I always believe that if an artist is passionate, intelligent, daring, frightened, uptight, intense, mababaw, and so on, it shows in his work. Assessing Padilla, he would be an unassuming artist with volcanic eruptions of genius. He never sells himself but his art says it all. He is not only a director but a visual artist and a wide reader who listens to good music every night. Add all that up and a hysterical play that is full of wisdom evolves. Very few directors can pull that off.

There are the theatrical quirks that are very him: a urinal coming down from the lighting grid, a character springing out of a TV set, and people playing various roles, never mind the gender. He re-writes plays sometimes beyond recognition and if a playwright is too egoistic he would suffer heavily from the imagined offense. But the celebrated playwright himself, Wilfrido Maria Guerrero, believed in his nephew so much that he permitted every change done by Padilla in his script. "Approved!" he wrote him, "I trust you completely." In Ulilang Tahanan, Guerrero, immobile and in tears, stood before the audience beside Padilla and basked in unending applause. So my advise to playwrights would be: trust Padilla as a director, sit back and enjoy the success, possibly in tears flowing out of gratitude.

Another artist with superb taste is National Artist for Design, Salvador Bernal (the second person in my elite group. The third, I’d rather keep to myself.). His design for Belong Puti is uncomplicated — walls showing O’Hara’s diverse photos epitomizing the warped mind of the writer and a sloping staircase signifying the imbalance of Annella and the rest of the cast. The partnership of Bernal and Padilla in the old days of CCP’s Tanghalang Pilipino fashioned not only brilliant productions but fed a growing number of young enthusiasts. I remember seeing students flock out of the theater exultant and feeling sophisticated because they actually appreciated and understood a play they would not have under the hands of less-gifted artists. The seeds they planted continue to flourish. I still see the young aficionados in Tanghalang Pilipino plays today.

Shoko Matsumoto, who has illumined many Filipino productions with her clear-cut gift in lighting design, completes the team along with music designer Dodjie Fernandez and the rest of the PETA staff. All together, they have put up a darn good show that must not be missed.

The brand new PETA Theater Center at Sunnyside Drive, New Manila, Quezon City provides the perfect venue for this fantastic work of art. The remaining performance dates are March 2 at 2:30 and 7:30 pm., March 3 and 4 at 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. For ticket reservations, call 725-6244, or 721-8604.