Center Stage

Filipino audiences will get a whiff of the Fil-Am experience when the celebrated Ma-Yi Theater Company returns to the Manila stage in July with "The Romance of Magno Rubio", as part of the Cultural Center of the Philippines’ month-long celebration of Philippine-American relations, the Sangandaan Festival. The awaited return of this Obie Award-winning theater company offers an "intriguing mixture of verse, music and dialogue" in this stage adaptation of a Carlos Bulosan short story.

There is nothing about him that will tell you he’s Filipino. If you know even a smidgen of Spanish, you’ll realize his name, Jorge Ortoll, should roll twice on your tongue with a hard "rrr". If he doesn’t speak, you’ll conclude he is generically castillian. When he does, his American English hints at his Catalan roots (on his father’s side). And despite an MBA from Columbia University that was meant to benefit his family’s real estate company, Señor Ortoll is primarily in the business of selling Asian and Filipino culture to New York audiences.

Filipino even if he is biologically only a quarter Pinoy on his mother’s side. We are told that the gentleman grew up in Manila, leaving the country in late ’70s to live in the US. Still, he stayed here long enough to learn the language, imbibe the culture and feel the need to visit every year.

The lunch conversation segues first to Jorge’s life as a theater actor. One anecdote that has probably stuck to him since Day One involves Mary Prieto playing Auntie Mame in his debut performance with Repertory Philippines. You imagine him standing onstage waiting for his next line when he realizes that Mary has skipped four pages from the script, leaving him out of the scene. The poor guy had to inch his way backstage without catching too much attention.

Instead of taking that as an omen, Jorge pursued acting, alongside a career in banking and real estate. Unavoidably, his looks only got him Latino roles on the New York stage.

Fate landed him a major part in an off-Broadway production of In My Father’s House. (He stepped in two weeks before the run after the original father became unavailable for reasons he can no longer remember.) The little-known theater company called Ma-Yi (derived from the name used by ancient Chinese traders to refer to the Philippine islands) piqued his interest. Their goal was admirable: "To be leaders in nurturing the development of new forward-thinking Asian- American plays, while providing artists with a supportive home and encouraging them to redefine the boundaries of culturally-specific theater."

Formed in 1989 around the time Miss Saigon allowed Filipino actors to shine on the London stage, Ma-Yi was a product of the united frustration of US-based UP graduates. They felt that New York theater was not addressing the issues of Filipino-Americans. And so they brought Filipino material to life.

Their efforts did not go unnoticed. Even The New York Times acknowledged that "Ma-Yi Theater Company is one of New York’s emerging theaters to watch."

As a non-profit organization, it was going in the right direction. Unfortunately, it was in financial straits, losing money with each production.

Jorge brought all his business and banking (he also worked at Citibank) background to the theater company, bringing Ma-Yi into the black. And then he became a master of looking for money–grants, national endowments and the like.

As executive director, Jorge Ortoll is half of a two-man team that keeps Ma-Yi running. He and artistic director Ralph Peña are the brains and heart of the operation. The two are Filipino professionals with steady day jobs (Peña is an accounting graduate from UP and Ortoll has a flourishing real estate business). Theater is a common passion they brought with them from the Philippines when they migrated to the US as adults.

"Basically, what we wanted to do was to have a Filipino theater company that would bring works of Filipino playwrights from the Philippines and possibly translate their works into English for performance in New York. Then we realized that some of these plays don’t talk to the Filipino-Americans. So we said, maybe we should do something else. We’ll do Filipino-American theater pieces that are done by Filipino-American playwrights. So we jumped from being a Filipino theater company to being a Filipino-American company to an Asian-American company. We did that to get more money. You see, the Filipino donor base is not enough. Actually, there were two reasons for the change. First, we were able to expand our donor base. And then, we were also able to expand our audience base. This also opened up our options on material," he insists.

After several productions, the people behind Ma-Yi realized they were not addressing the particular interests of their audience so they began using the scripts of Filipino-American writers. Flipzoids, written and directed by Ralph Peña, made US audiences notice Ma-Yi Theater Company. In 1997, Ching Valdes Aran received the Obie Award (as prestigious as the Tony or Oscar Awards) for her performance in the play. It also got standing ovations at the CCP in 1998 when the production was brought here to commemorate the centennial.

Admittedly, a number of Ma-Yi’s productions have tackled the age-old problem of immigrants in America. But Jorge insists that there are other materials close to the hearts of Asian-Americans.

"We did a play about Filipinos exhibited in the St. Louis World’s Fair of 1904. That was an eye-opener to everyone who watched it. Filipinos were being displayed half naked in the winter. How many people really knew about it? We also had a workshop on the Balangiga massacre last July. It was an eye-opener for people who saw the show. The Q and A after was something else. A lot of them had never heard about this. How could this have happened? That’s part of the importance and relevance of theater–you open the eyes and ears of your audience. Those plays had nothing to do with the immigrant story but they were able to teach people in a very entertaining manner."

Now no longer limited to Filipino material, Ma-Yi produces two main shows every year with workshops that serve as venues for mentoring Asian-American directors and playwrights. Proof of the importance of its mission came in the form of an Obie Grant given to the company in 2002. Ma-Yi has also shifted from being an off-off Broadway theater company (a maximum of 99 seats for every show) to an off-Broadway company (a maximum of 150 seats) which means it reaches a larger audience.

Jorge proudly breaks down their audience to 60 percent Asian-American (40 percent Filipino-Americans, 20 percent other Asian-Americans) and 40 percent Caucasians and Latin Americans. Even Ma-Yi’s Board has welcomed other ethnic groups. It currently includes a Chinese-American, Swedish-American and Italian-American; legal counsel is African-American.

"We want to have a mix of ethnicities and careers and ages," says Jorge, who intends to have a continuous flow of fresh ideas.

He is aware that the growth of a theater company depends on how open-minded its core group remains. "Pan Asian Repertory has been active in New York much longer than we have. But they don’t do the kind of innovative, edgy, risky stuff that we do. They’re doing Rashomon, my goodness! We will never do Rashomon. I mean that dates back to the 1960s, come on. They’re still there. They’re stuck on that. I hope that in 20 years, I can say I’m not stuck in the 2001 era. You have to move on to 2020. But, you know, that tends to happen. The founders or the innovators get stuck in their time. And that’s bad."

To balance off what they fear may be time-warped ideas, Jorge and Ralph tirelessly search for young blood. It is Ralph’s job to discover budding playwrights they can commission for new material. The work is never-ending. Sometimes it may take years until a script can reach its full potential. Such is the case of Hawaiian American Zach Linmark whose commissioned work has been years in the making. Jorge says non-commitally that it is promising but not ready yet.

And then there are gold mines like prodigy Han Ong, a Filipino-Chinese playwright, who became the youngest Asian-American to receive the MacArthur Foundation Genius Award in 1998. (The honor came with a $250,000 cash prize.) What doubles this accomplishment is the fact that the young Han is a high school dropout. More precisely, he was kicked out of a Catholic high school in Manila years ago. He is currently working on a trilogy of plays for Ma-Yi.

Meanwhile, Ma-Yi’s two major productions for 2003 cover the experience of other Asian-Americans. Last of the Suns by Alice Tuan focuses on the lives of three generations of the Sun family–how they battle with the conflicts of Chinese folklore and consumerist America. Wave is a futuristic tragedy (adapted from the Greek story of Medea) by Korean-American playwright Sung Rno.

A bonus for audiences in the Philippines is Ma-Yi’s The Romance of Magno Rubio to be staged at the CCP in July as part of the Center’s massive Sangandaan festival celebrating a century of Philippine-American relations. Written by Lonnie Carter and adapted from a short story by Carlos Bulosan, the play had its first run in New York from October to November last year.

Brian Scott Lipton writes in his article in the New York Post (Nov. 4, 2002): "There may be no bouquets of flowers or Michel Legrand love songs in The Romance of Magno Rubio, but this unusual 80-minute fable by the Obie-winning Ma-Yi Theatre Company has much to say about the world’s most delicate emotion. Playwright Lonnie Carter uses an intriguing mixture of verse, music and dialogue in this adaptation of Filipino author Carlos Bulosan’s short story. Young Magno Rubio, a barely literate migrant worker in 1930s California, woos (via letters written by his college educated bunkmate, Nick) Clarabelle, an Arkansas girl whose ad he saw in a lonely hearts magazine. What little plot exists turns on what Magno’s reaction will be once he learns, after years of correspondence, that Clarabelle...is little more than a con woman."

The Romance of Magno Rubio opens at the CCP’s Tanghalang Huseng Batute on July 16 and will run for two weekends. The Sangandaan Festival also features a unique stand-up comedy show, Tongue in a Mood, featuring three comic artists from the US and three from the Philippines and Orasiones, a presentation of four playwrights dealing with four outstanding characters in the century of shared history. The world premiere Ballet Philippines’ dance musical Darna, featuring spectacular aerial dance and movement sequences, will close the festival on July 31.

"If there was easier accessibility to funding, we’d come here more often," says Jorge, whose plans to stage Swoony Planet in Manila in November of 1998 did not push through. Unde-niably, it is only a grant from the Asian Cultural Council-Philippines that makes it possible for this long-awaited comeback.

The truth is that Ma-Yi stays afloat through grants and benefits. Only 40 percent of revenue comes from the box office. This means the theater company’s executive director spends most of the year searching for much-needed funding. The paperwork alone is overwhelming.

How does he manage to run a real estate business and still have time for Ma-Yi?

"It used to be a 20-80 split. Twenty percent of my attention went to theater and the 80 percent was devoted to real estate. Now, it’s the other way around," Jorge confesses with a smile. "You know, it’s like having two children. One is a very independent child. The other one is very dependent, very high maintenance. That’s theater. I get paid peanuts for this job. My money for subsistence comes from real estate."

But even a high-maintenance child will eventually stand on its own. A recent accomplishment is Ma-Yi’s move from Jorge’s living room to a real office. Next on the agenda is getting two full-time employes to man it. And then, if things go his way, Jorge dreams of releasing an anthology of new plays performed by the company.

All these are simply icing on the cake. Unfortunately, a theater company’s fight for survival takes on many facets in today’s world. "The industry is in a crisis because you have dvds, MTV, vhs, video tapes, malling. I mean these are all different competition for the same audience. And the youth of today has such a short attention span. They expect high tech effects. You will always have competition with technology," he says regrettably. "But we are low tech. Our competition is so high tech. In fact, I don’t even consider that competition anymore. They’re in a whole different category. We don’t want to be in that league. First of all, you know, a show like Flower Drum Song is what six to eight million dollars? We will never be a household name. But then people who go to the theater know who we are and what we do."

For a big little theater company like Ma-Yi, that is all that matters.