Theater for the multilingual

La Bohème wasn’t the only production that was keeping the Cultural Center of the Philippines abuzz over the weekend. There was another one, albeit smaller, that my friends and I decided to see out of curiosity: Tanghalang Pilipino’s Actor’s Company in Lab. In my case, it was also to make up for all the Virgin Labfests I’ve missed, and to jumpstart my love affair with local theater.

The Virgin Labfest is an annual festival of unstaged and untested works by playwrights, directors and actors. I’d been promising myself I’d go for God knows how long—the ticket prices aren’t bad at all (I think you fork over more moolah on any given Starbucks stopover) and you get to see that Filipino acting and playwriting isn’t just what you see on the boob tube or on the big screen. It was on its fourth run this year and I missed it once again.

Actor’s Company in Lab wasn’t quite of the “untested and untried” variety—two plays were based on foreign works: Tragedy for Two, which was an adaptation of Jean Anouilh’s Antigone, and The Lover, which was an adaptation of Harold Pinter’s play—but it sure did stoke my passion for local productions anew with Rene Villanueva’s Baby B. 

Did you just wonder if I watched three plays? You bet I did. And for less than the cost of a designer cup of java too! For P100, I enjoyed three one-act plays performed by some of TP’s newest talents.

While I thoroughly enjoyed Tragedy for Two and Baby B, I was totally blown away by the adaptation of The Lover (directed by Tess Jamias). The original play has “three” characters: a husband (Bong Cabrera) and a wife (Wenah Nagales) who seemingly live in mundane marital comfort and a lover who comes to visit the wife in the afternoons.

The lover is actually the husband playing a role—he’s the lover to the wife’s whore—but viewers don’t get to realize that until the end. The play is at once comic and dramatic—I’ve read that Pinter’s works are usually like that, allowing for both serious and comic interpretations—and, at some points, naughty, sexy and all around crazy.

What blew me away, though, was the play’s impressive use of language. The play opened with just about yawn-inducing British English. The conversation between husband and wife was stiff and polite, even when the husband asked if the wife’s lover was coming over and she said yes. The language barrier was all the more highlighted by the actor’s thick Visayan accent and the actress’ softer, but decidedly Filipino one. I started to wonder about the casting.

I was ready to set the play aside as one of those British plays I just wouldn’t “get,” when the lover slid in, leather jacket, shades, skin drum and all. I did a double take when they started talking in what sounded like a mixture of Filipino, Visayan and Ilonggo as they played out their sexual fantasies: he’s a rapist, she’s his victim; he’s her rescuer, she’s an innocent woman caught in the rain; he’s a guard, she’s the whore in his guardhouse; he’s a married lover, she’s a bored wife having an affair, and they’re breaking up. Suddenly, I was all eyes and ears, having finally connected with the play. The vernacular language had reached out to my primal instincts.

As the play progressed, the language didn’t revert to what it was like at the beginning, nor did it return to the fantastic smorgasbord it was during the lover and the wife’s exchanges. It became a relaxed version of Filipino English, with a smattering of the vernacular, as the “affairs” of husband and wife took their marriage in a different direction, with the spouses freely expressing their wildest desires as lovers.

This creative use of language could be a precursor to theatrical productions that could command bigger audiences. I hope to see more plays that use language as creatively. I think the Filipino audience is ready.

Email your comments to [email protected] or text them to (63)917-9164421. You can also visit my personal blog at http://althearicardo.blogspot.com.