Theater review: Virgin Labfest 9: A road less traveled in 'Isang Daan'

In this country, it is rare to see comedies told succinctly, without sacrificing depth, without the usual devices of slapstick and a screaming (if not token) gay character. Even rarer is the comedy that is able to weave together a narrative informed enough about nation to not talk about it to our faces. 

 

There is a road, and it is important to different people, in a variety of ways. There is a road, and this play will take you for a ride through it, straight through its dead end. It will also reveal for you the person that you are, relative to the task at hand: that is, there is a road. 

 

What would you do to save it? 

 

The promise of a road
 

The premise is simple: a road is about to be turned into a highway by your local government official. It is something that’s familiar to every Pinoy who has had to suffer at the hands of a local government that thinks “development” and “change” mean making highways out of small roads and new street names. 

 

But on the day the mayor (Meila Romero) holds a press con regarding the highway that would put her name on the map of, uh, development, Ting and Bituin beat him to it. Ting (Ed Lacson Jr.) is a balikbayan from the States who wants to introduce his daughter Bituin to their historical roots. That is, to her great-great-grandfather, who died fighting as a Katipunero, on that street that was named after him. 

 

Bituin (Adrienne Vergara) is uninterested. In her a fancy American accent devoid of a Pinoy cadence, she reprimands her father for dragging her to find that street—a street that didn’t matter to her. But there’s no negotiating with Ting, dead set as he is on finding that street named after his great-grandfather, as his doggedness really is also about the migrant Filipino’s search for rootedness in nation. 

 

They find the street name neglected, the road ready for demolition. But to Ting, this road is part of his rootedness in history, part of his family and heritage. But the road's demolition is what is expected of the mayor, the grand project to put a feather in her cap, to bring her political bid over the edge. 

 

Comedy on that road
 

And so Ting fights it out with the Mayor, the only way citizens know how: he goes to the streets, though he’s already on the one that he’s fighting for. With nary uncertainty, he asks his daughter to join him. But Bituin is mostly aghast by the whole situation, ready to give in to the Mayor. 

 

At the sign of a protest, the rest of the community—or its representatives—come out of the woodwork. The informal settler who will be affected by the highway’s construction, the motley crew of fake activists—all of two of characters—who are wont to scream against whatever is the issue of the day. 

 

Along with the mayor’s posse, comprised of a bodyguard predisposed to violence and an assistant who is the mayor’s sidekick and fan and slave and alter ego rolled into one, the picture these characters paint is quite the display of lives lived in urban Manila. The effect as such is chaos that is familiar, but also done to its most absurd extremes. 

 

For example, there is the mayor and her usage of a politician’s diplomatic words, even as she inflicts her bodyguard on her constituents. 

 

There is the assistant (Karenina Haniel), who has committed the mayor’s speech to heart, and is one to turn defensive for her boss while acquiring the voice of the Fil-Am Bituin.

 

Bituin is the most rational character in this play, but being her father’s daughter, is unable to leave Ting even when she thinks him crazy for trying to save the road. 

 

There are the activists, who care for everything except fo making sense and who are laughable in their superficiality. 

 

There is Ting, who is no activist, but who is the most sincere character on stage. He runs on emotion, and the cause he fights for is something he truly believes in—as a matter of family yes, but also as a matter of history.

 

That this scenario makes for comedy is borne of the skill of the playwright. Each character’s perspective is distinct enough, each voice is heard. But the final product is also borne of a cast able to work at refusing the noise of multiple voices speaking. Individually, everyone knew exactly when to chime in and how; as an ensemble, this cast was so in sync with each other that despite the din of heightened emotions, no voice was lost. Comedy could only ensue.

 

“Isang Daan” owes its success to its entire cast. Haniel and Vergara were distinct if only because their characters are usually believably portrayed. The play’s director, Ed Lacson Jr., played the role of protagonist Ting, pinch-hitting for actor Jelson Bay, who couldn’t perform the night I watched. That he did it without missing a beat, even as he was holding a script throughout the play, was a feat in itself. 

 

How did the play cross the road?
 

The play begins and ends with the neighborhood taong grasa waking up on the street. She is dirty and is voiceless, a presence throughout the play that is ignored, one who isn’t spoken to. A symbol of neglect just as the road is.

 

The set is sparse, with only the cement block that carries the street sign, the makeshift fence that carries the mayor’s tarp and signals the beginning of the destruction that accompanies the building of a highway. There is the drill that looks over the set, poised to do its work. Everything the play demands in terms of props are hidden behind the fence. The sparseness of the set is part of the narrative’s unfolding; the play’s direction pushed for a cast that could swiftly navigate the stage, allowing for chaos that is obviously about order still. 

 

And here, really, is the gift of direction: the actors know where to go at any given time, to allow for the narrative to unfold with nary a mishap. The stage that is so well thought out, you almost forget it matters at all. 

 

But of course it does, just as the writing of this play achieved a microcosm of a nation that is not only unfamiliar, it is also not shoved down the collective throats of the audience. There is a sense here of simplicity, the kind that any good comedy lives off, and which we rarely see in our local writing. It is this simplicity that allows for the narrative to, in the end, fly—though not in terms of forcing on the audience the familiarity of stereotypes and highlighting that we could be one of the characters living and breathing on the stage. Instead, it dares to give us characters that we know to be familiar because the do exist, and who are, at the same time, not who we are, either. 

 

Because we, the audience, witness these things happening to our streets and roads, to our histories and heritage, and ultimately, to our nation. We know our government officials but don't care enough to engage with them, we know of the informal settler living nearby and ignore them completely. We know of our neighborhood taong grasa, and we only to neglect her, too.

 

“Isang Daan” is a show, yes. It’s a show in the way that, for many of us, our nation is nothing but. — VC/BM, GMA News

 

“Isang Daan” is written by Liza Magtoto and directed by Ed Lacson Jr. as part of Set B of Virgin Labfest 9. It will be staged tonight, July 6 at 8:00 PM, and tomorrow July 7 at 3:00 PM at the Cultural Center of the Philippines’ Tanghalang Huseng Batute. 

 

Click here for the schedule of Virgin Labfest and here for the plays' synopses.

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Katrina Stuart Santiago writes the essay in its various permutations, from pop culture criticism to art reviews, scholarly papers to creative non-fiction, all always and necessarily bound by Third World Philippines, its tragedies and successes, even more so its silences. She blogs at http://www.radikalchick.com. The views expressed in this article are solely her own.