A Fil-Am romp through myth and memory
November 26, 2001 | 12:00am
For its 23rd repertory season, Tanghalang Ateneo presents when the purple settles, a play written by Francis Tanglao-Aguas and directed by Yam Yrastorza Yuson. Like the novel Dogeaters by Jessica Hagedorn and Flipzoids by the May-i Theater Company, this work from a Filipino-American writer peels away the layers of our history and explores issues of immigration, imagination, language and gender–the shaping or misshaping of a person and a nation.
When the play started with the national anthem sung in Kampampangan, I knew this play would be something else. Victor Acrimea Jr., called Junior naturally, is having parallel pangs. The first is the writing of his play, which exorcises the ghosts that hound him and his mother. The second is the birthing of his first son, which reminds him of his grave issues with his feudal and cruel father. This would have been a merely pat parallelism, were it not for the energy and experimentation that inform this play.
The mother weaves in and out of the play as commentator, subaltern, and actor. She draws people to her son’s play as a mere artifact–that mere words cannot completely capture the sharpness of one’s personal pain. And yet ironically, language–and the gaps between speech and silence–saves the mother from living the life of a zombie. She can be Mother Courage here for all we know, in this play informed by Brecht, as she deftly slips in and out of the character she plays, inhabiting other skins, other lives.
When the purple settles also plays with gender roles, rolling them about like so many pins in the circus. The soldier is played by a woman. The nun Sor Pera is played by a man whose head is ringed by a halo in the shape of a crown. This cross-dressing and transvestism show the slippages between and amongst genders. And in pushing the envelope further, you have scenes of salacious priests molesting both women and men, a generation of truly horny men forcing their housemaids Nurra and Bilma to give them oral sex, a funny send-up of Miss Saigon, complete with a miniature helicopter circling above Auntie Gordita–the Miss Saigonette in this play.
Notions of linear time and the unities of place are shattered as the play progresses. Time zips from present to past, with significant dates as anchors, including June 12, 1998 and September 21, 1972. The play in progress is written and re-written, a casting call begins and ends abruptly, a technical person tells everyone to vomit, but Auntie Gordita refuses, preferring to play a prostitute in Miss Saigon than act in a Filipino, or Fil-Am, play. And when she says she’d rather be "f----- in the a--" than perform in a Filipino play, a group of shirtless men with low voices cluster on stage, sending the girls in the audience to scream "Yikes!"
Song and dance, sex and violence, hilarity and melancholy inform this play. I like the rap scene where Junior shows for all the world to see why we are the Blatinos of Asia – the Blacks and the Latinos of this rather boring continent, with our bones made of water and our voices rising into the air. I also marveled at the forest scene where the women hang to the nets like creatures of the night, alluding to the mimicry that informs the play, from the tiyanaks who pretend they are babies, to brown people who pretend they are whites, and yes, to grown-up men who pretend they are still children running around Momma’s skirts.
I am not comfortable, though, with blurred texts from the play projected on screen. If they were Kapampangan texts translated into English, that would have been fine, since not everyone in the audience understands that language. But sometimes, the texts were in English. I am also not comfortable with the use of colors as metaphors, which is not really new. The title When the purple settles alludes, I think, to the idiom "when the dust settles," or "when the ashes have settled." Moreover, some of the actors could not be heard at the back, mumbling their English lines in some parts.
But my biggest beef is with the ideology of the play. The first part is an exciting and energetic romp through the landscape of pain both personal and historical. It shows us the only kind of love we can offer our mothers, and our motherland, is a kind of bitter love. We may also call it a postmodernist play showing the cracks of language, the slippages of gender, the fragmented nature of time, even the very flatness of history.
The second part, though, is more linear. The first part pushed the envelope very far indeed, but it was diluted by the second part that was more conventional, with its ideology of harmony and reconciliation, and the restoration of the moral order. It is as if after showing us how to shatter a jar with magic and skill, then we are shown how to put it back again, seamlessly.
Be that as it may, when the purple settles belongs to that group of texts now coming from the pens of our Fil-Am artists, a gifted group that shows us new visions and revisions of a brave and wonderfully complex world.
Tanghalang Ateneo’s when the purple settles will be shown on Nov. 29 and Dec. 1 at 7 p.m. Other playdates are Dec. 1 at 2 pm at the Rizal Theater, Ateneo de Manila University.
Comments can be sent to danton@admu.edu.ph
When the play started with the national anthem sung in Kampampangan, I knew this play would be something else. Victor Acrimea Jr., called Junior naturally, is having parallel pangs. The first is the writing of his play, which exorcises the ghosts that hound him and his mother. The second is the birthing of his first son, which reminds him of his grave issues with his feudal and cruel father. This would have been a merely pat parallelism, were it not for the energy and experimentation that inform this play.
The mother weaves in and out of the play as commentator, subaltern, and actor. She draws people to her son’s play as a mere artifact–that mere words cannot completely capture the sharpness of one’s personal pain. And yet ironically, language–and the gaps between speech and silence–saves the mother from living the life of a zombie. She can be Mother Courage here for all we know, in this play informed by Brecht, as she deftly slips in and out of the character she plays, inhabiting other skins, other lives.
When the purple settles also plays with gender roles, rolling them about like so many pins in the circus. The soldier is played by a woman. The nun Sor Pera is played by a man whose head is ringed by a halo in the shape of a crown. This cross-dressing and transvestism show the slippages between and amongst genders. And in pushing the envelope further, you have scenes of salacious priests molesting both women and men, a generation of truly horny men forcing their housemaids Nurra and Bilma to give them oral sex, a funny send-up of Miss Saigon, complete with a miniature helicopter circling above Auntie Gordita–the Miss Saigonette in this play.
Notions of linear time and the unities of place are shattered as the play progresses. Time zips from present to past, with significant dates as anchors, including June 12, 1998 and September 21, 1972. The play in progress is written and re-written, a casting call begins and ends abruptly, a technical person tells everyone to vomit, but Auntie Gordita refuses, preferring to play a prostitute in Miss Saigon than act in a Filipino, or Fil-Am, play. And when she says she’d rather be "f----- in the a--" than perform in a Filipino play, a group of shirtless men with low voices cluster on stage, sending the girls in the audience to scream "Yikes!"
Song and dance, sex and violence, hilarity and melancholy inform this play. I like the rap scene where Junior shows for all the world to see why we are the Blatinos of Asia – the Blacks and the Latinos of this rather boring continent, with our bones made of water and our voices rising into the air. I also marveled at the forest scene where the women hang to the nets like creatures of the night, alluding to the mimicry that informs the play, from the tiyanaks who pretend they are babies, to brown people who pretend they are whites, and yes, to grown-up men who pretend they are still children running around Momma’s skirts.
I am not comfortable, though, with blurred texts from the play projected on screen. If they were Kapampangan texts translated into English, that would have been fine, since not everyone in the audience understands that language. But sometimes, the texts were in English. I am also not comfortable with the use of colors as metaphors, which is not really new. The title When the purple settles alludes, I think, to the idiom "when the dust settles," or "when the ashes have settled." Moreover, some of the actors could not be heard at the back, mumbling their English lines in some parts.
But my biggest beef is with the ideology of the play. The first part is an exciting and energetic romp through the landscape of pain both personal and historical. It shows us the only kind of love we can offer our mothers, and our motherland, is a kind of bitter love. We may also call it a postmodernist play showing the cracks of language, the slippages of gender, the fragmented nature of time, even the very flatness of history.
The second part, though, is more linear. The first part pushed the envelope very far indeed, but it was diluted by the second part that was more conventional, with its ideology of harmony and reconciliation, and the restoration of the moral order. It is as if after showing us how to shatter a jar with magic and skill, then we are shown how to put it back again, seamlessly.
Be that as it may, when the purple settles belongs to that group of texts now coming from the pens of our Fil-Am artists, a gifted group that shows us new visions and revisions of a brave and wonderfully complex world.
Tanghalang Ateneo’s when the purple settles will be shown on Nov. 29 and Dec. 1 at 7 p.m. Other playdates are Dec. 1 at 2 pm at the Rizal Theater, Ateneo de Manila University.
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