Anyone out to retell the story of Insiang must deal with lofty expectations. The 1976 film by Lino Brocka has the status of a masterpiece, no less than the greatest work of the country’s greatest filmmaker. Those who would tell the story again ought to tell it anew. That is what Tanghalang Pilipino has done, and done marvelously well.
Earlier this decade Mario O’Hara, himself one of our great filmmakers, revisited the script he wrote for the film and reimagined it for the stage. Under director Chris Millado, Tanghalang Pilipino staged the play to great accalim, winning a slew of Aliw Awards in 2003, including Best Play. So to those who did not catch that staging of Insiang (including myself), the company’s decision to bring it to life for a limited run of two weekends in October was something to be grateful for.
How exactly is the story reworked for this other medium? First there is the design of the stage. Though a small box of a theater, the Cultural Center of the Philippines’s Tanghalang Huseng Batute has one great benefit: intimacy. Production designer Bobot Lota makes a long platform wrap around two corners of the room and snake through the center. Intricately detailed shanties huddle shoulder-to-shoulder along two walls. Above, the stage lights peer through slats in sheets of corrugated steel. Behind the spectators are posters for cheap liquor, above them laundry is hung out to dry. The effect: the action engulfs the viewer, taking away as much distance between him and the performers as possible.
The story, too, is changed. Around its core — a young woman (Insiang), her mother, and her mother’s lover caught in a swirl of violence while living the grim existence of slum dwellers — O’Hara creates a frame in the guise of a new character, Toyang, perhaps the most significant way in which the play veers from the film. Millado, in an interview, says that O’Hara thought it was necessary for storytelling reasons to create the new character as a way of bridging scenes a film handles easily with cuts, dissolves, and other editing devices. Indeed, but Toyang is more than a handy device to fill in narrative gaps.
A stout and middle-aged laundry woman with a shameless laugh and no end of stories to tell, Toyang is Insiang’s neighbor who also serves as narrator, commentator, and jester. It is through Toyang (a lively and endearing Peewee O’Hara) that Insiang’s story is told. In fact, she addresses the audience directly in several monologues, asking during the first one, as she squats before her pile of wash, “Hindi ba ’yun ang pinuntahan ninyo dito, yung kwento ni Insiang?” And so the story becomes one that has already happened and is merely being remembered (an effect that works well on those who have seen the movie and are indeed remembering the story).
She compares the story to the more familiar and very Pinoy soap opera, and it is one of many wink-wink moments in which the play invites the viewer to think of what he is witnessing as no more or less than a story. She interrupts characters in mid-speech to wonder about their sincerity then gets them to play the scene over. Not even the story she is telling is spared her questioning gaze; before the last speech of Insiang’s in which she reveals her motivations for her final deeds, Toyang interrupts to comment on the role of such speechifying in radio dramas. Insiang launches into it, the moment already colored by Toyang’s remarks.
This framing device also mitigates the harrowing violence. Ricky Davao’s Dado, the lover of Insiang’s mother Pacing, is the village goon, the mayor’s bodyguard. He walks around with a gun, but with Davao the weapon is superfluous. His body is muscle and menace, yet flabby with the self-satisfaction of a corrupt cop. He can exude a roguish charm, yet his every step sends ripples of fear through the community because, shielded by his powerful patrons, he has no qualms about unleashing his inner brute.
Which is not to say that the violence comes from him alone. Not at all. In fact the play (more than the film, as I remember it) creates the impression of a shared victimhood. Everyone has a back story, all have suffered terribly at the hands of others, and distinctions between villains and victims melt in the fetid air of the slums. Mailes Kanapi’s Pacing is both savage and sad like a wounded beast, and she lashes out at her daughter only because of some dark sorrow she carries. Even the title character becomes, after violence has sunk its talons into her, only too willing to engage in it.
But not without cost to herself. In Sheenly Ver Gener’s finely modulated performance, Insiang turns from vulnerable soft-spoken woman-child who must carry the memory of discovering the body of her father hanging from a noose (the scene in which she recounts the event is heartbreaking) into dark avenging angel. When, after the story takes its pivotal turn, Dado asks her what favor she would ask of him now that he has declared his love for her, she hesitates a moment, stares stonily into the distance, then turns to him, her heart in the clasp of the cold fingers of vengeance. This, not any of the physical assaults, is the play’s most chilling moment.
Yet despair is not the last word. There is yet another remarkable difference between film and play: its language. Understandably, the film goes easy on the swearing, what with martial law and the censors. The play has no such encumbrances. Millado says that the coarseness of the language O’Hara wrote for the play gives it a musical quality. It rings out from the very start: the play opens with two minor characters cussing each other out, hurling crude words for body parts from two ends of the stage. Then other people swarm in, adding their voices to what should be a din but is not. In vulgar speech, the blunt weapon of the powerless, the play finds some kind of harmony.
If coarse language can become musical, pain, too, can be redeemed. One way is through humor. The play is surprisingly, and sometimes riskily, lighthearted considering the gravity of its subject and the seriousness of most social realism. When Toyang tells the audience how she too was once victimized, she ends her story with exclamations of pain that she turns into a song and crude, comic dance. She is Everyman, or rather every Pinoy — victim of oppression and inhumanity who survives by transforming suffering into laughter and — like the actress who plays her, like the other remarkable performers, like the writer and designers and all who had a hand in this astonishing production — by transposing pain into art.
* * *
Insiang will run from Nov. 16 to Dec. 2 at the Tanghalang Huseng Batute of the CCP. Parental discretion is advised because of violence, profanity, and brief moments of nudity. Call Bright Eyed Boys Events and Ideas at 521-0412, e-mail ticketboy@brighteyedboys.com, or go to http://www.brighteyedboys.com/insiang/.
* * *
Send comments to dogberry.exie@gmail.com, or visit my blog at http://dogberryexie.blogspot.com.