Scaling down the sacred into objects of desire

There are times during Dulaang UP’s Collection, which closed early in March, that make you believe you are witnessing theatrical perfection. Actually, it’s most of the first act, spanning 80 minutes.

It starts with the script by Floy Quintos that audaciously melds two ostensibly disparate narratives. The first involves a satirical image of the Philippines where the government auctions off national treasures (both precious objects and natural wonders), then turns around and raffles off a meager portion of the earnings to the masses in the name of poverty alleviation. Commodification is the name of this cynical game. “History is the latest handbag,” says Iñaki, the portly gay socialite who lives it up on overextended credit cards, uttering the most memorable of the script’s passel of punchy quips. At least the goods are being cared for, argues government flunky Helena de Zialcita (Jean Judith Javier), director of the Commission for the Disposal of Patrimony.

An ultra-wealthy clique, the small group that usually wins the bids and puts the items to their own self-serving uses, comes into focus. The most colorful is Alphonse (Alexander Cortes), the creative constantly in need of inspiration for his fashion lines, movies, and other artsy projects. “I need to make them dream,” he says, “then make them buy the dream.” Manolo Estancio (Leo Rialp) towers above them, the über-tycoon who drops 100 million pesos on the Banaue Rice Terraces. They’ll go well with the Bohol Chocolate Hills he bought and had transferred to his theme park. “Theme parks are the new museums,” he explains, with the nonchalance of a man who owns everything and doesn’t give it a second thought. A new arrival from Shanghai appears: Stephen Yan (Roeder Camañag), owner of Sui Generis, a giant in the “rejuvenation business” (Alphonse himself swears by their creams). Aside from being fabulously rich, Yan is earnestly in search of a meaningful life. “Does the soul exist?” he asks, discussing his latest obsession. “It does,” Alphonse replies dismissively.

Giving their acquisitiveness its sharp itch is master auctioneer Carlo Vibal (Jeremy Domingo). He must make these wealthy, jaded souls want his wares. And he does, splendidly. Asked what item his Maharlika Pilipinas will offer next, he unfolds a tale that steers the plot into an unexpected place. He unveils a three-foot ivory statue: Nuestra Señora de Las Almas Perdidas, Our Lady of Lost Souls. The set changes: the metallic black and gray surfaces of the backdrop give way to a wall of bronzed earth, with stairs and niches carved into it. The light changes from cold to warm. Satire gives way to solemnity.

Vibal has a long story to tell: how the statue was commissioned by a friar who was then martyred by a pack of locals led by a babaylan, how a Spanish contingent quelled the uprising, how a young woman from no one knows where who sings with a soothing lilt and possessing miraculous healing powers appears on the scene and becomes the image’s caretaker. Revered as some kind of saint, she is adopted by a rich, devout woman and given the name Hermana Augusta Beata; even the cardinal comes to her defense when scandal erupts. But the people turn on her (her utter guilelessness is her undoing), and eventually she is cast out of town and dies alone. Years later her remains are dug up and reburied with the statue, and fantastic occurrences are attributed to her. Don Cosimo, a Spaniard who surveys the scene with a skeptical eye, intones the play’s most trenchant lines: “These Filipinos are like children without a memory. No one remembers. Not one.”

Joined together the two narratives share parallels and contrasts, flip sides of a strange coin. Both involve co-optation, revelation congealing into ritual, the sacred and mysterious reduced to the understandable and accessible. The doubling of the cast  the main actors appear in both the present and the history (Rialp as the cardinal, Javier as the babaylan, and so on)  create an eerie connection between the disappeared past and the vibrant present, vivifying Cosimo’s declaration about our poor memories, as if Estancio and his cohort of high rollers have forgotten who they are.

Vibal succeeds fabulously; this rich cabal declare their desire to bid for the piece. The lights fade on Estancio and Yan, the lead horses in this derby, and we roar our approval. Fine ensemble work from the principals (with the grace to yield center stage to the riveting performance of Teetin Villanueva, a student, as the Hermana), set design (Ohm David) and costumes (Raven Ong), light (John Batalla) and music (Janine Santos and William Manzano)  theater crafts cohere into a thrilling experience under the guidance of director Dexter Santos.

Maybe it’s because the first act sets the bar so high that our disappointment in the second is so sharp. When the play resumes it focuses on Vibal’s struggle with conscience, and it’s a mistake. He’s not a complex figure. (There are none in the play; complexity is beside the point here. The actors make their characters vivid, going beyond naturalism without losing sympathy.) The encounter with the statue has changed him. Then comes a scene almost unwatchable in its awkwardness. An anxious Vibal stands alone in the auction hall talking to the statue when  surprise, surprise  the Hermana comes on stage. It’s his conscience bedeviling him, and she smiles enigmatically, speaking English (which Villanueva doesn’t command as well as Filipino), singing her signature melody. “Everything gets sold somehow,” she assures him, “even me.” I twisted in my seat wanting to disappear.

The fault is not the staunchly moral stance Quintos takes, but how simple it is. This isn’t the first time Quintos, perhaps our most consistently interesting playwright, has roused us only to disappoint. In “Evening at the Opera,” a struggle between a thuggish local politician and his old-money wife, who has the fanciful idea of bringing a full-scale opera to her backward province, hits its climax with these banal lines: “I’m rotten,” he tells her, “but you’re rotten, too. Rotten to the core.” In Fake, perhaps the earlier work with the closest resemblance to Collection (it consists of two unrelated halves), the perpetrator of a notorious historical hoax (the Code of Kalantiaw) is unmasked as merely a harmless old man whose heart is in the right place. “Ang Kalungkutan ng mga Reyna” worked far better, perhaps because the woman at its center  a despot wanting to turn her republic into a monarchy and be crowned its queen  draws a complex reaction.

Besides, Collection raises tantalizing possibilities it doesn’t pursue. It creates a fiction within a fiction (the Hermana’s story within the auction narrative) but presents it as fact. What if its status were uncertain, the truth of the mysterious woman ultimately beyond anyone’s grasp? Part of the thrill I felt was thinking Quintos might be fearlessly refashioning Rashomon for the stage; how appropriate, through the medium of embodiment, to cast doubt on the veracity of what you are embodying.

But, no. The plot hums along pleasantly enough. The rich clique returns to the stage, touched by Hermana’s story. Tatiana (Alya Honasan and Stella Cañete), matronly jeweler, designs a basilica to commemorate her, with the statue (which she intends to win, with the help of donors) at its heart. Alphonse conceives a new line of women’s wear, the dresses harkening to religious themes but cut to show off ample bosoms and slender thighs. Even the student, Gus (Red Concepcion), who managed to sneak into the clique’s inner sanctum in the first act, the only one affronted by the auction of national treasures, now rallies a small band of activists to protest the sale of the image. With T-shirts, hand signal, and slogan, he too traffics in commodities.

Finally, there’s the loud, apocalyptic finale. The big auction takes place, Vibal drives the bidders into a frenzy, but all hell breaks loose. Gunshots, panic, violence  Vibal grabs the statue to protect it from the melee, but, to everyone’s horror, it breaks in his grip and falls to the floor in powdery pieces. Gus’s followers brandish knives and stab Vibal, Yan, and others. You can almost hear a chorus intoning the words “All are punishéd!” above the din. (And what a din; the sound mixer must have been paid by the decibel.) No one is evil, though everyone is benighted. As the pandemonium dies down, the Hermana appears above them all in the same spot her statue stood, serene and child-like as ever, hovering over these lost souls.

It’s neat but unsatisfying. You can’t renounce the world as the Hermana did, Alphonse argues at one point, yet what other option does the play offer? There is no other way to escape its noise, it seems to say, and to be in the world is to have no choice but to participate in the scaling down of the sacred.

Nevertheless, belaboring its flaws shouldn’t take away what this production achieves: a most vivid, visceral manifestation of an idea. To make the abstract concrete doesn’t always mean to commodify it but also to complete it, to bring it to a previously unachieved fullness; to make it real, not just in our minds but in our imagining. When the curtain falls, after watching the winding history of this statue, we believe we understand what it means to be reduced to a thing, then to be sold by a people who can’t remember its worth.

Collection doesn’t achieve perfection  a false god, anyway  but in its best moments it touches greatness.

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