BTS renews battle of sexes

When we were young and our life was an open book, we used to read the X-rated bedtime stories surreptitiously inserted between the pages of our high school textbooks of the ’70s, marveling at the full-colored regalia of the booklet featuring many splendored positions available between a man and a woman whenever their genitals and other similar orifices meet. Of course our teachers never knew about it, so absorbed were we with the lesson of the moment that fired up the imagination of an adolescent during the repressive martial law years.

So it was not without a little curiosity that we chanced upon the play "Philippine Bedtime Stories" in a backstreet of Mandaluyong, at the Sinag Arts Studio that staged one weekend six BTS episodes that were a collaboration of Philippine and Japan theater people. Directed by Toshihisa Yoshida, Philippine BTS has one-act, 20 to 30-minute plays by four Filipinos and one Japanese, with six thespians for each country. The result is one of cultural understanding if not enlightenment of Philippine mores and taboos about the love act, with a good measure of asides thrown in on the epic battle of the sexes crossing nationalities but steering clear of the prurient.

Rody Vera’s "Ang Unang Aswang" is the centerpiece work in Philippine BTS, as it accounts for two of the episodes, one a trans-cultural counterpoint of the other. Whereas the aswang is a Japanese jungle woman in the first version, she promptly adopts the skin of a Pinay in version two, with other supporting characters similarly transposed — the Japanese soldiers in one segueing into a chorus of elders in the other, and the Filipino macho guerrilla turning into a Japanese straggler in the other. Yet one is simply not the mirror image of the other, but worthy counterpoint melodies that enhance our understanding and appreciation of love and brewing betrayal between the races, though here race seems incidental.

Yuko Miyamoto as the Japanese aswang has her moment in the spotlight, her spoken Nihonggo translated in real time on monitors on opposite sides of the stage, almost as if we were viewing a Kusosawa film live. The last line she utters in her foreign tongue has us reading it off the monitor as "You can be that, too, if you wish," or similar words, and has us hanging on the emotion of delivery. When we hear Angeli Bayani speak the words in Tagalog in version 2 it may not be as effective, but only because we could not decipher the corresponding Japanese translation on the monitor screen so delivery was not many-layered.

Perhaps the shortest of the episodes is Rene Villanueva’s "Walang Iwanan," about a man (Vera) and his sugar mommy (Mari Nakayama) and the conversation that takes place between them inside a motel room, with a couple of beers each and an order of crispy pata. Vera’s portrayal of the man about to be married and assuring his older lover-benefactor that nothing has changed, is an accurate depiction of the regular Pinoy macho in our time. Nakayama’s foreign accent of a love-starved matron had our ears perked up at times, but the overall understatement and low-key atmosphere make the episode subtly tragicomic.

More light moments are at hand in the BTS’ icebreaker, "Isang Libong Tula Para sa Dibdib ni Dulce," that has Vera (again!) as balut vendor and stuttering poet for the breasts of one Dulce, played by the buxom Mailes Kanapi, who performs simulated sex in different positions with her lover as played by Jojit Lorenzo, on bed at centerstage while balut vendor hovers about in the surroundings selling his aphrodisiac unhatched chicks.

A point for the absurd in this episode written by Lallie Bucoy, in this amorous triangle that explores the varied angles and viewpoints of both betrayer and betrayed. There could be some urban myth reinforcement here with the balut vendor’s heart as the lonely hunter.

"Single Brown Female" by playwright Vic Torres has Raye Baquirin as babymaker for hire to mostly Japanese and Korean clients, plus the occasional weird Fil-Am. While the episode raises certain questions of political correctness and stereotyping, such narratives hew close to the real world, and there is a poignancy not at all deliberate when Baquirin as Lara says that of the nine babies she gave birth to for sale and adoption, she would take them all back again as her own and reunite as one family. It makes a case for mums the world over, and how one should never underestimate the power of the matrix.

It seems ironic, as one theatergoer noted, that it took the lone Japanese writer in this production, Shungiku Uchida, to tap the Pinoy funnybone in "Ligaya sa Isang Pinoy Bar." In turns hysterical, onomatopoeic, wistful and ribald, this show-stopping episode features a transvestite (Kanapi, in her expert handling of Nihonggo) out to hook a customer to the Fil-Japanese KTV bar, backed up by her three sisters and househelp and parents for rollicking comic effect.

Even the environmentalists are not spared as the Japanese husband to the transvestite nurtures the family garden with fertilizer taken from the excrement of their four infants either adopted or born of artificial insemination. Nice take, too, on a verse or two from Carole King’s You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman with Vera (yup, him again) as the maid having a brief solo spot in the chorus.

A night at the theater, even in a backstreet in Mandaluyong on a quiet weekend, might be just the right medicine to get one out of the election doldrums. It is a welcome treat to see Japanese and Filipino actors continue to make cross-cultural inroads in this ongoing exchange, for the betterment of theater in both countries which have a shared history of ambivalence.