If there’s a successful formula for staging plays for children that don’t talk down to them, that are accessible to the young but that speak to grownups too, the Philippine Educational Theater Association (or PETA) might have found it. Its twin productions of Mga Kuwento ni Lola Basyang and Batang Rizal, two plays it has produced before and brings back to the stage this year, find that tricky balance between entertaining children as it teaches them good values and making the older folk in the audience feel that the story is also for them.
Mga Kuwento ni Lola Basyang is a feast for the eyes. The costumes are wonderfully bright, playful, and inventive. Ron Ryan Alfonso, who dresses the cast, designs the costumes with simple household items and a childlike lunacy. A caldero, painted gold, becomes a king’s crown, complete with three cooking spoons arranged flower-like in front. His son the prince wears a gold band with three tablespoons similarly splayed. A princess wears a crown of plastic laundry clips. A datu wears a headpiece of spongy puzzle tiles, complete with letters of the alphabet in them. Dresses, tunics, pants, and collars are stitched together from checkered tablecloths, hand-sewn rags, and an assortment of strikingly colored and textured fabrics that might have been curtains, sofa covers, or pillowcases in another life.
Similarly ingenious is the set. Though otherwise unadorned, the stage features a large metal structure that might have been stolen from a toymaker’s playground. Fashioned by Mel Bernardo, it moves on wheels, folds and unfolds, and includes extensions such as stairs, ladders, slides, and platforms. Folded in, it’s the skeleton of a house, the belly of a river. Unfurled, it becomes the facade of a palace, a city wall. Ladders at its sides turn upwards to form a roof, a mountaintop. The actors gleefully work the contraption like a giant plaything.
The play involves three stories of Lola Basyang (Severino Reyes in real life) adapted for the stage by Christine Bellen and acted by the usually reliable PETA crew of performers. Phil Noble’s direction seems focused on giving the stories a knowing charm, telling them with affection and humor but without descending into cloying sentimentality. Songs by Noel Cabangon add to the pleasing mix.
If the show has a weakness, it is the interludes between stories. They are simply too long. In the gaps between stories Lola Basyang (a tirelessly energetic Bernah Bernardo) engages the audience in conversation and makes sure to extract the morals of the stories and express them in clear language. After a while, it starts to grate. The audience gets restless with all the didactic patter. Altogether the show runs two hours without an intermission, perhaps an interminably long time for young children. The morning I watched the show, I sat with school kids of various ages, from early grade-schoolers to college students. During the interludes some of the youngest ones got up to walk around, having tuned out the good lola, or go out to the comfort rooms. The interludes may be necessary, to buy time for the performers to change costumes (after all, a small ensemble performs all the roles), but wouldn’t it be better to trim the banter to a minimum and provide two 10-minute intermissions?
In contrast to Lola Basyang, Batang Rizal consists of one unified narrative, which is a reason it is the superior, more satisfying work. Written also by Christine Bellen, the play follows the story of Pepito Waling-Waling, a student at one of our many schools named after the national hero, as he journeys back to Rizal’s time and brings the boy who isn’t yet a hero but is already destined for greatness to the present. (Pepito’s time-travel device is that instrument of imaginative wonders: a book.) The narrative is interspersed with the writings, mostly poems and tales, of the young Rizal.
Mel Bernardo’s set looks like a blown-up student’s desk, consisting of massive pencils and books. A space in the far wall like a lined sheet of school paper becomes a screen for video work by Don Salubayba and the Anino Shadowplay Collective. Ron Ryan Alfonso’s costumes are again playfully vivid. The students wear bright yellow uniforms with candy-colored stripes. (These would be welcome in the real world, where khakis and whites reign in bland supremacy.)
The play is a richer experience than Lola Basyang also because it traverses a broader spectrum of emotions. Though largely a comedy, it also has poignant moments: Pepe visits his mother, Donya Lolay, in jail (she spends more than two years there on trumped-up charges), and he recites a poem to her as she listens, attentive and sad. Pepe’s older brother Paciano desperately exhorts the young boy to study hard in Ateneo and not waste his gifts. Brief episodes with stern friars remind us of a grim part of our history. Young though the boy is, he is already awakening to the harshness of the world. (Dudz Teraña’s astute direction keeps the shifts in tone finely modulated.)
Part of the play’s humor derives from its doing something most others find unthinkable: poking fun at the National Hero. How often have we seen plays or films about him or his work that groan under the weight of their own solemnity? Pepe is just a little vain. Upon seeing a portrait of his grown-up self in Pepito’s school, he grins and says, “Es muy guapo!” Pepito replies, “Sabi na nga ba, mayabang ito, eh!” In a skit reenacting Rizal’s execution, a student turns to the audience to recite his famous farewell poem, forgets the lines, and substitutes wildly inappropriate words. When he is scolded for it, he says, “Mamamatay na nga, tutula pa! Meron bang ganoon?”
Again the PETA ensemble turns in a strong, assured performance. Not only that: I watched both productions on the same day, and most of the performers in the morning show of Lola Basyang appeared in Batang Rizal in the afternoon. It’s a testament to the skill of Bernah Bernardo, Joann Co (as both Miss Tangolang the teacher and Pepe’s mother), and Wylie Casero (the mayor and Pepe’s brother) that they move easily from cartoonish humor to tenderness and as deftly make us laugh as make our hearts heave. And when it comes to making us laugh, Bernardo and Casero do it best. Bernardo plays Tangolang as a garish sequined butterfly, one part schoolmarm and three parts palengkera. Casero’s Mayor Rapcu (say the name quickly several times to get the joke), who donates a monument to the school, smiles with unctuous pomposity and mauls the English language with clueless impunity while wearing perhaps the most hideous barong tagalogs ever seen on a public stage. The gaudy bling is the cherry on top. Other standouts include Abner Delina, whose preternaturally youthful countenance and voice make him perfect for the title role, as well as Kitchie Pagaspas, Joan Bugcat, and Carlon Matobato as Pepito’s feisty classmates.
The play has a conventional moral about everyday heroism, yes, and it even comes bundled in a song (Vince de Jesus provides the music and lyrics), but it goes down smoothly with so many spoonfuls of sugar. Wholesome in the best sense yet daubed with welcome irreverence, Batang Rizal is infused with something else that young and old will have no quarrel with: childlike wonder.
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Mga Kuwento ni Lola Basyang and Batang Rizal run until Oct. 19 at the PETA Theater Center, 5 Eymard Drive, New Manila, Quezon City. Call 725–6244 or e-mail petampro@yahoo.com for details.
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