directorial concept paper

A DIRECTORIAL CONCEPT PAPER FOR

NICK JOAQUIN’S

PORTRAIT OF THE FILIPINO AS AN ARTIST

Theater 231

Marilie Fernandez-Ilagan

Prof. Tony Mabesa

There were two dialogue lines that made me cry as I read Nic Joaquin’s Portrait of the Artist as Filipino. I was surprised at my own reaction because I was not moved that way when I watched the play in Butuan in the late 80s and in Manila a decade after. Could be that I didn’t get the lines or else was distracted at the precise moment when Don Lorenzo and Don Perico told Candida:

PERICO: ”…I do not resent your father, I admire him. He is a very happy man.” (Hindi, Candida - Wala akong sama ng loob sa Papa ninyo, humahanga ako sa kanya. Maligaya siyang tao.)

CANDIDA: “Because he did what he has done?” (Dahil kaya ginawa niya ang kanyang ginawa?)

PERICO: “Because he always knew what he was doing.” (Dahil alam niya lagi ang kanyang ginagawa.)

I felt Don Perico’s lament for the passing away of the artists of his time, whose art died with them for lack of Aeneases to carry it forward. I became conscious of Don Lorenzo’s failure to reconcile his present with his past, a failure as an artist, despite his moral triumph.

The second instance that set me to tears was Pepang’s, addressing Manolo:

MANOLO (sobbing into his hands): Oh father! Oh, poor, poor father! ((Humihikbi sa kanyang palad.) Ay, Papa! Kawawang Papa namin!

PEPANG: “…Oh, how we worshipped him when we were children! We were so proud of him because he was a genius, because he was different from all other fathers. We always took his side against mother – remember? Poor mother, with her eternal worrying and her eternal complains – poor mother did not understand him, of course. Only we, his children, understood him. And we defended him, we justified him, we were willing to be poor, to go without the things other children had, so that our father could go on being just an artist. Oh, we were happy enough, I know – though, even then, I promised myself that my children should never suffer what we had to suffer. And when we grew up, Manolo – then what did we do? When he could not give us the things the young people of our age all had – what did you and I do? Did we not face him also and accuse him of cowardice and selfishness? Did we not blame him also for the humiliations of our youth? Did we not berate him also for having squandered mother’s property? And did we not also tell him that he could have been a rich man if he had only used his talents to advance himself in the world? Yes, we did, Manolo – you and I! We faced him and we accused him and we rejected him! And how can we blame Candida and Paula now?” (Lumaki tayo at nagkagulang, Manolo. Noong musmos pa tayo lubos-lubusang sinamba natin siya! Ipinagmalaki natin siya dahil isang henyo siya, dahil iba siya sa ama ng mga kababata natin. Lagi tayong nasa kanyang panig laban kay Mama - natatandaan mo? Ang kawawang Mama natin, hindi niya nauunawaan si Papa. Tayong mga anak lamang ang nakakaunawa sa kanya. Ipinagtanggol natin siya, binigyang-matwid, handa tayong maging mahirap, basta makapagpatuloy sa pagiging artista ang ama natin. Pero nang lumaki tayo, ano ang ginawa nating dalawa? Nang hindi niya maibigay ang mga biyenes na dulot ng mga magulang ng kababata natin, hindi ba hinarap natin siya at binintangang duwag at makasarili? Hindi ba't isinisi natin sa kanya ang mga kahihiyang dinanas natin? Hindi ba't inalimura natin siya dahil winaldas niya ang naiwang pag-aari ni Mama? Hindi ba't sinabihan natin na dapat ay naging mayaman siya kung ginamit lamang niya ang kanyang mga talino upang mapaunlad ang kanyang kabuhayan. Ganyan ang ginawa natin, Manolo. Hinarap natin siya, inakusahan at tinalikdan. Paano natin masisisi ngayon sina Candida at Paula?)

It was a feeling of outrage that made me cry because, ironically, Pepang’s and Manolo’s acceptance/acknowledgment about the past that their father made them to go through failed to produce a change of heart.

ANALYSIS

The play intends to dramatize the difference between the Filipino’s Spanish past and his American present. It says that the writer is Aeneas, for he carried all time -- past, present and future -- on his back.

The play is an elegy for lost virtues, underscoring the need for knowledge of our past and for identification with it.

The play allows its audience to travel through the past and on to the future by making them experience the present. “For we are what our past has made us; we must know it to know ourselves.”

The play employs dramatic devices and techniques that are both realistic and expressionistic.

1. The choice of the Aeneas myth as the basis of the Portrait and its new

significance – by transforming the faces of the father and son into those of the old

and younger Lorenzo – seems to be the most significant.

2. Similarly important is the location of the Portrait, the imaginary fourth wall.

This special device begins to have an impact on the viewer as the play starts

staring through the blankness of the fourth wall.

3. Then there is the demonstration of Joaquin’s familiarity with dramatists and their

style – such as Yeats (his writing drawn from Irish mythology and folklore,

passion for nationalist politics, pessimism about political situations, interest in

mysticism); Lorca (who balanced his drama and poetry between the traditional

and the modern, between mythology and contemporary cultural trends to express

his tragic vision of life); Sophocles (his introduction of the third actor as the

narrator-actor-chorus, his technical innovations like the use of scene painting);

Williams (his autobiographical play The Glass Menagerie and its character-

narrator device); Wilde (who played upon the controversy swirling around art's

proper function in his The Picture of Dorian Gray); Joyce (his interest in

priesthood, and the political and religious influences in his A Portrait of an Artist

as a Young Man); and Calderon (a priest who developed a series of plays with

mythological themes).

4. To keep the theme in focus, the play employs a character-narrator-chorus, an

expressionistic technique. Bitoy is also a one-man chorus. Complete with light

effects, transparent curtain, narrator’s voice, and the audience’s view of shifting

time, this attempt at flashback is a device to connect the space between present

and past.

5. The ageing of Paula -- Tony’s object of temptation -- sensuality is reduced. If

she were younger, the temptation might have been overwhelming.

6. In Scene 1, an imaginative device (a play within a play) is utilized to evoke the

life in Intramuros of the lead characters (Bitoy, Candida and Paula) in their

youth. This intensifies the impact of the past. The characters indulge in some

make-believe.

7. To slacken the tension in the first indication of the conflict in the play between

two generations and their values (when Tony has his outburst), a brief comic

interlude is introduced. Paula tells Bitoy and Tony that Candida has caught the

rat she set out to catch. Joaquin stresses the irony of the sisters’ dilemma when

the refined and well-mannered Candida says she is willing to expose herself to

mockery by making an honest living -- catching rats.

8. A babelization device is employed at the end of Scenes 1 and 2 to highlight the

shocking quality of contemporary life and of intensifying the contrast between

this life and that as lived by the Marasigans. Its purpose is more symbolical than

theatrical.

9. In these scenes, too, as Don Perico declaims “Dies irae, dies illa,” an air raid

siren begins to blast (but, to me, is damaging), just as Pepang tells Paula

and Candida about the rumor that they have been flirting with Tony. Because of

the siren blast, the characters need to shout at each other, intensifying tension to

a high point. (The siren actually saved this scene from becoming melodramatic.)

10. In the first two scenes, it must be noted that the people who are enthusiastic

and vocal about their views, the young journalists Pete, Eddie, Cora, as well as

the old politician Don Perico, are the characters Joaquin uses to engage in a

discussion.

11. To save the scenes from becoming too discursive, Joaquin uses irony in so that

his characters could reject the past. He lets the vaudeville performers intrude when the journalists analyze the relevance of the painting to contemporary conditions (the first discussion). The society matrons also intrude when Senator Perico reminisces about the past and reviews his decision to abandon poetry for politics (the second discussion).

12. To transform the image of Don Lorenzo as father, protector and patriarch and

enhance excitement, the playwright employ the La Naval de Manila procession.

13. The tertulia at the end of the play shows the influence of realism a la Chekhov

for whom the ceremonious social occasion is the best means of revealing

individuals at moments when they are at least engrossed in private rationalization

and most open to disinterested insights.

ATTITUDE AND APPROACH (ON THE CONCEPT)

The Acting Style

One must first understand the principles of realism and expressionism in order to gauge how an actor must perform in a production of Portrait of the Artist as Filipino, how the artist revolts after soul-searching, and how he finds the solution in isolation.

I see that Portrait has the trademarks of Chekhov – populated by the disappointed gentry, by those who could not adjust to the new, repressive form of life. The lead characters tend to be alienated in their isolated grandeur and to be pessimistic about a future they may have dreamed about, but which now seems hopelessly unattainable.

The play gains its dramatic tension from the subtexts of people dispossessed of home, ideals, vigor and love. Similarly, the "action scenes" tend to take the form of arrivals and departures. The bustling arrivals provide a perfect dramatic means for bringing all the characters together and filling in the details of their lives. The characters talk more at, than to, each other so that we have conversations where no one seems to be listening to but him/herself.

As a director, I would apply Chekhov’s realism with a mix of Sophoclean and Brechtian expressionist techniques.

Chekhov wished the audience to feel that they are eavesdropping on very private conversations. This sort of realism demands intense attention from an audience, while creating an intimacy within which the audience can become deeply involved with the characters. As a director, I would consider the use of acting, not simply the text, to establish their developing rapport. I would instruct my actors to strictly control the expression of overt dramatic action by expressing deep feeling through subtle nuances, gestures, glances, vocal tones, and the shared understandings and sympathetic rhythms that distinguish siblings everywhere (for Candida, Paula, Pepang and Manolo). This technique, developed by Chekhov, is called “indirect action.” It concentrates on subtleties of characterization and interaction between characters.

Brechtian actors utilize a minimum of gesture and underplay their roles to augment the tragedy – in the case of Bitoy, of losing his childhood. I would apply this theory of minimalism and underplaying in his character. This acting style would require the audience to change their perspective, and thus cause critical analysis of characters.

Brecht established the exchange of roles and the encouragement of actors to directly speak to the audience, so that an audience may remain emotionally detached and not emphatic – in fact, directly opposing Aristotelian theatre. I would insist consistency as to the acting style of Bitoy in his particular role as Narrator and One-Man Chorus. I would tell the actor to make obvious his assigned characters (having actually dual roles) and to merge himself with the characters rather than to ‘become them’. Constant critical judgment of himself, I feel, would also contribute to the actor’s detachment and perhaps ‘downplaying’ of his roles.

The other personas of Bitoy would demand other techniques of acting, not only using storytelling, but also as a character interacting with other characters. He must be charming and enchanting to convince the audience to imagine that the Manila of the past is ever-present. He is both a participant in, and a narrator of the struggle in whose outcome the protagonists have an important stake. Though he seems to play a peripheral role -- often serving only as a sounding board for the ideas of the other characters, he sets the tone of the play. It is also necessary that he marks the stages of the action, maintaining the theme and leading the audience to a new perspective as he does so. As a one-man chorus, I would want him to present the point of view and the faith of the Filipino people.

To represent his life story up to the time of his latest visit to the Marasigan home, I would employ five actors portraying him during Scene 2, in which he drifts from one job to another – bootblack, newsboy, baker’s apprentice, waiter, pier-laborer. I feel that this would underline how life has changed completely for him – gone are the blissful days of his privileged childhood because the harsh reality is that he has to make a living. His autobiography is important in terms of the theme of the play. His story serves a dramatic function. I would like to stress his life story as quite the opposite of what life has done to Don Lorenzo’s older children, Manolo and Pepang.

When he gives the epilogue, he has to move the audience.

As a director, I would advise the actors portraying Candida and Paula to keenly show their shabbiness despite their being genteel and brought up well. In Scene 1, I would want a distressed Paula and a hysterical Candida. In Scene II, I feel Candida should be useless towards Paula. Internal rebellion should be subtly expressed by Candida and Paula at the end of this scene. Likewise, Candida and Paula should subtly show their danger of extinction everytime they leave the sala when outsiders take possession of it and they come running back to it when its sanctity is endangered.

The Design

The given theatre space is a proscenium that lends itself to the theatre of the “fourth wall,” that is, the audience eavesdropping on the stage action, which is assumed to occur in private. The stage measurement is 10 by 11.02 meters.

The play is not naturalistic, employing stage conventions and making use of special effects like music and video projections.

The first scene opens with Mozart’s Requiem Dies Irae, a famous Medieval Latin hymn on the Day of Judgment which is often used in the liturgy for the dead, as the video zooms in to the ruins of Intramuros.

As Bitoy begins to speak, the video dissolves to a travelogue of the different churches (as if making the rounds of churches like what Joaquin used to do when he had nothing to do) in Intramuros). Intense downlighting – to keep our attention to the subjects – fades in on a number of actors (missionaries, merchants, harlots, pirates, sultans, etc.) do their respective businesses in the moving space on center stage (a mechanical device that is only moved during the prologue of each scene. The moving spave is the performance space provided to depict exterior units and scenes; it encircles the sala of the Marasigan house (still in the dark).

As lights fade out on the moving space, the video shows Calle Real leading to the house.

Then as the lights slowly fade in the sala of the house, Merry Widow Waltz is softly played until lights are set full to reveal the set. I would like to include an art deco painted ceiling.

The second scene would show Bitoy’s life through the five actors on the moving space until he speaks about working at the piers. This time, focus would be on the video of the Manila piers in the 40s. Then lights slowly fade in to the sala.

The third scene would use more of the sound effects. The moving space would be used by busy people – women running errands, a trike driver transporting a passenger, the young decorating arches and paper lanters, men tapping canes.

The epilogue would start off with the sound of bells and the Merry Widow Waltz with the moving space filled up with vendors and their stuff – sweets, fruits, etc. As lights fades out, the video of the ruins is shown.

For sound effects, symbolic sounds are heard offstage (a la Chekhov). For example, the distant sounds of the wind against the trees and iron sheets to indicate the typhoon month, the air raid sirens to denote the oncoming war, etc., faint sound of bells and band-music to specify a feast. The floor of the stage must produce a squeaking sound to imply age. It must sound as it is stepped on.

For additional lighting: the blinking lights for the procession, the searching followspot for the sirens, individual pools of light to illuminate and to isolate Bitoy the narrator always, and the five actors playing Bitoy. Visibility and focus are the primary considerations of lighting design for Portrait. Realistic lighting must be created to appear as if emanating from the sun through the balcony in one scene, and from moonlight in the prologue and epilogue. General lighting is atmospheric to evoke the mood appropriate to the action: gloomy, oppressive, austere, funereal, or regal. Lighting beneath the stage to the balconies is to be designed for the procession scene.

Regarding costumes, I feel that the best approach is to use old Manila fashion in the 1940s. My initial concept for the women costuming involves printed blouse in puffed sleeves, black or checkered skirt, black or white heeled shoes, bangles, pearl necklace, hair clips, round shaped neckline, wide belts but everything dull (to avoid any distraction to the audience), except those of Susan, Violet, Doña Loleng and Elsa Montes. The four would be dressed in V-necklines with pendant necklaces and bracelets. Makeup for the lips would be red and eyeliners would be dark. Doña Loleng, in one scene, would be dressed with long sleeved gown. In another scene, she would be in a printed terno with black shoes. Elsa’s Carmen Miranda costume would include a fruit hat, ruffled blouse and Capri pants – the Latina look. However, I would opt that Paula wear pendant necklace and bracelet as well as makeup for Scene 3 where which she comes back radiant.

I would suggest that the sailor suit of Bitoy be in white with blue cord, instead of the traditional blue suit with white cord, to give him more visual focus in the prologues of each scene. He would wear a blue undershirt and cap with black shoes.

The other younger men would be in plain polo tucked, or shirt or Hawaiian shirt untucked and uninhibited, in high cut boots and cap. The older men would be in Americana.

A Turning Point in the History of Philippine Theater

A TURNING POINT IN THE HISTORY OF PHILIPPINE THEATER

by Marilie Fernandez-Ilagan

Tony sat on a chair blindfolded and handcuffed. He screamed in pain, his face wrought in terror as his body convulsed.

The scene welcomed me in one of my visits to the rehearsals of Sining Malay Ensemble’s “Bombita ug Ako sa Tralala,” mounted by Alan Glinoga. Designed as a comedy, it became wicked towards the end. If I recall it right, the play was Davao City’s version of Tony Perez’ “Bombita,” which was about a soldier who discovered the absurdity of his life and decided to be human.

Then there was “Ang Paglilitis ni Mang Serapio” of Paul Dumol, which revolved around a syndicate composed of beggars. I could still remember Bobby Cielo giving last minute instructions to his cast. They won the grand prize in an interschool theater festival in Butuan City.

“El Fili,” Davao’s version of Paul Dumol’s “Kabesang Tales,” is another play etched in my mind. There was Romy, bathed in light as he delivered his lines to a mesmerized audience. Directed by Nestor Horfilla, the play about the travails of a peasant family brought to life a recurring theme in our society.

Finally, there is this play I remember only through word of mouth and some
photos that its director, Betbet Palo, kept in his old wooden house. He was the theater desk coordinator of Mindanao Development Center when he directed Bonifacio P. Ilagan’s “Pagsambang Bayan” in Zamboanga. In one of the pictures, the priest, garbed in colorful indigenous fabric, was celebrating mass with peasants and workers as the audience in the semi-arena watched intently, some sitting in the bamboo bleachers. Betbet told me the play was forthright in telling of the human rights violations and the impoverishment of the people because of the greed of those who ruled them. There was really not much surprise to it – except that it was performed during the height of the martial law regime of Ferdinand Marcos, and that the message was conveyed through the oldest of all traditional dramas, the mass.

Bombita, Mang Serapio, Kabesang Tales and the Priest are figures of the absurd and nonconformist whose stories underscore the oppressive structures of authoritarianism in which they – and we – lived. They symbolize the Filipino asserting his rights as a human being and citizen. Finding themselves in conflict with a society that threatened to overwhelm them, they had to cling to a faith in their humanity, in their identity and in a cause they felt they could die for.

Their coming into being on Philippine stage brought alive not only the language of the Pinoy – Bisaya in Mindanao – but also the Pinoy’s worth in terms of the theater. The daring commitment of the Filipino theater artists who produced these plays were happily reciprocated by an appreciative audience that delighted in a fledgling genre of the performing arts.

Except for “Pagsambang Bayan,” I had either watched or been involved in various roles in the plays that I mentioned – which all had their run in Mindanao in the 1980s. Except for “Bombita,” these plays were originally performed in the late 1960s and the 1970s. How fared Philippine theater before the advent of these plays?

Historians say that this period was a turning point in the saga of the Filipino people. It was brief as brief could be – only a matter of years, but its impact was enormous because it dwelt on the consciousness of the people. It was a period when society’s rules, long held sacred and inviolable, were questioned; power relations that defined progress, peace and order were defied; suppressed ideas sprung up like thinking out of the box. The process was started by the intellectuals and the youth and quickly engulfed the rest of society.

The turbulent period told on theater as well. Western hegemony of what was legitimate and presentable began to crack when even West-trained playwrights and directors made contrary assertions in their works. As the 1960s ended, a new breed of theater artists experimented on activist themes and conflicts, making heroes out of the kargador and the sakada, and villains out of the honorable politico, propitario and members of the alta de sociedad. The new consciousness had to be performed onstage.

Fired up with an urgent sense of the theater, groups multiplied from Manila to the rest of Luzon, the Visayas and Mindanao. The theater scene – though not the kind that landed in the reviews of the papers, bustled with energy and productions -- from agitprop presentations in parks and streets to one-act and full-length plays in theaters with paying audience. The other outstanding feature of the period was that theater came to the people. It happened where the people lived or worked.

In particular, a theater of liberation engulfed Mindanao, abetted no less by the progressive section of the Catholic Church. In the late 1960s, its parishes and social action programs utilized theater for social change. When liberation theology found its way to Mindanao’s seminaries, theater-of-liberation activists employed theater to facilitate the formation of the so-called Basic Christian Communities. They propounded on local and national issues through the legends of the indigenous peoples. In one province, peasants who were in the midst of a big conflict with the landlord wrote their own script and perform it as well. Muslim farmers eventually joined them.

So here was theater returning to its roots. It could not have happened had there not been a turning point in its history.

Why My Passion for This Theater

Why My Passion for This Theater

by Marilie Fernandez-Ilagan

One afternoon, on my way home from school, I was attracted by the noise coming from the church by the sea. I went in and saw David, a well-liked gay church worker in our small town of Mati in Davao Oriental. l. He was talking and moving about like a real male. I realized that he and the rest were doing drama. I took note of the one who was directing, who, I would know very much later as Karl Gaspar. It was 1972. At seven, it was my first theater exposure.

It took all of seven years before I found myself performing onstage – in high school dramatics. In college at the Ateneo de Davao, I was expectedly also active in theater. Later, I joined a theater group of a social development agency. It seemed like there was no turning back.

Then one day, in 1982, I learned a man was arrested by the police. He was unlike most captives. He stood proud. It was Karl Gaspar becoming a political prisoner.

In the 1980s in Mindanao, community theater was already thriving, thanks to artists like Karl Gaspar. The Mindanao community theater was the great drama school where I honed my artistry. There could not have been a better one, because here, theory and practice merged, instilling in me a commitment to the arts that was rooted in the social value of theater.

Instead of running away from theater on account of Karl’s arrest, I kept my faith. At that time, I was already active in Kulturang Atin Foundation, Inc. (Kafi), a big name in the mass-based cultural work in Mindanao in the 1980s. Kafi then was a well-run cultural institution that put a premium on theater in community education and development work. It had a regular theater season and summer workshops.

I also became active in the Mindanao Community Theater Network (MCTN), an impressive theater coalition in the island, whose cultural workers and popular educators had a favorite slogan: “Magkoryo tayo kung paano mag-akyo” (Let’s do plays, songs and dances the way we use acupuncture),” in the sense of “healing our social ills.” MCTN explored and mastered cultural action programs in the communities, combining education processes with advocacy work through theater. My work in these organizations taught me theater’s relevance to the day-to-day life of the people to survive and find meaning in their poverty and misery.

This is not to say that my college learning of Western classical theater did not amount to something. In fact, I was glad that I had a taste of the West End before I did agitprop. Now my vision had become broader because I went surrealist and expressionist to realist; my experiences ran the range of “My Fair Lady” to “Nukleyar” to “Pilipinas Circa 1907” to “El Fili” to “Sinalimba (Airboat)” to “Nag-alintabong Kabilin (Burning Legacy)” to “Road to Mindanao” to “Siak sa Duha ka Damgo (Crack in Two Dreams)” to “Oya! Arakan” to “Ang Babae sa Ating Panahon” to “Langaw sa Isang Basong Gatas.”

My theater since the 1980s, however, concentrated on folk traditions -- particularly on indigenous forms, and women’s issues. I chose to focus on these because I wanted to catch up with my appreciation of my indigenous roots at the same time that I was being stirred up by the women’s liberation movement.

My passion for this kind of theater was all the more encouraged when in 1990, my colleagues and I in the Kaliwat Theater Collective interacted with Dr. Julie Holledge, chair of the drama center of Flinders University in Australia. She took the occasion to encourage us to do theatre about and for the women, a kind of theater that was then novel to us. I realized for the first time the extent of retrogressive teaching about women and saw the connection between past and continuing attitudes toward women.

My interactions and immersions with the virtuosos of the indigenous communities of Mindanao afforded me a new high on indigenous forms. In my first visit to a B’laan village in Sultan Kudarat, an elder woman told me and my group, “You’ll never know how we write our own epics, songs and riddles, and how we move in our own dances until you come here and live with us . . . until you settle down with our Mother, the Earth.” Not even my experiences in doing theater overseas – a different high altogether -- could negate the wisdom of these words.

All told, I found challenge and freedom as I grew up in the Mindanaoan theater. Perhaps because theatre -- the way we define it in Mindanao, like oral traditions, didn’t impose rigid standards even as it required one to hew close to the heritage and not stray away from Mother Earth and all that it meant through the generations.

When some say that theater using indigenous forms and tackling women’s issues has remained largely on the fringe, I become impassioned about my desire for this kind of theater to break through the barrier of the experimental. Also, I wish to show that theater could both be art form and platform. Politics needs the theater as much as the theater needs politics. As long as I live it, as long as I am clear about my development as a theater artist through reflection, self-discovery and assertion, I’d be impassioned about this kind of theater that serves beyond the entertainment.