In celebration of the 96th birthday of National Artist Francisco Arcellana on Sept. 6, Zoetrope is reprinting an excerpt of his column entitled “Art and Life” which appeared early 1941 in Herald Midweek magazine, where he reviews a play in which one of the actresses is Emerenciana Yuvienco, who months later would become his wife just before the war broke out. The column was actually the first of three reviews, the other two now lost to the elements, but the lead actress when she read them said ‘this is not a review, this is a marriage proposal!’
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Three nights, the UP Players thought they presented four plays but there was really only one. There were more actresses than actors. There were many players, yes.
I went to all three nights, the first performance and the second and third because I wanted to be sure to be fair and just: I found out that I could have gone to any one of the three performances and have emerged with the same convictions just the same; I could have gone to the first or the second or the third - it would not have mattered. I would have come out feeling the things I feel now, believing the things I believe now; and, for having been at all three performances, I am surer of myself and of the things I want to say, I am more certain of my feelings and my beliefs about the plays and the players.
There were four plays but there was really only one. Educating Josefina plays; but is it a play? If plays very well, yes, but is it a play? Only at two points in it does it manifest any semblance to a play or does it try to be a play but at that time it is too far gone and no amount of trying would have saved it then, would have made a play of it.
An Evening Reverie is not a play either: I do not know what it is, it has got me stumped, all balled up for a name with which to tag it; it is curious thing. It is perhaps a tableau vivant only the sleepwalkers not only walk, they talk in their sleep also.
A Matter of Husbands is a play: it was the only play of the evenings. It is not only a play it is also a good play; and it is not only a good play, it is also good theatre. All good plays should be good theatre. But are not — through no fault of the plays. Some of the finest plays I have read are good theatre but are too hard to recreate in the theatre and so remain just finely written plays. At any rate, in A Matter of Husbands, there is glimpsed for the first time a sense of shape a feeling of form; there is direction here — not direction in the sense of the director’s function but direction in the sense that the play moves and it goes somewhere.
In Educating Josefina, as I have remarked before, at only two points was there any attempt to move, to go somewhere, the second attempt being more extensive than the first. An Evening Reverie, there is no movement at all — the thing just stops there, dead and inert.
But in A Matter of Husbands, for the first time, there is movement, and it is going somewhere and it gets there, not hurriedly, nor confusedly but leisurely and clearly — everything happening in its own time without wrenching, without jerking.
Help Wanted is not a play either, it is a picnic: there is a lot of movement but is movement without direction or too much of it; it goes everywhere and anywhere and that is why it never gets there.
The finest performance of all three evenings was turned in by Emerenciana Yuvienco who was Luz in all three presentations of Help Wanted and the famous actress in the second presentation of A Matter of Husbands. Miss Yuvienco is one of the finest and the most exciting that has ever happened in UP dramatics. You watch her move and you listen to her speak and it seems as if she moved and spoke in you, in your heart and in your mind. Her voice is like a musical instrument, a musical instrument of quality, on which she plays and from which she evokes a range of emotional utterance as far apart as the whisper is from the thunder; she has a true feeling for words and can realize almost instantaneously the passional intent of a sentence — it is a joy and delight to listen to her speak. There is a miraculous fluency in her, an articulateness the like of which I have never before encountered on the local stage.
The finest actor of the evening was Louis Alba. There is about his voice, not extraordinary in itself, and his person a quality of ease and naturalness such as we find only in the older and, shall we say, the more seasoned players of the stage we have. His insight into character is also keen and almost instantaneous, judging from the very effective if little businesses he performs in pantomime. There is a certain abandon to his acting, a kind of surrendering to the demands of the role he is portraying.
There were more actresses than actor.
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Manuscript recovered courtesy of Mayi Panlilio, thanks elder sister.