Floy Quintos and the politics of miracles

The theater luminary Floy Quintos was fascinated by many things.

Away from directing and writing for the stage, Floy was an authority on animist objects such as amulets and rice gods. 

One of our last conversations, before he passed away suddenly last April, was about an exhibit he was curating at the Yuchengco Museum on the life’s work of the late Ramon Obusan, National Artist for Dance. 

In particular, Floy was asking me about the lukayo, performed in small rural towns in Laguna, an age-old fertility dance by grandmothers dressed up like clowns and wielding wooden phallic symbols while dancing around newlyweds as they exited the church. 

Ramon Obusan had been among the first to record this tradition. With his help, I did a documentary on the lukayo and after it aired, both Obusan and I were called to a hearing of the MTRCB because some viewers found the dance offensive. 

And of course, Floy, who loved the company of fellow cultural provocateurs, highlighted that risqué ritual in the exhibit he curated, and later at a major dance concert he directed commemorating Obusan’s work. He called the dance an expression of “folk Catholicism.” 

On stage, he had the same playful, provocative approach and explored large, contemporary themes. Amid the piano music and classical singing in his “The Kundiman Party,” he pushed back against the culture that applauded extrajudicial killings. 

He tackled how the 2022 elections polarized our politics and divided friends in “The Reconciliation Dinner,” a play so current he kept updating it each time it was restaged. 

In a podcast interview I had with him last year, Floy told me, perhaps too modestly, that those two recent plays were so bound to our era they probably would not be remembered long. I think future theater companies will decide that. At the very least, they’ll be engrossing cultural artifacts that captured a distressing time. 

Between pre-colonial animist rice gods and post-colonial partisan politics, I thought I had seen the eclectic sweep of Floy’s fixations. 

Then I saw “Grace” last weekend, an astonishing, posthumous finale to a prolific life. 

Floy could mount lavish, colorful productions, but his last play “Grace” was strictly minimalist, from the one-syllable title to the set consisting of a solitary chair in the center of the stage bathed in rays of what appeared like divine light. Nothing was to distract from the power of this story, and the riveting portrayals ranging from the humble Batangueña visionary Teresita played by Stella Cañete-Mendoza to the imperious Italian bishop portrayed by the tall, regal Leo Rialp. 

Having married into a native Lipeño  family, I can attest that the distinctive but acquired rapid-fire Batangueño accents of the characters, folksy and often comedic, sounded true, a product of thorough coaching and preparation. 

When Floy died, he had been polishing this new play about a true-to-life religious controversy that had divided hard-core Catholics. It was a startling theme for an iconoclast  known for his large collection of pagan bululs or rice gods. 

Juxtaposing the dialog with news headlines projected on the stage, director and longtime Quintos collaborator Dexter Santos reminds us that the broad strokes of this church thriller, albeit a “fictionalized narrative,” were based on facts dug up mostly by the playwright Floy, himself a former journalist. 

In 1948, amid the destruction left by World War 2, crowds of devotees began to descend on the provincial town of Lipa in Batangas after news spread of an apparition of the Virgin Mary that appeared before a novice nun in a monastery. 

The throngs and claims of miraculous healing drew the attention of skeptical bishops and even the papal representative in the Philippines, who noted as well the mounting cash donations to the monastic nuns. 

In Floy’s retelling, this episode was less about the truth of an apparition (for how can one really prove or disprove a purported supernatural event?) than the exercise of power in the Catholic Church, an institution rarely made accountable in the temporal world. 

Floy’s evenhanded treatment is neither worshipful nor cynical. He simply portrayed the religious as people with human virtues and frailties. The controversy, which concluded in 1951 with a papal declaration that the apparition was a hoax, was Floy’s lens for examining power in the starkest context, seemingly insulated from the pollution of traditional politics. 

But what could be more traditional in the political realm than the 2000-year-old Church, with its white-dominated male patriarchy? 

The heated interactions between domineering priests and assertive underdog nuns evoke this power imbalance repeatedly. 

The multitudes and their donations to a small provincial female congregation were threatening to the centralized authority of the church, and the fervor had to be nipped in the bud. 

The key nuns in this drama were banished, while the church patriarchy grew even more entrenched, evident today in its influence over secular public policy. 

But through Floy’s deft storytelling, brought to life by the exquisite ensemble acting in “Grace,” we know now of the patriarchy’s contradictions in a new light. 

The church men’s demands to the nuns to honor their vows of obedience, even in the form of false confessions, illuminate a disturbing question: where is the vow to the truth? 

It’s a question that must be asked today in all realms where the truth has been muddled and devalued, often to facilitate obedience to authority.

It was Floy Quintos’s final, dramatic act of genius that he was able to turn a simple miracle story into a  warning from the grave about the insidious dangers of autocracy. 

“Grace” has been extended to run until June 23 at the Blackbox Theater in Circuit Makati.

— LA, GMA Integrated News