RP’s Ma-Yi Theater to launch Savage Stage

On previous occasions, I have written on the Ma-Yi Theater Company, but memories may need to be refreshed. Its organizers and members, all Filipinos, describe their ensemble as "an Obie-Award winning, professional, not-for-profit theater in New York dedicated to developing and providing new and forward-thinking plays that essay the Asian American experience. We believe in process and collaboration, encouraging our artists to push beyond creative boundaries and challenge popular prescriptions of what Asian American theater should be."

"We provide artists with a supportive home where they can hone individual and collective skills, explore new ways of creating theater, as they engage their communities in vigorous dialogues about our diverse and changing world.

"At Ma-Yi, we choose to create theater hopeful as it is interrogative. We believe in responsive art and in a theater that celebrates the resiliency of the human spirit.

"The company’s reach cuts across ethnic and economic lines. Through sustained outreach programs that bring plays and workshops to specific communities, and by partnering with other community-based organizations, Ma-Yi theater has successfully diversified its audience base."

How did Ma-Yi get its name? "Ancient Chinese traders used to refer to a group of islands that is known today as the Philippines. We chose this name in recognition of the vibrant culture that existed in Ma-Yi prior to Western colonization."

The company deal with Asian American rather than Filipino American experience to give relevance to other Asians in the US.

The company’s executive director is the highly regarded theater personality Jorge Ortoll, Spanish by birth but thoroughly Filipino at heart. Jorge acted for Repertory Philippines up to the time of its transfer to the Shaw Theater in Mandaluyong. Off-stage, Jorge was then connected with financial establishments – he has an MBA degree from Columbia U. – and was a trainee at the City Bank in Manila when he severed his business connections. He has been the executive director – read the pillar, primary inspiration and guiding light – of Ma-Yi since 1991.

Jorge is briefly in town to announce the launching of Savage Stage, a gigantic tome which consists of nine plays Ma-Yi has presented through the years. Edited by Joi Barrios, the book carries a foreword by Jorge, its executive publisher, and Ralph Peña, Ma-Yi’s artistic director.

The foreword reads: "After 17 years, it’s good to raise our heads above the trenches, breathe, and take stock of where we’ve been and the choices we’ve made. Ma-Yi has persisted in raising the bar for Asian American playwrights, actors, designers, composers, directors and choreographers.

"In many ways, this book maps the intersecting journeys of Ma-Yi Theater Company, its artists, and our community. Each play in the anthology is a milepost, bearing thoughts and impulses at a particular moment in time, marking and staking new creative ground. Together, they form asymmetrical trails that tell of Ma-Yi’s evolving attempts to construct its mission around what it means to be Asian American today, and of a larger community’s struggles to locate itself in a shifty American landscape.

"More than anything else, this anthology is about the writers. We hope this book documents the omni-directional complications of their art, their voices – our stories."

Editor Joi Barrios writes a lengthy intro replete with meaningful, illuminating insights, being an authoritative history of theater, both Filipino and Asian. Her essay alone makes the book worth reading.

Why the title Savage Stage? Barrios explains: "It is the trope of savagery that the play ‘Trial by Water’ (which depicts death and cannibalism) along with the other plays in the collection, interrogates. By rendering the characters as savages, colonialism is justified; ‘global war on terror’ is sustained, and imperialist globalization makes itself appealing."

Barrios continues in part: "It is also the ‘images of savagery’ (the piercing of the flesh, the flowing of blood, the emphasis on pain and sacrifice, beheaded characters, battle and murder scenes) that have characterized the depiction of traders in Asian countries and this has reduced many of these rituals and classical Asian plays to spectacle and theatrics in the gaze of the West. Religious ritual and scenes in classical Asian theaters use signifiers of the savage as empowering acts."

The book will be launched both in NY and Manila; tentative dates in the latter are July 12, 13 and 14. Launching will be in Quezon City which encompasses the academic community – UP, Ateneo, Miriam College, etc. – Makati where several theater venues are located, and at the CCP.

Two plays in Savage Stage were shown at the CCP: "Flipzoids" by Ralph Peña and "The Romance of Magno Rubio" by Lonnie Carter (with Loy Arcenas and additional text by Ralph B. Peña), based on a short story by Carlos Bulosan. "Romance" won eight Obie awards.

Wrote the STAR on the production: "As the play sparkles and bristles, it grips the audience from start to finish. Credit for the standing ovation must be fanned out to Mr. Carter who has dramatized, and given bone and sinew to Bulosan’s Asian-American experience while faithfully conveying the Filipino character, identity and amusing idiosyncracies; to brilliant director-set designer Loy Arcenas whose revisions and tight integration of choreographic movement, song, dramatic action and dialogue produce a compelling, powerful impact, and not the least, to the excellent cast."

The Ma-Yi has been operating financially on an even keel; it has no debts! Of 500 institutions that applied to the Ford Foundation for grants last year, Ma-Yi was the only theater company given one, in recognition of its intrinsic merit and the impact of its production.