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This is the blog of Ian Rosales Casocot. Filipino writer. Sometime academic. Former backpacker. Twink bait. Hamster lover.

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Tuesday, December 17, 2024

entry arrow4:49 PM | Plays! Plays! Plays!

I just finished editing and preparing a packet of full-length plays by Silliman writers [most of them Palanca winners] for Dessa Quesada-Palm’s directing class next semester. Was happy to note that three of them are comedies, and one — Lemuel Torrevillas’ Enter Edison, or What’s the Name of the Guy Who Invented Something — is an absolute farce of the first order. I also loved the pre-colonial shenanigans of Leoncio Deriada’s Maragtas: How Kapinangan Tricked Sumakwel Twice, the Basay-set agrarian reform family melodrama in Bobby Flores Villasis’ Eidolon, the rape legal melodrama of Elsie Coscolluela’s Original Grace, and the forbidden love sarswela of Rolin Migyuel Cadallo Obina’s San Nicolas. [There is another musical in the mix: Lakas ng Mahirap by Rosario Cruz Lucero.] Three are by former students of mine: Mike Gomez’s Tirador ng Tinago, Beryl Andrea Delicana’s Mango Tree, and Jireh Catacutan’s Una't Huling Gabi sa Ramona Disco. I have nine in all so far, and waiting to source out three more [one by Edilberto Tiempo, one by Linda Faigao-Hall, and one by Krip Yuson]. This really should be an anthology.

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Sunday, December 01, 2024

entry arrow9:00 AM | A Second Homecoming for Elsa Martinez Coscolluela

She is one of the best writers I know—although when you mention that to her, Elsa Victoria Martinez Coscolluela would demur. Once I remember her referring to her brother, the late David Martinez, as the better writer in the family. Granted, he was also a Palanca winner—he did the astonishing double whammy in 1997 by winning the Palanca first prizes for both the short story and poetry. But I think Ma’am Elsie is in a class of her own, and I will always be her grateful reader.

Admittedly, I first knew about her from two things. First, in high school, I came upon her short story “After This, Our Exile,” which won third prize at the 1972 Palanca Awards. I did not exactly know the import of her name yet, but I remember being blown away by the story’s instinctive feel for hacienda life in Negros, able to look beyond the gloss and see the rot behind the glitter of sugar. Second, when I knew more about her upon entering college at Silliman University, I learned that she was in fact crowned Miss Silliman in 1964—and I was quite astonished to realize one can actually be a great writer and also be a campus beauty queen. [Alas, when you’re younger, you tend to pigeonhole people into specifics. I later learned beauty queen writers were actually not uncommon. The equally great Dumaguete writer Rowena Tiempo Torrevillas was crowned Miss Negros Oriental in 1970. There’s also Jacqueline Veloso-Antonio who was Miss Dumaguete in 1985 and Miss Negros Oriental in 1987—and while she would not really call herself a writer, she is in fact a fascinating essayist, usually writing about local culture and heritage.]

Ma’am Elsie is still a beauty after all these years, and I have always taken to her as a kind of long-distance mentor. We chat often on Messenger, and the last time I was in Bacolod early this year, she went out of her way to take me out to dinner. I find this personal relationship with her very humbling. It is an honor to be friends with one of Silliman’s greatest writers.

The thing about Ma’am Elsie is that she is prolific. She writes poetry. She writes essays. She writes short stories. And she writes plays of various kinds—theatrical ones, of course, but also ones written for television and film. In the late 1960s until the 1980s, she was so prolific in her literary output that eventually she was elevated to the Palanca Hall of Fame in 1996—for the feat of having won five first prizes. Which is not something very easy to do. [For the record, she has won a total of 24 Palanca Awards.]

I love her plays. Her subject is so varied, but she returns often to the Negros of her childhood—which is in Dumaguete; and her adulthood—which is in Bacolod. That she is considered one of the foremost writers of both Negrense capitals means she has the pulse of Negros in her writings. And thus she is able to write truthfully about the place, and about us.

The thing about her plays, however, is that they’re seldom performed, if ever, even if they have won awards. The recurring joke about winning the Palanca for the play is that, after the awards ceremony, these plays find home not on the stage but in the drawer. But not for lack of trying by these playwrights; who wouldn’t want to have their plays staged? The simple reason is this: theatrical productions of local plays are very rare—unless you’re Nick Joaquin, Rene O. Villanueva, Nicolas Pichay, Floy Quintos, or Rody Vera, or, of late, Vincent de Jesus, Carlo Vergara, Dustin Celestino, Joshua Lim So, Guelan Varela-Luarca, or Eljay Castro Deldoc. You will notice a preponderance of Manila writers. The seeming exception seems to be Glenn Sevilla Mas from Iloilo, but he does work and live in Manila. Even in regional theater, play selections tend to favor Manila writers. How many times have we seen Marcelo Agana Jr.’s New Yorker in Tondo in Dumaguete? Or F. Sionil Jose’s Progress in Cebu? Too many times. They’re classics, of course—but their constant rotation in terms of local production seems to come at the expense of local writers.

One of Ma’am Elsie’s most famous plays is In My Father’s House, which won the Palanca in 1980. This is a Dumaguete play, based on the lives of her father and uncle who lived through World War II in Dumaguete, and who suffered tragically during the Japanese Occupation of the Oriental Negrense town. [Dumaguete would only become a city in 1948.] After the play won the Palanca, it was performed everywhere—at the Cultural Center of the Philippines in Manila and at the University of the Philippines-Diliman in Quezon City; in Singapore; in L.A.; even in Tokyo. But it was never staged in Dumaguete. Here it was, a quintessential Dumaguete play, but never performed in Dumaguete itself.

That is until 2013, when the Silliman University Culture and Arts Council took the chance of bringing it back home, under the direction of Amiel Leonardia. I was part of that cast at the Luce Auditorium, and we were honored to be part of that history in the making.

And that’s the thing. There are so many playwrights from Silliman and/or Negros Oriental. We have Ricaredo Demetillo, Bobby Flores Villasis, Linda Faigao-Hall, Rosario Cruz Lucero, Roberto Ponteñila Jr., Lemuel Torrevillas, Alfred Yuson, Leoncio Deriada, Edilberto K. Tiempo, Luna Griño-Inocian, Dessa Quesada-Palm, Rolin Migyel Obina, and many others. Ang among the younger set, we have Beryl Andrea Delicana, Earnest Hope Tinambacan, Karla Longjas, Junsly Kitay, Michael Aaron Gomez, Benjie Kitay, and Jireh Catacutan. Their plays keep winning plaudits everywhere—but they remain unstaged.

Which is why last year, Dessa and I took the initiative to start staging Palanca-winning plays by local writers, to be directed by our student directors at the Speech and Theater Department of Silliman University as part of their senior thesis productions. We thought this would give their works a chance to come alive. We started with the Palanca-winning one-act plays by Bobby Flores Villasis last year. This year, we have continued this project with the Palanca-winning one-act plays by Elsa Martinez Coscolluela. Staging In My Father’s House in 2013 was her homecoming to Dumaguete; this play festival should serve as the second one.

Last November 28, we finally raised the curtain on the first playdate of the Elsa Martinez Coscolluela Play Festival at the Woodward Blackbox Theatre at Silliman University. We knew the endeavor is partly to honor our beloved Dumaguete [and Bacolod] playwright, but we also were aware that the project is still essentially a laboratory for Silliman’s theatre students. We were going to watch student-directed plays, not professionally staged ones—and for that, we knew it will mostly be a hit or miss affair depending on the strengths of the student director involved. [You take these things with a grain of salt, always hoping for the best.]

Which is really to say: I was awed by what I saw of the Set A plays that night—with Bret Bonnie Ybañez directing Japayukisan, the opening play, and Francis Esguerra directing Blood Spoor, the final play for opening night. Mr. Ybañez took the melodrama of a young woman arriving home from abroad to attend her father’s funeral and keeping fiercely the secret that she works as a Japayuki [or nightclub entertainer] in Japan, and staged the play with surprising restraint and subtlety. [Even with a delicious catfight involved!] Even with a forlorn scene of having closure with an old boyfriend! [This scene actually made me tear up.]





















What made the production work was that Mr. Ybañez knew how to get to the interiority of the story; he also knew that good casting for our protagonist would be enough to telegraph the emotional core of the story. Mass Communication student Joriz Angel Palermo as Mayang the Japayuki truly gets to the heart of her character so well: we commiserated with her when she grappled with her secret; we ached for her when she confronted her sister and mother about having to support her family while her siblings got the privilege of going to school on her dime while she stripped away her dignity in a mob-controlled bar in Japan; and we rooted for her when she was tearing the hair out of a nosy “family friend.” When she is later confronted by her ex-boyfriend to get to the heart of their breakup, we finally comprehend where she is coming from and the extent to which she has arrived at a hard-earned worldly wisdom: “We don’t always get what we want. Plans miscarry, feelings change, dreams die—.” Heady stuff, and yet I like that at the end of it, the two characters choose to be kind to each other, to say goodbye in tacit understanding of their parting. Powerful stuff.




















Mr. Esguerra, on the other hand, has the luckier hand in directing a material that invites the epic and the atmospheric. But he also shows that he knows what exactly to do with every beat of the story: he begins the play with bird sound in complete darkness, then with the actors coming in from the direction of the audience, screaming incoherent pain in that darkness—until suddenly, a shaft of stage light shows us a woman on centerstage cradling a dying, bloodied girl. Then we get a sense of the other characters in the melee, all looking bloody, and then we understand that this is a community of Mindanao lumad, their homes having been randomly attacked by the military. There is much wailing, and recrimination, and later on, some quiet moments when the characters ponder their fate with each other. And then all of that gets embraced with some uncanny use of supernatural elements—fog and chanting and blinking lights do the trick—which are somehow tied up with the age-old beliefs and rituals of the hurting tribe. It is a very serious play, but it works. It is also very bloody and deadly, although all the violence occurs off-stage. I quite liked it. I admired how Esguerra knew how to pace the material, how to block, how to use music effectively, and how to detonate the drama with eerie silence. I like that he has a good sense of stage spectacle, which is rarely achieved by most student directors.

As of this publication, Set A [Japayukisan and Blood Spoor] would have finished their two-day run. You can still, however, catch Set B [First Fruits and Late Journey Home] on December 2 and 3, and Set C [The Captive Word] on December 6 and 7. The first two plays were more than the worth of the measly P200 ticket. If you are in Dumaguete, do yourself a favor and catch the remainder of the festival. This is truly a celebration of Dumaguete’s literary heritage.

This year, Dumaguete City is the official Philippine endorsee to become a UNESCO City of Literature in 2025, and it deserves that distinction truly. Doing this kind of theatre festival, of putting life to the literary works of our local literary artists, is very much a part of that effort.

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Sunday, November 03, 2024

entry arrow9:00 PM | Dessa at 60

Tonight, we celebrated Dessa Quesada-Palm's 60th birthday, in a lovely dinner and program with her friends of a lifetime at Essencia — and it was, to be honest, one of the most meaningful birthday celebrations I have ever come to witness. By the end of it, I was teary-eyed [and I never usually get teary-eyed at birthdays]. In occasions such as this, it's usual to have birthday greetings and speeches dedicated to the celebrator, but in the hands of a consummate theater artist like Dessa, each speech came at suitable intervals in a perfectly directed biographical narrative [with a good Powerpoint show to guide everyone]. And each speech was given by a perfectly handpicked friend or family representing an aspect or a major episode in Dessa's fruitful life — from her days as a member of the Quesada household [speech by sister Mae Quesada-Medina], from her life with PETA [speech by film director Avic Ilagan], from her days studying in New York [speech by composer Lerrick Santos], from early days in Dumaguete doing theatre workshops with the Divinity School [speech by Jean Cuanan-Nalam], from her almost two decades of mentoring YATTA [speech by Mellard Chiong Manogura], and from her love life [speech by her husband Colby Palm], interspersed with a monologue from Dessa's play Rape Buzz performed by Mayumi Maghuyop, improv comedy from the YATTA OGs Hope Tinambacan, Junsly Kitay, and Nikki Cimafranca, and music with the Quiz Family Singers, and the trio of Sharon Dadang-Rafols, Jean Nalam, and Dessa herself. At the end, she considered everyone in attendance and how each one has come to mean something significant in her life [it is at this point that I would finally break down and cry], and ended the evening with a song that she uses as her answer to the question: “What makes a meaningful life?”

Mother, you make 60 look fabulous. You have touched so many lives, and thank you for making Dumaguete your home, and the base of your theatrical gifts.

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Saturday, November 11, 2023

entry arrow2:38 PM | A Hamilton Workshop



A few weeks ago, I flew in to Manila with some high school friends to watch the touring production of Hamilton, the smash Broadway hit from Lin Manuel Miranda that has galvanized American theatre since it debuted in early 2015 and won a slew of awards—among them the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Tony Award for Best Musical—in the process. Hamilton injected new energy to the Broadway stage, but above all, it also reconfigured our way of thinking about history—specifically, how our received narratives about who we are as a people and where we come from are often cast in stone [or on the graying, unimpeached pages of history books], but also how also in our retelling of these stories we can resort to imaginative reinvention [without necessarily rewriting history] to be able to speak to broader, more contemporary concerns. Coming off the show at Solaire, I had to think to myself: I guess that’s one way of making history that’s so far removed from us become alive. Miranda did it by casting the play in diverse colors, to make an on-the-nose point about the pallor of history made up mostly of white men; and making it sing in a contemporary voice, and in this case, having a musical about Alexander Hamilton, one of America’s founding fathers, be told to the tune of Broadway melodies infused heavily with hiphop.

The result will not always be to everyone’s liking. I have heard contemporaries of mine agonizing over the rapping, and I have seen white nationalists go up in arms over the “wokeness” of Hamilton’s intensions. I like Hamilton, but this is not my favorite musical—I’ve never taken to it like many of my friends have done, who I knew to have waxed rhapsodic over the original Broadway cast recording some years ago, many committing entire songs to heart and memory. [I guess, in the way I did for Les Miserables or Spring Awakening, or ehem, The Sound of Music or West Side Story when I was much younger.] But I like it. I know snatches of lyrics [“I am not throwin’ away my shot”], I have seen the film recording of the Broadway production on Disney Plus, I know many of its original stars and have followed their careers since then—but I went to Solaire knowing I was not exactly its audience [fine, let me admit it: I do not get hiphop, but my partner schools me about it constantly anyway—in fact, he wooed me using lyrics from Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy].

But when the curtain came down on the Solaire stage with that last spotlighted look on Eliza looking up and shouting in revelation, I was in tears: I liked that by the end—after a whirlwind of an epic retelling of the American Revolution and the subsequent hard work [and political manipulations] of nation-building—we get three confessions in two songs:

Hamilton, dying in slow motion after a duel, lamenting: “Legacy, what is a legacy? / It’s planting seeds in a garden you never get to see”; Aaron Burr, the man who killed Hamilton in that duel, prophesying: “History obliterates, in every picture it paints / It paints me and all my mistakes / When Alexander aimed at the sky / He may have been the first one to die / But I’m the one who paid for it / I survived, but I paid for it / Now I'm the villain in your history”; and Eliza, Hamilton’s widow, feeling the full weight of history on its great men: “It’s only a matter of time / Will they tell your story? / Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?” And the answer to her questions? “Time,” the song goes.

The power of stories and the privilege of narratives have always been things I think about constantly, even in my creative work: I have written lots of stories about the writing of stories, and I have written stories about reseeing history with new lenses, often to give voice to the muted. So that ending in Hamilton—more powerfully received live on stage than on a recording—really got to me. I teared up.

But this essay is not a review about Hamilton.

It’s about how, a few weeks later, after getting back to Dumaguete from that Manila trip, I come home to the news that the director of the touring production of Hamilton was going to be in Dumaguete to give a workshop on November 6! It felt like coming full circle for me as a new fan of the material, to actually be able to meet with the Australian director Dean Drieberg, in my hometown no less.

His workshop’s official title was “Theatre-Making Workshop and Technique Masterclasses for Theatre Performers and Practitioners,” and what participants—which included theatre artists not just from Dumaguete and Negros Oriental, but also from Cebu, Bohol, Negros Occidental, and Panay—got was an in-depth exploration of inclusive theater practices, and above all, making any material become relevant to the contemporary. That last one is particularly important, with Mr. Drieberg saying right from the get-go: “Theater has the ability to change the way we see the world. It normalizes the way we look at the community, and it is important that we see ourselves onstage.”

He began the workshop by demonstrating to participants how he exactly goes about directing his performers tackle the music they have to interpret for musicals. First up, we had Louise Remata Villanueva performing “With You” from the musical, Ghost—a lovely rendition from Wowie, and which Mr. Drieberg workshopped with a series of probing questions: Who is this song for as a character? What do you think your character has to gain by singing this song? What has just happened just before the first lyric was sang? What happened in the moment? (In other words, ask: “What am I doing?”) Why do you think your character sings this part? Why does this song exist? “Emotions [called for in the scene] are too high that you can’t speak about [them],” he reminded the participants, “[but at the same time] we need to sing about this.”

He asked Wowie to explore key changes, to investigate why certain choices are made, to see the moment of acceptance after the peak of release, to breath [and to reset], and even to speak of the song as if it was a monologue. “What word is mostly sustained?” he asked.

“[The word] you…,” Wowie replied.

“Underline that word, [that’s] who she misses.”

She sang the song one more time, differently this time. More felt. More real.

Next up, we had Jon Riam Quizo, singing “Being Alive” from Company. Mr. Drieberg asked him: Who is this song for? “Picture a mirror in front of you,” Mr. Drieberg said. “There’s just a mirror confronting the character. Don’t play the room too much.” He asked JR to delve into the “moment before”: “That feeling of being cornered, suffocated, ganged up on,” he said. And then, other questions: Who is this character and why are they singing this? Why is this a song, and why is this not just a written text? What is the character doing in the scene?

“Play the punctuation mark,” Mr. Drieberg reminded everyone. “Or is it a question mark? Is the comma a pause? Read the scores, because there are notes there you can’t see in lyrics alone.”

Later, he delved deeper into actors as theatre makers, and the challenges of staging stories for contemporary audiences.

“We can all create theatre, we can all put an idea together,” he said. “The type of theater that I really love, what I like to create, is about reimagined stories—taking an existing show and reimagining it for a contemporary audience.” For him, re-imagined stories tackle best social issues, even politics; re-imagination can make an old story still relevant today. Which was why he was eager to do production work for Hamilton—and he noted that the casting alone can really be powerful thing to wield, because presence on stage is a form of activism, a bold statement. “[Imagine seeing on stage] people of diverse cultures [become the] Founding Fathers.”

He cited that other Broadway shows have taken this tack, especially Six, which chronicles the stories of the wives of Henry XIII, set to contemporary music, remaking the historical into pop, recalling Beyonce and Adele.

He also cited recent productions of older shows, which are now being revived with a fresh outlook of adaptation. “Why must we restage them the same way many years ago?” he asked. “I like to watch revivals that are reimagined, and made more relevant. Like the 2019 Broadway revival of Oklahoma!”

Revivals are important, according to Drieberg—but the adaptation must answer three basic questions: Why this? Why now? What are the parallels happing to the world now?

With that in mind, he put the participants, divided into four groups, to task: to reimagine three old tales—Goldilocks and the Three Bears, The Pied Piper of Hamelin, and Hansel and Gretel—choosing just one, or several of these choices, and to work around the material(s) with respect to the culture, to people, and others. “What is integral to the storytelling without perpetuating stereotypes about culture and gender, and other such things?” Then he told them to put on a showcase of their adaptation with only an hour of conceptualization and execution and rehearsal.

All the groups turned in fantastic productions—some even with music and choreography—but the efforts of two groups are burned into my mind. One group called their piece, “Burn the Bodega,” and in it, they retold the Goldilocks story as the [often funny] story of a strike—eventually leading the characters to call for the titular act, and ending their strike with a grand conflagration, only to be provided with a twist: an innocent girl trapped in the flames. Which begged the question: what are the lines dividing social action and crime? In another quick production, one group presented “Influence”—a deeply disturbing story, following the conceit of the Pied Piper story and told mostly in mime, which follows a young woman trapped in COVID-19 quarantine. She finds a way to alleviate her boredom with social media, and soon she develops a growing presence on TikTok. She becomes so influential that when she dares her followers to do challenges, they do them without any question. And then one day, she dares them to go to high places, and jump. And they jump.

Talk about making old fairy tales relevant again.

Thank you for the visit, Mr. Drieberg!









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Thursday, November 09, 2023

entry arrow4:57 PM | The Secret Lives of Oriental Negrenses as Drama

For the longest time, whenever I see senior directing students at Silliman University put on a play, I’d discover that the invariable title would always be a play from Manila, by Manila authors. And I’d go: “Manila na pud…”

Quite frankly, it irritated me, given how I vent about the Manila-centric nature of our culture.

It also regularly pained me because Dumaguete is supposed to be a City of Literature, and we do have an abundance of writers and playwrights here—but their plays don’t seem to get any traction about being staged locally!

Case in point: In My Father’s House by Dumaguete playwright Elsa Martinez Coscolluela. A play about a Dumaguete family torn apart by World War II, it won the Palanca Award in 1980, but was first staged not in Dumaguete but by the University of the Philippines Playwrights’ Theatre at the Faculty Center Studio [and then later at Teatro Hermogenes Ylagan in UP Diliman, and at the Cultural Center of the Philippines’ Tanghalang Huseng Batute] in 1987. In 1989, they restaged it at the Wilfrido Ma. Guerrero Theater, but with a Filipino translation, Sa Tahanan ng Aking Ama, by Raul Regalado. That year, it became the country’s official entry in the 11th Singapore Drama Festival. According to the CCP Encyclopedia of Philippine Art, its productions in the United States included one at the Astor Place Theater in New York by the Ma-Yi Theater Company in 1990, and then at the Hudson Theatre in Los Angeles by Stage West in 1996, both directed by Chito Jao Garces. In Japan, it was presented in 1995 at the Clapbard Garden Theatre in Kyoto by the Kapatiran-Kyoto, co-directed by Matthew M. Santamaria and Josefina Estrella. In 2010, a new translation in Filipino by Jerry Respeto was presented by ENTABLADO at the Rizal Mini Theater at the Ateneo de Manila University, co-directed by Respeto and Jethro Tenorio.



That play was being staged everywhere except the place it truly belonged to: Dumaguete. Only in 2013, thirty-three years after it won the Palanca, did the play see production at the Luce Auditorium, with Amiel Leonardia directing.

Many other award-winning plays by Dumaguete and Silliman playwrights—Lemuel Torrevillas, Leoncio Deriada, Edilberto Tiempo, Aida Rivera-Ford, Linda Faigao-Hall, Luna Griño-Inocian, Ephraim Bejar, Beryl Andrea Delicana, Michael Aaron Gomez, and so many others—suffer from the same oversight.

I understand why: Manila plays have the most recall power especially among younger theatre artists because they are constantly being staged and talked about, especially on social media. And they’re also accessible. Whereas, with Dumaguete plays—where can we even begin to get hold of copies of these plays? And how come nobody talks about them? It’s a conundrum.

It’s not that there is no universality in locally-set plays: the playwright Alexandra May Cardoso took my short story “The Sugilanon of Epefania’s Heartbreak,” set in Bayawan at the turn of the last century, and adapted it into the fabulously written Ang Sugilanon sa Kabiguan ni Epefania, and that play, which started its journey at the CCP’s Virgin Labfest in 2016, has been performed everywhere—and people seem to love it.

Which is why I was delighted that Dessa Quesada-Palm came to me months ago to hatch a plan: why don’t we ask our senior directors to stage plays by Dumaguete playwrights, and why don’t we begin with Bobby Flores Villasis? I jumped at the invitation.


When the Dumaguete writer Bobby Flores Villasis passed away on last May 2 this year, he left behind a great array of literary works and books that defined a life dedicated to creative writing. He was also a persevering cultural worker, having spent most of his working life as the cultural officer of the Negros Oriental Provincial Tourism Office, but it is his poems and his short stories and his plays—which chronicle the storied lives of Oriental Negrenses from Bayawan to Dumaguete—that would come to be the foundation of his legacy.

In his 1998 book Demigod and Other Selections, Villasis first gathered together a sampling of his oeuvre, anthologizing plays, poems, and short stories that showed his unique worldview, crafted with obvious mentorship from teachers like Edith Tiempo, Edilberto Tiempo, and Albert Faurot. In his 2001 short story collection, Suite Bergamasque, he embarked on an even more ambitious literary project: gathering interlinked short stories that told, as a whole, the dazzling and devastating lives of the denizens of Dumaguete’s Rizal Boulevard, particularly the families of local sugar barons whose mansions—colloquially called the Sugar Houses—line the seafront. The book became Dumaguete’s answer to James Joyce’s Dubliners or Carlos Ojeda Aureus’ Nagueños.

Of particular interest, however, are his plays, for which he won an impressive number of Palanca Awards, seven in all, which include Vigil [first prize for one-act play, 1978], Demigod [second prize for one-act play, 1979], Fiesta [first prize for one-act play, 1987], Salcedo [first prize for one-act play, 1988], Brisbane [second prize for one-act play, 1989], Eidolon [honorable mention for full-length Play, 1990], and Caves [third prize for one-act play, 1994]. They are a mix of historical and domestic dramas, but all of them invariably dramatize the secret lives and public sorrows of privileged Oriental Negrense families. These plays were acclaimed in their time, but they have never been staged, even during Villasis’ lifetime.

For the first time ever, four of these Palanca-winning plays will be performed in Dumaguete in a festival at the Woodward Blackbox Theater in Silliman University, on select dates from November 8 to 18. The productions are all under the auspices of the Speech and Theatre Department of the Silliman University College of Performing and Visual Arts, in cooperation with Artista Sillimaniana, the Silliman University Culture And Arts Council, Youth Advocates Through Theatre Arts, Buglas Writers Guild, and the Dumaguete City Tourism Office. The event is also one of the highlights of the 75th Charter Anniversary of Dumaguete City going into its Diamond Jubilee Year.


Opening the festival is Vigil, directed by Andrea Nazareno, which bowed November 8. I had a raucous good time watching it, and guffawed at the unexpected queer sensibilities. I had no idea! I could see traces of Nick Joaquin’s Portrait of the Artist as Filipino [the unseen father in the next room, plus the bickering women, plus the strapping young man in their midst], and the glorious madness of women in Tennessee Williams’ plays, with the paraplegic plot of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? [the one with Joan Crawford and Bette Davis] thrown in for good measure. That’s a lot of queer ur-texts to see limning the lines in this play about a nun named Manul [played by Lady Elmido] who comes out of the convent to take care of her overbearing paraplegic mother [played by Jecho Adrian Ponce]. Things go awry when the father comes home to die after leaving them eight years ago for another woman, and as if that is not enough, the other woman [played by Rhayana Marie Dalisay] enters the picture during a stormy night—and soon secrets and hijinks are revealed!






That ending, which involves an inevitable sexual romp that happens right in front of a paralyzed woman who is all but forced to get out of bed in sheer horror, was something else: it is the definition of choice, and I am glad Villasis chose to end the story this way.

Then there’s the fact that Nazareno had cast a queer man [Ponce] in the role of The Mother, which made everything all the more camp. Dalisay acquitted herself well as Ponce’s foil, but what would have completed the whole draggish illusion Nazareno [probably unwittingly] started would have been to cast another queer man as The Other Woman. Because for these two, to borrow from drag terminology, the “library” was way wide open, and they were reading each other to filth! [Ponce’s exquisite line reading of “I ... hate ... you” or his “You haven’t even begun to work on anything successfully!” deserves a Tony Award.]

It was all melodramatic fun, for sure. It was not perfect—the production design needed a more imaginative rendering, the sound design was deeply wanting, and sometimes the actors’ voices could not be heard because of challenges of projection and enunciation—but I have no deep complaints. Some might even say the play is dated—but I think literature that provides a snapshot of olden times and olden ways is its own valuable thing. True, the English deployed in the dialogue [“Husk and chaff!”] had an unreal quality to it that I somehow liked, although I also kept wondering: what if this play was translated to the Binisaya/Kiniray-a of Tolong Viejo [the old name of Bayawan], which is the setting of this overheated drama? The impact would probably be more considerable, but I can appreciate this play for the gifts it brings, foremost of which is recalling the unique voice of Bobby Villasis. He died early this year, and his birth anniversary is next week [the 16th of November]. I like to think of this festival as a good birthday gift. He would have been happy.

The rest of the festival showcases the following plays:

Demigod, directed by Elouise Zapanta, on November 11, Saturday at 8 PM. In this play, we are transported to Bacong, Negros Oriental in 1898. It has been 300 years since the start of the Spanish colonization of the Philippines, and discontent is everywhere. People are starving and guardia civiles are watching. A revolution has started, led by none other than Pantaleon Villegas, a.k.a. Leon Kilat, and no one can catch him. He is quick like lightning. But too much light can blind you. Be careful who you trust. In these trying times, faith will be tested and love will be questioned.


Salcedo, directed by Gillian Inocente, on November 15, Wednesday at 7 PM. The play follows the members of the Salcedo household, Lourding’s family, along with their close friends, the Bouffards, who are mourning the loss of Lourding’s husband, Pedrito. Amidst this period of grief, Lourding grapples with the challenges she encounters in her relationship with her daughters, and the Salcedo retainer leading to a surprising revelation.


And Fiesta, directed by Neve-Rienne Fuentes, on November 18, Saturday at 7 PM. The play takes place during fiesta in Bayawan, which is something everyone looks forward to, except at the Ragada household. For twenty years, Ines Ragada has been a thorn in the side of Corito, Manuel, and Soling. But everything changed with the arrival of Lucia Solon, and dark secrets and big revelations are revealed.


I do hope more people in Dumaguete will come to enjoy these plays, because these are our stories, penned by one of our best writers. Long live Dumaguete theater!

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Monday, October 23, 2023

entry arrow9:00 AM | Taking Not Throwing My Shot





I needed this theatre break, away from all things Dumaguete for the weekend, with a thousand thanks to my high school friends Eugene Kho and Niña Christine Miraflor-Kho [and Lance!] who made this happen. I love Hamilton, but I was never a die hard fan of the material unlike most of my friends, until now. Found myself blown away by the magnificence of Act II, and teared up many times at various points of the concluding scenes. The duel, Burr's "I'm the villain of your story now" confession, the rousing legacy final number. The play's really a different thing when you see it live on stage.



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Saturday, August 06, 2022

entry arrow12:51 PM | A Grand Finale to the 2022 CCP Arts Academy



Have you ever had that feeling that you've done your best, and now it's up to the fates for that one last go to end up at least satisfactorily? We — the mentors for literature, dance, theatre, visual arts, music, and film — workshopped and workshopped and workshopped for five days straight, and now it came to this: a recital involving all the participants for the closing ceremony.

With barely half-a-day of rehearsals to iron out the kinks and to determine what needed to be done [choreography, choice of pieces, etc.], we were in it because everyone wanted it. In fact, we started the week thinking a final performance was going to be optional for each workshop. By Wednesday, all the mentors were keen to do at least something. By Thursday afternoon, we had some idea about what to do. By Friday morning, the rehearsals began. By Friday afternoon, the performances were on the slot.

AND IT WAS TREMENDOUS. It was like watching a concert of all the arts coming together in a spectacular and unexpected grand finale, with everybody doing their best to make everything work. You couldn't tell that most of the dances — sometimes paired with poets or with theatre artists — were improvised on the spot. It was just all seamless, certainly not without its flaws [a missing cue, a missing mic, etc.], but altogether fantastic. This is why in this video, as the last performers took a bow, we are all so generous with our applause, because we recognized that we just did something magical — and that all that hard work actually went to something tangible.

I think I echo my other co-mentors when I repeat what I said to myself at the end of the program: "Oh my God, they all actually learned something from us." We actually observed that our participants — 188 teachers from all over the Philippines — were hungry to learn, were willing to absorb something new and challenging, and most of all were generous to share their [sometimes newfound] talent in front of everyone. We made them dance, write, act, direct, make music, make art — and in the end, we were all very happy.

Thank you, Cultural Center of the Philippines Arts Academy [Chris Millado / Ron B. Mirabuena] and Silliman University Culture and Arts Council [Diomar Abrio] for making this possible. And congratulations to all my co-mentors [Dessa Quesada-Palm, Cheenee Vasquez Limuaco, Angelo Sayson, Aiken Quipot, Elvert Bañares, Juni Jay Tinambacan, Joseph Albert Perez Basa, W Don Flores, Ramon del Prado, and AK Ocol] for forming such a formidable group of resource speakers.

It was a happy week, all in the name of the arts!

[Video by Aiken Quipot]

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Sunday, June 19, 2022

entry arrow2:19 PM | Dean Francis Alfar's 'Short Time' for 6200 Pride

PINK THEATRE presents a staged reading of Short Time, a Palanca-winning play by Dean Francis Alfar about friendship, marriage, and forbidden passion. Directed by Dessa Quesada-Palm, featuring Nikki Cimafranca, Rojan Bungcasan Talita, Jo Camille, and Mellard Chiong Manogura of Youth Advocates Through Theater Arts [YATTA]. Also streaming at 6200Pride!


The past week was incredibly heavy for me, perhaps a bit of a side effect of the second booster shot I had on Monday. Was sick, on and off. There was also a socials thing earlier in the week that drained all of me. And there was also the fact that it took me five — five — days total to download all the video files I needed to have to edit the Pink Theatre video I just uploaded.

Talk about frustrating: the worst wait was for a 6 GB file to download, and it kept encountering errors. The video editing itself, which I thought would be a nightmare [e.g., we didn’t get the venue we needed because of unavoidable circumstances, and had to make do with taping in Dessa’s house which had occasional sound disturbances (tricycles, planes, dogs, etc.)], only took a total of one day to do, so that was a surprise. Lesson relearned: it’s all about perseverance, even when the going gets tough. But I do think I deserve a massage.

Thank you, Dessa, Mellard, Nikki, Rojan, Jo Camille, Renz, Benji, and Renz for all your help and contribution to this project. And thank you, Dean, for allowing us to do your play!

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Thursday, May 06, 2021

entry arrow2:51 PM | The Four Faces of Our Current Woes

You know how it is when things sometimes frighten us that our reflex is to laugh out loud, perhaps in an ironic attempt to keep the demons at bay? I have just seen the first important theatrical experience of our long pandemic season—and I found myself laughing in that painful, silent way when you try to keep your chortles in quiet mode.

Not because the play is funny, although there are certainly deft comic touches here and there, but because what you are seeing is so reflective of our everyday horrors, elevated to such absurdity, that the only way to process all that it presents is to recoil, then to reconsider, and finally to discharge a nervous chuckle or two. Catharsis is the end goal of Fighting the Invisible, opening on May 7, Friday at 7 PM at the Sidlakang Negros Village Function Hall, with another performance slated on May 8, Saturday. And catharsis is probably what we all need right now.

That said, it is quite vital that we see the play now, because the present—replete with lives on hold, on bankruptcy, on nervous bravery, or on the verge of lockdown madness—is its terrible, perfect currency. But while it does deal with contemporary travails in excruciating details, this is certainly not a realist play. In borrowing its staging from a wide variety of inspirations—from mime to Noh, from shadow play to Kuttiyatam—somehow the material feels elevated to a kind of modern mythology.

You can tell you are not seeing a regular play by how it opens: in the dimness of its performing space, four face-masked, white-faced figures congregate in the middle, all in a hush, all in a kind of trance, all attracted individually to low-key music, singular to them, which soon turn out to be varied, personalized ringtones from cellphones. Each clutches their own device like a leech, like how we all do in reality; each bump into each other; each regard the other with mistrust, and distance. And then they scurry to their specific spots onstage—with nary a dialogue—and the play begins.



That opening performance spiel in abstraction clues us in to how to embrace the play: everything is stylized, everything is pushed to a performative strangeness, and everything is metaphorical.

That could spell disaster in lesser hands. Often there is nothing as off-putting as material that spoon-feeds you earnestly with meaningful didacticism, especially when done in the bent of realism. But D Salag Collective, a new Dumaguete theatre company whose first full-length presentation is this play, is not a collective of “lesser hands.” Leading the group is Hope Tinambacan, the Hopia frontman, Bell Tower Project visionary, and YATTA stalwart, whose recent training at the Intercultural Theatre Institute [ITI] in Singapore—one of the most rigorous theatre programs in the world—has allowed him to shape, in collaboration with his fellow artists, a play that is beautifully performed, informed by Asian traditions of theatricality, with a gut punch for insights. Together with Nikki Cimafranca, Benjie Kitay, and Karen Silva, all co-directors, co-stars, and co-writers, and aided by a one-man stage crew, D Salag Collective invites us to consider carefully our current woes.

They do that by splintering the story into four vignettes that still somehow feel like parts of an organic whole, threaded together by a kind of a guide [played by Benjie Kitay] who fills the interludes with an earnest, audience-participatory yielding for time. Time eventually becomes one of the invisible antagonists of the play, but I’m getting ahead of myself. The coronavirus, too, is another one of the titular invisible antagonists—and Kitay’s guide also represents that, courtesy of a globular headdress that looks very much like the virus, with pencils, pens, cellphones, rulers, etc. in place of its spikes. That small piece of production design alone underlines so much what Fighting the Invisible wants to tackle.



In the first vignette, a man in a black raincoat [played by Tinambacan] struts around in weariness, opening his garb to reveal assorted items—socks, cellphones, teddy bears, etc.—all price-tagged for sale. To a haunting guitar accompaniment, he mimes again and again the concerns and desperations of the present, a feel of temperature and heartbeat, a demonstration of dwindling resources, punctuated regularly with a plaintive plea, “Ayaw pud tawon, Lord.”



In the second vignette, a figure in a tent [played by Cimafranca], shadowplays our daily anxiety-ridden ritual of waking up to the pandemic, presaged by a sigh, “Kanus-a pa ni mahuman?” We see his silhouette go through getting up, dressing up, all the while mumbling one horrifying pandemic statistic after another. When he comes out of the tent, the revelation is both a surprise and a reckoning.



In the third vignette, a woman in an apron equipped with cleaning paraphernalia [played by Silva] goes about household chores—but in donning an office jacket over that apron, we get the slap of the farce: how our personal and professional lives have blurred in the lockdown, and how that uneasy blurring, Zoom meetings, and the still constant demands by our economic overlords to produce, produce, and produce eventually lead to breakdowns of our body, sanity, and spirit.

In the last vignette, our guide is joined by the three others [who provide both musical accompaniment and reflective Greek chorus] in a wrenching portrayal of anguished mental health wrought by the pandemic. This is my favorite vignette, because raw and real. There is something to be said about Kitay’s frenetic eyes as he rails against pandemic time that is both deliriously slow and excruciatingly fast at the same time: “Dili puwede mo pas-pas!” To which the chorus replies: “Unsay adlaw karon / Asa ko paingon? / Unsa akong unahon… / Kapa! Gakapa! / Kape! / Bugnaw nang kape. / Gabii pa man ni…” The anxiety is real.

It all feels so strong, and moving—because the play allows us to be somehow seen.

This is not the first play Dumaguete has seen since the pandemic started. Last 26 November 2020, Artista Sillimaniana put on an intimate, health protocol-following staging of Karen Schiff’s Breakfast with Willy, starring Malka Shaver and Andrew Alvarez, and directed by Hannah Catacutan. It was a small comedy set in a grocery store, and its mirth and high jinx were what we needed in the dark depths of that uncertain year. A full year on, and with the end of the pandemic [hopefully] in sight, it’s time for our artists to take stock of our fragile recent past and still surging present, refracting our collective experience into a mirror of truth.

Cringe, laugh, cry—these are the measures of the catharsis we need. Fighting the Invisible paves the way.




Fighting the Invisible is slated on May 7, Friday and May 8, Saturday at 7 PM at the Sidlakang Negros Village Function Hall. Reserve a seat now at the D Salag Collective FB page. The production is limited to 40 seats per show. Safety protocols will be followed. A talkback session will follow after the show.



Photos by Renz Torres

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Friday, November 27, 2020

entry arrow11:49 PM | A Good "Breakfast" for Friday Night

Some years ago, the poet Myrna Peña-Reyes made an astute observation about how spoiled Dumaguetnons are when it comes to the city’s vibrant art and culture scene: so many events happen within a given week that most people don’t even bother to go and support all these exhibits, concerts, screenings, stagings, gigs, readings, or lectures anymore. “They’ve become a dime a dozen,” she said.

Well, 2020 changed all that. The pandemic has starved us so thoroughly of live performances that when I heard there was going to be play staged tonight—but an invitational one that followed health protocols, in a well-ventilated venue, and with the most minimal number of audience members—I jumped at the chance to watch it. I’VE BEEN STARVED SINCE MARCH OF CULTURE. And what a wonderful time we had with the play!



Andy Alvarez starred as an elderly Polish grocery stocker with a painful past and Malka Shaver starred as a bored graphic designer with an unsure grasp of what she wants in Karen Schiff’s Breakfast with Willy, directed by Daisy Hannah Catacutan. It was just the right play to watch in these fraught times: a nice blend of comedy with something important to say about the horrors of war, immigration, identity, life choices, and breakfast cereal. I had a great time.

Thanks for the invite, Dessa Quesada-Palm!

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Wednesday, October 21, 2020

entry arrow5:30 AM | Turn Back Time



I really would like to borrow my costume again from our production of Elsa Coscolluella’s In My Father’s House [2013, directed by Amiel Leonardia] and just strut around the city pretending it’s still 1940.

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Wednesday, August 26, 2020

entry arrow9:00 AM | Epefania and Dumpawa



Here are two of my stories getting the theatrical treatment, and COMING SOON. Catch May Cardoso's adaptation of "The Sugilanon of Epefania's Heartbreak" on August 29 over at Relive Your Passion PH, and my own adaptation of my children's story "The Story of Dumpawa’s Lullaby" based on The Folk Songs of the Visayas by Priscilla Magdamo and a Manobo folk tale told by Violeta Gayak on October 31 over at the Silliman University Culture and Arts Council and the Cultural Center of the Philippines.

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Thursday, July 23, 2020

entry arrow10:00 AM | The Film Meme No. 89



[89th of 100]. Plays can be tough adaptations to film -- as a medium, it's bound to a strict unity of place, hence the intrinsic stagebound-ness of films made from theatrical materials. Most of the time, directors attempt to "open up" the story, to get away from that static changelessness and to become more cinematic than just having people in a room talking to each other. Most retain their feel of being contained -- but sometimes for the better, like in Oleanna or Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, where the singular setting contributes to the suffocation of the drama. [But Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf even attempts to "open up" a little by having its characters leave the living room for a nearby bar for a while.] "Opening up" can work, like in Barefoot in the Park or Brighton Beach Memoirs or Closer or The History Boys, or most musicals to be honest. My favorite attempt at an "opened up" play is this prismatic gem of a film from 1993, directed by Fred Schepisi from the play by John Guare who also wrote the screenplay. It hops around, gets to places and mindsets in a swirl, it's unbelievable the original material is a play. I've read the play before, and I've always thought it unfilmmable, a quirk about most Guare plays. In fact, the film critic Pauline Kael once wrote: "When I see a Guare play, I almost always feel astonished; I never know where he’s going until he gets there. Then everything ties together. He seems to have an intuitive game plan.” The same exact thing strikes me about this particular play, which premiered on Broadway in 1990, garnering nominations for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Tony Award for Best Play. It is about an upper class couple in Manhattan, the Kittredges, who run a private art gallery catering to their wealthy friends. One night, as they are about to go to dinner with a prospective client, a young man -- who tells them he is the son of Sidney Poitier and is a classmate of their Ivy-educated children -- barges into their evening, eventually charming them with home-cooked pasta and a spirited discussion of modern ennui and Catcher in the Rye. He promises them parts in the film version of Cats that his "father" is preparing, and they're dazzled. Things best left unsaid ensue, but they discover he is a conman, and has pulled similar shenanigans with other friends. They collectively go to the police, only to be told the young man has not done anything wrong: he didn't steal anything -- he only wanted to be, in a surreptitious way, part of their lives. But I have not done justice to the intelligence of the material, and how elegantly it explores the beauty of art, the singularity of experience, the want for what is deprived of you, and above all, the longing for connection, hence the title of the film. This is emphasized by the monologue given by Stockard Channing's nuanced take on Ouisa Kittredge, who sees finally the young man not as a criminal interloper, but a lost soul brimming with this longing: "I read somewhere that everybody on this planet is separated by only six other people. Six degrees of separation between us and everyone else on this planet. The President of the United States, a gondolier in Venice, just fill in the names. I find it extremely comforting that we're so close. I also find it like Chinese water torture, that we're so close because you have to find the right six people to make the right connection ... I am bound, you are bound, to everyone on this planet by a trail of six people." A beautiful film, and I'm glad Schepisi found a way to be truthful to the play. It must have been difficult transferring the nuances, but in accomplishing this, found a way to make an almost perfect film. Ryan Gilbey, writing for New Statesman and echoing Kael before him, has this to say about the film: "I want to liken it to a mosaic because of the accumulation of mysteries and profundities. In fact, it's more fluid than that suggests; it's closer to a word-association game, or a string of sense-memories. This is a kind of film-making that aspires to reproduce consciousness, where our divisions between past, present and future are elided." Yes, yes, yes. What's the film?

For the introduction to this meme, read here.

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Wednesday, March 25, 2020

entry arrow4:07 AM | Terrence McNally and the Artistic Struggle



I've always wondered, morbidly, which among the major [or minor] celebrities that I know would succumb to COVID-19. It turned out to be a writer and theatre artist, the Tony-winning playwright Terrence McNally [1938-2020]. I first discovered his work [like most people, I think] via the film version of Love! Valour! Compassion!, which centered around a group of New York friends, all gay, as they occasionally spend weekends together in the country -- which allowed for deep excavations of friendship, fidelity, AIDS, and dancing Swan Lake. I loved that film [and play]. It was one of those titles that my brother Rey sent me all the way from the U.S. in the late 1990s that proved foundational in my then growing education in queer cinema. The play was funny and sad in equal measure, and allowed me to distinguish all the kinds of queerness that it offered. [Also, that kitchen scene at midnight looking for milk will always leave me breathless.] I also loved Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune and Master Class, which we staged at the Luce starring the great Cherie Gil as Maria Callas. And although he will always be notorious for writing Corpus Christi -- which I won't even bother to talk about -- he will always be for me as the playwright who grappled with artistic obsolescence [choreography in Love! Valour! Compassion! and opera singing in Master Class] but gave the struggle wit, beauty, and humanity. Thank you, Mr. McNally. And here's wishing COVID-19 will stop its ravaging before it takes more of the people we admire and love

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Monday, March 02, 2020

entry arrow3:00 PM | Rape Buzz!



If you're in Manila this Saturday, March 7, catch Onna Rhea Quizo perform Dessa Quesada-Palm's RAPE BUZZ for the Fetival of Plays by Women at the Cultural Center of the Philippines! Glad to help out YATTA with this poster design.

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