Truth or consequence

Two current stage productions focus on the complexity of the relationship between men and women: Repertory Philippines’ Dinner with Friends and Dramatis Personae’s Rashomon. The two plays, however, are continents apart in their respective views of these attachments.

Donald Margulies’ Dinner with Friends is a saucy concoction that throws into the saucepan a recipe that mixes the dramatic, the poignant, and the comic, which director Baby Barredo serves with the expertise of a master chef.

In their well-appointed kitchen in their house in Connecticut, Gabe (Michael Williams) and Karen (Liesl Batucan) are preparing dinner for their best friend, Beth (Ana Abad Santos-Bitong). The hosts are internationally known culinary experts and they have just returned from a trip to Italy. On this winter evening, while their kids are watching TV upstairs, they serve their guest a new pasta dish that they have just learned from their Italian expedition. During the meal, Beth suddenly breaks into tears and confides that her husband, Tom (Jeremy Domingo), Gabe’s best friend since college, is divorcing her.

Later that night, Tom comes home and cross-examines his wife about the dinner with their best friends. What had they talked about? Did Beth tell their friends about the break-up of their marriage? What culinary wonders were served at dinner? Etcetera. One thing leads to another and – would you believe? — they end up making love. Now, you might think that an unexpected reconciliation provides a happy ending, but it is not even the conclusion of Act I.

Before the night is over, Tom rushes to the home of Gabe and Karen to explain his side of the story and to gulp down the leftovers.

The first scene of Act Two is a flashback to the summer in Martha’s Vineyard more than 12 years before, when Beth and Tom met for the first time. The final scene is set in the same resort in Maine in the spring following the events in Act One. I won’t say anything more lest I give the ending away and have Barredo and Rep artistic director Zeneida Amador come after me with pincers after serving a theatrical feast fit for a king – or a hungry critic.

Dinner with Friends won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the Lucille Lorrel awards for Off-Broadway Play, the Dramatists Guild/Hull-Warriner Award, the Outer Critics Circle Award and the American Theater Critics Association New Play Award. And Rep talents Liesl, Ana, Michael, and Jeremy apply their craft in a manner that would surely delight its author and titillate the taste buds of their viewers.

Over at the Pius XII Theater on United Nations Ave., director Lito Casaje is presenting on weekends Shinobu Hashimoto and Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon. Based on two short stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa set in 12th century Kyoto, this drama has been transmuted by Casaje into an eschatological tale of rape and murder in a dying world poisoned by nuclear weapons circa 2055.

Akutagawa’s "Rashomon" is about a young servant of a samurai who has been released from servitude by his master who can no longer feed him because hard times, storms and plagues have devastated Kyoto. On a cold, rainy evening, the man seeks shelter in the Rashomon, the great gate of the walled city now falling into ruins. He finds in the tower of the gate an ugly, toothless crone pulling out the hair from the heads of corpses to be made into wigs. The old woman justifies her action by explaining that she has to rob the dead for her own survival. The servant strips her of her kimono and runs off into the darkness with her rags. The story raises a question on morality: Is survival ample justification for a man to become a thief?

The second story, "In a Grove," poses another question about the ambivalence of truth.

This whodunit written in the style of relativism delivers an account of the investigation by a high police commissioner of the murder of a young samurai whose remains have been found in a clump of cedars. The first four testimonies are those of the woodcutter who found the body of the victim in the woods, a traveling Buddhist priest who met the samurai and his wife shortly before the commission of the crime, a policeman who arrested the principal suspect, and the mother-in-law of the victim who identified the body.

The complication intensifies in the last three testimonies. Tajomaru, a notorious bandit in the prefecture, admits to the deed and explains the circumstances that lead to it. He had seen the samurai and his wife on the highway and had caught sight of the woman’s face when a breeze momentarily lifted her veil. Overcome by lust, he lured them into the woods baiting the husband with a lie about a buried treasure. Once they entered the clump of cedars, he overpowered the man and bound him to a tree trunk. When the woman divined his intentions, she drew out a jeweled dagger and fought like a wild beast at bay to protect her honor. The bandit swiftly disarmed her and ravished her within sight of her helpless mate. Afterwards, just as he was about to flee, the woman clung to him sobbing that it was " worse than death to have her shame known to two men." Either her husband or Tajomaru should die. He released the samurai from his bonds and crossed swords with him. After the bandit had run him through, he turned around and discovered that the woman had vanished.

The second account is that of Masago. She recounts that after the rape, her despoiler had fled in haste. Seeing her husband staring at her with contempt, she decided to put an end to her life but because he had witnessed her shame, she could not allow him to live. She drove her dagger into his breast and fainted. When she came to, he had breathed his last. She tried to kill herself, but failing, she wandered aimlessly, desolate.

The third narration is delivered by the dead man speaking through a medium. He claims that after the rape, he was consumed with jealousy when he witnessed the bandit and his wife exchanging endearments. They were about to walk away when his wife pointed to him and shrieked, "Kill him! Kill him!" Shocked by her perfidy, he knocked her down and turning to his captive, he said that he had only to nod and he would finish her off. The woman fled before he could even grasp her garment. Tajomaru loosened his bonds and went his way. Overcome by despair, the husband picked up the dagger and stabbed himself. As he lay dying, someone crept up to him in the dark and pulled out the dagger.

To Akutagawa’s account, Kurosawa appends another tale – that of the servant thief who asserts that he was an eye witness. His version, however, does not tally with that of the others. The woman taunts the men into a half-hearted duel with the bandit winning the game.

A Hollywood film made in the ‘70s sets the story in Mexico and this duel is pure slapstick. The cowardly husband running away from his foe falls by accident on his own sword.

And now Casaje’s post-modern production focuses the limelight on the actress who plays Masago, beauty queen and screen siren Alma Concepcion who incarnates in the same scene woman-power, the dominatrix, the antithesis of the Japanese woman of yesteryears who plodded meekly behind her spouse. For a woman like Alma to be raped by the likes of Joseph Lara as Tajomaru, Casaje has to make his bandit as agile as Spider-man when he mounts her curves.

Dingdong Rosales seems anemic for the samurai and the rest of the male cast, Christopher Cruz (Police Agent), Andre Christian Torres (Priest), Joel Caballero (The Stranger), and Fermin Villegas (Thief) appear too young for their respective roles. Only Angela Baesa as The Medium and Lito, bewigged, as The Magistrate look the part.

To mount this production of Rashomon, Casaje has to be a wizard to throw into his cauldron the diverse ingredients to make his theatrical sukiyaki spiced with wasabe and acid rain a palatable dish to be savored by a drama freak whose iron-clad stomach cannot be corroded by a plateful of sex and violence.

There is a note of hope at the end of the play aside from the adoption of the abandoned infant by the thief — the real identity of the humpbacked Buddhist priest, but this a secret I will not divulge lest Casaje throw me into his cauldron, too.

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