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.