The curtains have been drawn full open, and the lights are on when the viewers come and take their seats. The audience, one concluded, is meant to take in the set. Long.
And so we looked long.
It’s the interior of a house in Dumaguete on the eve of World II.
The house is not much different from houses now.
The point it seems clear is for the viewer to have a sense of immediacy. The war broke out on a most ordinary day under a most ordinary weather. Look at the house, the light in it is, to all intents, co-extensive with that illuminating the audience. It will be us there when the story begins.
A hallmark of Amiel Leonardia’s directing is the ability to make amateur actors, even outright beginners, look seasoned. He routinely succeeds in raising them to a decent level, at the very least, of competence.
Our understanding, right or wrong, is that only Dessa Quesada is professional. So that it didn’t come as a surprise that just minutes into the play, she begins to dominate the stage. That’s not saying we weren’t too impressed. She was gripping. An intensity that fortunately was not her exclusive possession.
Ian Casocot, along this line, would have been a revelation were it not that we’ve always suspected he could act.
Still on intensity, Onna Rhea Quizo amazed us. Hers struck us as effortless.
Carla Angeline Mongado’s acting was less intense than intelligent: Cristy Santamaria’s character deepens in the course of the play. As she suffers is the message.
We’re afraid we can’t be objective about Leo Mamicpic for a certain reason; namely, that we’ve heard of how Amiel, playing this role, the father, gutted the Manila theaterati (just coined that!) with his brilliance when the play, in its Pilipino translation was performed there. So, very unfairly, we kept comparing, and naturally, Leo pales. Perhaps underact is his style, and perhaps that approach didn’t work out so well because the father, except when he was wrathful at his son Franco (played with a focus that never lets up by Earnest Hope Tinambacan), is to start with a mild with age, and somewhat inherently low-key character.
More and more, we’re unhappy that there may never again be a production of the play with Amiel playing the role, and we can see it. For one thing — who will direct? He’s not too old to direct or too old to play major roles — but doing both may be too much.
By the way, was that Amiel’s voice doing Gen. Douglas MacArthur?
We looked and looked at the character Benito because we thought, Is that Rudy Juan? Yes it was! Not related, as far as we know to Anton Juan, but Rudy Juan was the guy who knocked us down, only half-acting on our part, when he hit us with his policeman’s stick as the play called for, but he didn’t mean it. Right there on the same stage — but 30 years ago!
That kissing scene. Tame, restrained, more artful than realistic, we guess by Manila standards, but we remember a play in the 60s or 70s which gave occasion to Amiel telling us that kissing for real on stage won’t do because the audience would be shocked and the spell, the illusion of reality, would be broken.
He allowed it!
It didn’t take us long to see that it is a pivotal detail in catching the meaning of Elsa Martinez-Coscolluela’s brooding play.
In the midst of unspeakable tragedy, the tragic will of the species to survive, to heed the commandment, prevails.
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