The best of 2001 in retrospect

(Second of two parts)

The best stage production of 2001 include the following:

• One Hundred Songs of Mary Helen Fee, drawn from the diary of an American schoolmarm who arrived in the Philippines with the Thomasites at the beginning of the 20th century to establish a public school system, with Irma Adlawan under the direction of Tanghalang Pilipino’s Nonon Padilla;

• Allan Ball’s Five Women Wearing the Same Dress, Actor’s Actors Inc. riotous comedy directed by Bart Guingona, a comic study of the feminine mystique with a bevy of beauties in the cast – Dindi Gallardo, Lara Fabregas, Rachel Alejandro, Miren Alvarez and Cris Villonco, with Lee Robin Salazar as the lone rooster of the roost.

• And Paul Stephen Lim’s Mother Tongue, directed by Chris Millado for AAI, an absorbing autobiographical drama about a gifted young writer’s attachment to his mother and her ambition for him and his own personal secret dreams, with Nieves Campa, Kate Fernandez, Miren Alvarez and Guingona.

This critic’s choice for the top personality in the theater during the year is Lito Casaje of Dramatis Personae. He has received a dozen awards for playwriting from Palanca, ECP, and CCP, and one from the University of Exeter Student Drama Playwrights’ Festival. He received a grant from the British Council to attend an advanced theater directing workshop in London. The Goethe-Institut Manila sent him to Berlin and the Swedish Institute to Stockholm to observe the theater arts in Germany and Sweden respectively.

Casaje’s insightful direction informs the productions of Dramatis Personae which he founded 11 years ago. The plays staged by the DP at the Pius XII Theater, Pius XII Catholic Center in 2001 are the following:

• Bienvenido Noriega, Jr.’s Batang Pro, an expose of child prostitution in Manila in which Casaje cast non-professional players gleaned from the depressed areas of the city to intensify the effect of realism in the drama;

• Thom Jonigk’s Perpetrators, a shocker that uncovers the naked truths about incest and perversions inflicted on children including infants by sadistic parents, staged at the Goethe-Institut Auditorium, German Cultural Center, with a cast that includes Angela Baesa, Giovanni Respall, Linda Lupton, Clay Phillips and Manuel Aquino;

• August Strindberg’s Road to Damascus, a powerful morality play by the Swedish master which depicts the arduous journey from sin and damnation to deliverance and salvation, with a strong cast led by Aquino as the Stranger;

• Marguerite Duras’ Hiroshima Mon Amour, an anti-war drama, staged with the cooperation of the Alliance Française de Manille, with Liza Dino and Casaje/Mario Magallona;

• And Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, a poetic fantasy, which follows the adventures of a rascal from a village in Norway across the region of the supernatural to America and Asia and to the end of his days to find himself trapped between hell and heaven, with a cast of talents led by Dingdong Rosales in the title role.

Operating on a shoe-string budget, Casaje has to exhaust the limits of stagecraft to mount his plays which send his audiences on their own spiritual journey to Damascus, deliverance and salvation.

As the moonlighter writes his year-ender every time, every year: there is no end but that which is only another beginning.

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For comments and suggestions, write to jessqcruz@hot mail.com.