MANILA, Philippines - The story of character actor Jelson Bay (pronounced Ba-e in Southern Tagalog style), 34, reads like a teleserye.
Jelson was born and raised near the port of Batangas City in an area filled with squatters (informal settlers, please). It was like the setting for a Lino Brocka social-realist film.
The neighborhood was noisy and congested, and sometimes violent. “Siempre magulo,” Jelson recalled. There were fights, gang wars, killings, drunken behavior, threats of demolition and marijuana users and pushers.
Jelson’s parents separated when he was only two years old. The father remarried and had a second family. The boy’s mother became a labandera who at first did not want her son to go to school, and encouraged him to be a basurero. (Today, when the mother sees her son in a TV commercial, promoting ice cream or whatever, she becomes excited and proudly proclaims the news to the neighborhood.)
The mother remarried, and so Jelson and his older brother Joel acquired a stepfather who was a barker near the Lyceum school.
The kids had a grandmother, Natividad Bay, in Manila. She was relatively well-off and sometimes she would visit her impoverished grandchildren, and help them financially. (Anita Linda or Rustica Carpio could essay this role if ever Jelson’s story is filmed.)
The boy did go to school to the nearby Batangas City Elementary School and later at the Batangas National High School. After graduation he worked for a time at Jollibee, and then became a construction worker ala Julia Madiaga in Brocka’s Maynila sa Kuko ng Liwanag.
“Struggle na naman,” he noted.
The succeeding years saw him jobless, finishing a year’s computer program at the Systems Technological Institute, working as a computer stock clerk, setting up his own computer shop, and jobless again.
One not-so-fine day, while jogging at Roxas Boulevard, feeling depressed and wanting to leave the country and become a merchant mariner, fate or divine providence intervened in the form of a text message from a friend.
The friend urged him to audition at Tanghalang Pilipino (TP), the resident drama group of the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP). Jelson had no theatrical experience, but unconsciously perhaps he had wanted to become an actor for he was a fan of Brocka and Bernal. So off he went.
The instruction was “prepare a monologue,” but he did not know what the word “monologue” meant! He asked around and was laughingly told he should invent a scene and talk all by himself.
Relying on his instincts, he acted like a drunkard, mumbling lines expressing disillusionment with the country. And what do you know — he impressed Tanghalang Pilipino’s artistic director Nanding Josef, and was taken in.
Not only that. He has become a favorite of indie directors and is appearing in July in three Cinemalaya films: Requiem, Oros and Posas. There’s a fourth movie in the planning stage.
The theater experience has improved his character, his outlook in life and his values.
“Dati bad vibes ako,” he shares. “But if you go into acting, you study a character, you go into the character… (and you learn) theater is part of life. Life is beautiful! Di bale na kung sabihin nila walang pera. Dati selfish ako, gusto ko lang mag-abroad. Ngayon may kaunti nang nasionalismo… malaking bagay yon.”