#14 Leandro Road: A macabre stage drama

MANILA, Philippines – The horror genre is not a very popular theater entertainment here or anywhere. A few plays have been staged with distinction and some success such as the Broadway revival in the 1970s of the old production of Dracula, mounted here by Repertory Philippines in 1979. Repertory also did a few other horror plays like The Woman in Black in 1990 and again in 1993, and more recently, the musicals Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in 2012 and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street in 2009, under the horror musical subgenre.

If horror plays are rather few and far between, it must be the huge resources required to do big productions like Dr. Jekyll and Sweeney Todd, and audiences’ expectations which do not meet the style of the play. As with horror movies which by comparison are profitable enterprises, people want to be startled and shocked. I remember watching The Mousetrap in 1987 at Repertory’s old home at Insular Life and the viewers reacted the way moviegoers did when Hitchcock’s Psycho was shown at Galaxy in the early ‘60s. Yet The Mousetrap isn’t horror but mystery suspense thriller. Psycho, however, is often classified as horror movie.

Theatergoers want to be entertained in a similar way. More so now that they are used to zombie apocalypses and slasher gorefests at the movies. A show isn’t good if it doesn’t make you scream, or so the common sentiment goes.

Horror, however, comes in various degrees of terror and dread. Some of the best horror movies do not shock viewers out of their wits. They work best in a more quiet and subtle manner, with a slow buildup of suspense and chills. Among the best horror movies are Night of the Hunter (1955), the only film directed by Charles Laughton, with Robert Mitchum and Lillian Gish, The Innocents (1961), Jack Clayton’s film adaptation of Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw, with Deborah Kerr magnificent as usual as the spinster governess, and Don’t Look Now, Nicolas Roeg’s 1973 reworking of the Daphne du Maurier story, starring Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland.

Mosang in another scene from the play

In the early ‘60s, got to watch the low-budget adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe stories by the “King of B Movies” Roger Corman for American International Pictures, like The Premature Burial (Ray Milland) and The Pit and the Pendulum. This series of Poe-Corman pictures began with Poe’s 1839 short story The Fall of the House of Usher in 1960 which earned critical and commercial success.

Just recently, a group that calls itself The Theater House of Black, which earlier staged a new Filipino adaptation of Federico Garcia Lorca’s classic The House of Bernarda Alba, visited another house — Poe’s gothic House of Usher, reset in Baguio, and retitled #14 Leandro Road. One of the producers says their budget is very low and the actors agreed to join the cast for the ridiculous fee of P1 each. No mean budget, however, must have gone to the special effects that shook the stage twice during the show, earthquakes that were both tense, exciting and fun.

#14 Leandro Road as a horror drama adapted by Jay Crisostomo IV (also the director) and C.K. Bautista does not go for the jugular but fascinates viewers with the weirdness and loneliness of the characters and situations. The old house on Leandro Road itself is a major character of the play. The production design by Harry David, also the lead performer in the other set of actors, is both creative and functional, filling it with stacks and shelves of books, antique furniture, paintings, and low-budget chandeliers. The cast is all dressed in black, save for the panties which the young sister Alex shows when she lifts her skirt in a moment of madness.

The family who inhabits the house is literally a dying breed. A person barging into this creepy abode, like Jonathan Harker entering Count Vlad’s castle, is drawn into a deep mystery that puts the outsider in harm’s way. Turns out the host is crying for help for a sister who periodically falls into catatonia. With the single gender cast, the production deals not only with isolation, mental disorder and fear of the outside world but premature burial, feminism, lesbianism and incest as well.

More than the dramaturgy and the effectively haunting performances, what makes the new Theater House of Black production more daring and imaginative is the experimental gender-changing of the characters. Where Poe’s original characters are men and a woman (the ill sister Anna), the version we saw had an all-female cast with Mosang doing the male role of Roderick Usher aka Pilar, the head of the house (locally, the family name is Laperal), with the male Migui Moreno as alternate at other shows. It is a showy role, which allowed the late horror icon Vincent Price to have a grand, gleeful time emoting in the movie.

Turning serious here, the otherwise comedic Mosang imbues her Pilar Laperal/Usher role with a menacing weightiness that makes the visitor Edna (Gold Villar) uncomfortable and a little harassed. This mistress of the house is getting too close physically, like a vampire about to plant her fangs into her neck. Or she longs for a kiss? And when sister Anna (Alex Leyva) calms down, she reveals more than sisterly affection.

Contributing to the success of the play are the other actors in key roles — Marife Necesito as Dr. Lita Dumas, the live-in doctor in charge of the obstreperous Anna, and in shorter roles Peewee O’Hara as Doña Victorina and May Bayot Castro as the ghostly Consuelo. May gets to showcase her reputed fine singing with a soulful rendition of Bach-Gounod’s Ave Maria.

The play ends with the house of Laperal on Leandro Road crumbling, the fall of which has been hinted at and has now come to pass. As for the audience, more than scared, they are awed by this grim, macabre stage drama.