Hair-raising experience in Taiwan

MANILA, Philippines - Balikbayan actor Bernardo Bernardo is a self-confessed Instagram-Selfie-Groupie-FB-Picture-Master-Poster wannabe. He has a lot of souvenir photos from the recent highly-successful staging of PETA’s Haring Lear at The Experimental Theater of the Taipei National University for the Arts (TNUA) as the Philippine theater showcase during the Kuandu Arts Festival.

Every October, the Kuandu Arts Festival in Taiwan invites the world’s leading performing groups and artists to participate and help realize its vision to become one of the world-famous arts festivals. Bernardo felt that “opening our show during Double 10 (Oct. 10), a major celebration in Taiwan, was particularly lucky for us.”

“We had sold out houses and earned rave reviews,” Bernardo shared. “The TNUA audiences practically ignored the English and Chinese subtitles on the proscenium during our limited run, and were totally engrossed in what Terry O’Reilly (artistic director of Mabou Mines, New York) calls the ‘ferocity’ of the drama — that relentlessly unfolded center stage and on the walkways surrounding the theatergoers.”

Bernardo added that O’Reilly, a former actor, was also very generous in his praise for the Filipino actors whose “all roles are major in Lear. The play demands a company of truly great actors. This is what PETA’s Haring Lear gives us — a relentless pace in portrayals that are relentless as our lives… Lear is a play for (all) ages.”

The PETA production also merited positive feedback from Hollywood producer (and current associate professor in Filmmaking at TNUA), Randy Finch, who wrote that Haring Lear was “an exhilarating production. . . (where) fearless actors and inspired design choices coalesce into a landmark production of Shakespeare’s relentless tragedy: Haring Lear resonates long after the curtain falls.”

Understandably, the mean and lean team of PETA’s Kalinangan ensemble (13 actors and seven production staff members) was elated. However, the whole theater experience in Taipei was not quite as easy as, say, munching delicious Taiwanese mooncake, judging from Bernardo’s bald-faced mini-horror story which he recounts below.

As Bernardo pointed out, “There’s a whole lot of highly-charged emotional and psychological storms going on in Haring Lear. Scene after scene, there’s all that blood, a relentless flood of violence, tears, curses, insanity, rage, conversations with Death and invocation of spirits — again and again and again… Well apparently, on the second day, they heard us.”

As the show started, Bernardo felt strange (well, stranger than usual!) — like energies were pressing against him, and he could not focus. Bernardo recalled that, “The lights seemed to be slightly hazy. And as the play began, I felt woozy, and just a step away from forgetting my lines and my blocking. It was morbid, but I was losing it — I was having fleeting thoughts of possibly dying on stage! Is this a heart attack? An allergic reaction to MSG?”

Bernardo asked fellow actor Buddy Caramat, who plays Goneril, to pray for him, because “something is going on. I don’t know what it is.”

Already, stage director Nonon Padilla had reassured Bernardo that there were no mist effects being used for the lights. They simply did not have the budget.

Somehow, Bernardo soldiered on as Lear. However, on the final scene where the character of Death is prominent, with several corpses on stage (Edmundo, Goneril, Regan, Cordelia, a Fool hanged) and with Lear himself about to die, Bernardo heard a woman to his left, crying right next to him — on stage. Which would have been all right. Except, the play, as in William Shakespeare’s time, has an all-male cast!

Bernardo added, “I was tempted to open my eyes to see who it was. But my character was already dead by then. So, I had to wait until after curtain call to approach dear George de Jesus III, who was playing my daughter Regan, to ask him teasingly if he got carried away and cried.” But, no, he did not.

Bernardo continued, “Then it dawned on me. One of my favorite first selfies in the Taipei University campus was taken in front of an iconic lounging lion with its left forepaw holding down a skull. And, I remembered . . . one of our Taiwanese organizers previously mentioned that the entire university was built on a hillside that used to be a cemetery.

“The very next day, I insisted that I lead the prayer to apologize for unintentionally disturbing the local spirits. That we did not intend any harm. We did not mean to disturb their resting place. And that what was going on was purely drama, a classic play that, in this production at least, offers hope and salvation in the end — through charity, compassion and self-control.

“After that, it was a flawless final Haring Lear performance in Taiwan. As if nothing untoward ever happened.”

After its triumphant limited run in Taiwan, Haring Lear is being readied for a return engagement in Manila with its Taipei cast, featuring: Bernardo (Haring Lear), Abner Delina Jr. (Cordelia/Lakayo), George (Regan), Buddy Caramat (Goneril), Jack Yabut (Gloster), Juliene Mendoza (Kent), Jay Gonzaga (Edmundo), Myke Salomon (Edgardo), Renan Bustamante (Duke ng Albanya), Roi Calilong (Hari ng Francia), Jeff Hernandez (Duke ng Cornualles), Gilbert Onida (Oswaldo) and Jason Barcial (Duke ng Burgonia).

The play, set in a post-nuclear landscape that highlights the dramatic descent of a king into madness, is directed by Nonon based on a Tagalog adaptation by National Artist for Literature Bienvenido Lumbera. Production design is by Gino Gonzales.