By Ian Rosales Casocot
Who says that the body of work of Sillimanian writers are devoid of social issues and is centered only on fruitless formalistic pursuits? Consider the latest two plays in the ongoing Teatro Sillimaniana Festival—Elsa Martinez Coscolluela’s Original Grace, and Linda Faigao-Hall’s Lay of the Land. Both plays emerge from different geographies and aesthetic registers, but they converge on the urgent politics of memory, abuse, and displacement that shaped the Filipino experience in the late 1980s.
In revisiting these works in 2025, we encounter not merely theatrical relics of their time but searing reflections that speak with renewed urgency to contemporary audiences. Set in the wake of the Marcos dictatorship and during the volatile aftermath of the People Power Revolution, both plays interrogate personal and political trauma, the price of silence, and the possibilities of healing.
Coscolluela’s Original Grace, directed by Tess Gal, stages its battle for truth and justice within the cloistered confines of a convent, juxtaposing legal struggle with spiritual sanctuary. Beatriz Vera [Jade Mary J. Cornelia], a corporate lawyer haunted by a troubled past, is pulled into the case of Carmela Santos [Precious Aranas], a teenage rape survivor whose abuser, Leon Garay, is shielded by layers of patriarchal and familial complicity. The play’s domestic horror is disturbingly familiar: Carmela’s mother Dolores [a very moving CJ Cañete] left for work abroad, a tragic echo of the “OFW economy” that escalated during the Marcos years and exploded in the post-EDSA years as the state normalized the export of labor. The play’s setting—a convent—might at first appear to be a retreat from political terrain, but it instead serves as a charged crucible where class, power, religion, and justice collide. Beatriz’s professional façade begins to crumble as Carmela’s story dredges up her own repressed trauma.
In 1988, when the play first emerged, such portrayals of incest, rape, and female complicity were incendiary; women’s rights were still marginalized in public discourse, and speaking openly about abuse was a radical act. Original Grace dared to expose the fissures beneath the idealized image of the Filipino family—especially the fractured families left in the wake of diaspora and dictatorship. In 2025, its relevance endures: child sexual abuse remains a crisis, and the question of how the law and social institutions fail survivors is still pressing. What deepens the play’s significance today is the recognition of how trauma is inherited and how women—across generations—internalize both pain and guilt.
Coscolluela’s choice to embed the legal battle within the nuns’ convent isn’t merely symbolic; it underscores the complicity of religious institutions in both silence and healing. Characters like Mother Alma and Sister Mary and Sister Lily are not caricatures of piety but fully human agents wrestling with their own ethical limitations. There is no easy redemption here. The staging and performances, particularly by Jade Mary Cornelia as Beatriz and Precious Aranas as Carmela, highlight the emotional tectonics of trauma without collapsing into melodrama. What Original Grace offers is not grace as divine absolution, but grace as the painstaking process of facing the past, speaking truth, and reclaiming one’s agency.
In contrast, Lay of the Land unfolds not in the Philippine homeland but in the fragmented diaspora of New York’s East Village—a milieu where identity is as much a matter of survival as it is of longing. Perlas [Liezyl Livestre], newly arrived from the Philippines, steps into a shared tenement space infused with both bohemian American decay and the unresolved specters of martial law. Set during the February 1986 People Power Revolution, the play juxtaposes the euphoria of collective political upheaval with the isolation of the immigrant experience. Perlas’s arrival coincides with the nation’s supposed rebirth, yet her personal displacement reveals how liberation at home can coincide with alienation abroad.
Faigao-Hall’s writing navigates this tension with sensitivity and complexity. Her ensemble cast of characters are not mere emblems of multiculturalism, but embodied critiques of power, history, and belonging. Joaquin [Christian Evangelista], a fellow Filipino immigrant and Perlas’ brother, becomes both foil and mirror to Perlas. He has adapted, assimilated, perhaps at the cost of remembering. Helene, Artie, Gustaf, and Kelly represent various facets of American life—idealism, cynicism, exploitation, and artifice—all of which Perlas must contend with in her search for meaning and footing.
Where Original Grace is intensely internal, Lay of the Land is spatial and relational. The physical space of the tenement becomes a metaphor for a dislocated homeland—shared, shifting, contested. The gallery housed within it reflects the tension between representation and erasure: what gets exhibited, what stories are told, and who gets to speak? The play’s engagement with art and memory echoes Faigao-Hall’s broader dramaturgical commitment to rendering myth and magic real. She subtly weaves Filipino folklore and history into the urban grime of Alphabet City, not through overt fantasy but through atmosphere, rhythm, and metaphor.
The decision to set the play during the climax of the Marcos regime’s fall is bold. In 1986, the revolution promised a rupture from tyranny and the reinstallation of democracy. But in Lay of the Land, that rupture is not clean. The overseas Filipino watches from afar, disconnected from the spectacle of history, burdened with familial expectations and survival in a foreign land. For Perlas and many others like her, People Power did not end suffering—it simply shifted its geography. In 2025, with the political resurrection of the Marcoses and the global backlash against democracy, the play now reads like both prophecy and elegy. The “land” in question is not merely the literal Philippines but the moral and political ground we all must navigate.
Both plays, then, do not merely recall the volatile politics of the late 1980s—they reanimate them. Original Grace dramatizes the internal war for justice and healing within a society riddled with patriarchal silence and institutional complicity. Lay of the Land maps the psychic toll of exile, exploring what it means to hold onto identity, memory, and hope when the homeland itself is shifting under your feet. Each play in its own way reflects a fracture in the Filipino soul—between silence and voice, home and exile, past and present.
In 2025, their meanings resonate anew. The Philippines continues to grapple with historical revisionism, with the return of autocratic figures, and with enduring gender-based violence and diaspora trauma. The brave testimony of Carmela in Original Grace reminds us of the urgent need to listen to survivors and challenge structures of abuse. The lost and searching gaze of Perlas in Lay of the Land calls us to rethink what it means to belong in an increasingly fragmented world.
Together, these plays demand not just witness but reckoning. They do not offer easy catharsis but instead insist on confronting the wounds we have inherited and the histories we choose to forget. In staging them now, we are not merely looking back—we are being asked to choose what kind of future we want to write.
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Teatro Sillimaniana Festival is ongoing. Beryl Delicana’s Mango Tree will premiere on Wednesday, May 7, directed by Jorelyn Garcia. Michael Aaron Gomez’s Tirador ng Tinago premiered May 3, directed by Bret Ybañez.
