Two plays question the shifting sands of memory and time
K.K.K. leader Emilio Jacinto is in a bad way. He’s been shot in the knee, lost a lot of blood, and now hallucinates while recovering under a Spanish doctor’s care. Played by Vic Robinson, Jacinto—or “Pingkian,” as he’s known—replays key events leading to his delirium, and even posits alternate futures for himself and the country.
Pingkian, Juan Ekis’ musical about Emilio Jacinto staged at CCP’s Tanghalang Ignacio Gimenez (Black Box) Theatre until March 24, focuses its spotlight on another key figure of the Filipino revolution of 1898—and, like the namesake of another historical musical, Hamilton, he was a man of letters. A lawyer, it was Pingkian’s published manifesto, “Ang Kalayaan,” that ignited many Filipinos to join the Katipunan. But what drives Jacinto is personal torment—whether to be a man of action or words. Also like Hamilton, Pingkian is driven by 20-plus musical numbers, songs written by Ejay Yatco, ranging from anthemic rock to rap bits to heartfelt ballads.
But there’s no need to compare Pingkian to the western stage. As many viewers noted, there’s a push among youth today to reexamine the country’s birth (movies like Heneral Luna and GomBurZa add to the conversation), and any method of presenting history in new, if refracted, ways is welcome. Director Jenny Jamora has imbued this staging with vivid images—the oppressed Filipinos gazing out at the audience surrounding the stage, the physical gestures of fidgeting fingers, as the people bide their time for change, or plot, or scheme. There’s a Les Mis feel to the ensemble numbers, as the collective actors amass center stage under the spotlight.
Playwright Ekis based his play on copious historical research, but didn’t want it to be Jacinto’s “greatest hits”; he allowed himself to jettison some facts and take “educated guesses” about what might’ve really happened.
Thus you have an imagined meeting between Jacinto and best friend Andres Bonifacio’s ghost (Paw Castillo); and you have a scene around a chessboard where a detained Jose Rizal (played in a bit of gender-blind casting by Kakki Teodoro) rebuffs Jacinto, there on a mission to rescue the author of Noli me Tangere and El Filibusterismo. Rizal tells the young upstart the Katipunan are “not ready” yet to defeat the Spanish, and urges him to focus on writing, which can “create a revolution in the heart” first. (About the gender-switch: as director Jamora explains, she had an epiphany during early readings for Rizal by Kakki; she understood that the words, as spoken, should be our focus, not the gender of the actor.)
Pingkian is framed around a dilemma—whether to join the battle with your physical body, or foster the “revolution within.” And therein, of course, lies a dramatic puzzle for Pingkian, because actions do often speak louder than words. Gravitas has to be conveyed onstage.
Jacinto was not blind to the flaws he saw in the Filipino—the “crab mentality” existing even then, the “disorderly habits,” and the tendency to treat women as “playthings” rather than equals—and he laid out an ethical primer for Katipunan recruits. The subject of Cain comes up in his writings—how we treat our own brothers, our kababayan.
The real question for me is whether it’s enough. Is it enough to change the hearts and minds of receptive audiences, to preach to the converted, when corruption still lies in wait, indifferent to change? Should we even expect government to solve problems that perhaps require a seismic shift in consciousness? Rizal’s answer was, of course, his own books: they changed people’s minds and allowed a revolution to take place within. Yet here we still are, wondering what that revolution was all about. Or even the 1986 EDSA revolution, at a moment when history is being rewritten in real time.
The play deserves praise for shining a light on another chapter of Filipino history that would otherwise go unexamined by this generation and the next. That is something, in this age of TikTok and our general dread of reading. Movies help bring to life dusty history. And if the Filipino is worth dying for, he or she is also worth singing and dancing for.
Non-linear chronology features in another play across town, Harold Pinter’s Betrayal, put on by Repertory Philippines at Carlos P. Romulo Auditorium, RCBC Plaza until March 17.
The stage is set: a British art gallery, festooned with pedestals and sculptures.
But what’s this? Gallery staff removes items and we are soon surrounded by the draped canvases and works of… Filipino artist Pacita Abad. That’s her actual “Paris in the Fall” hanging there center stage.
Victor Lirio’s production resituates us from the usual British sitting rooms of Pinter’s 1977 play. It’s now Filipino-British, essayed by three Filipino-British actors—Vanessa White, James Cooney and James Bradwell—playing Emma, Jerry and Robert, respectively.
Starting years after an affair between Emma and Jerry, it threads backwards and forwards, until we sometimes lose track, but are always drawn back in by the “recurrent tautologies” of Pinter’s language.
“Are you looking forward to our trip to Torcello?” is uttered several times, several different ways, by Robert, in one aggrieved segment of this love triangle. It changes in tone and adds irony as an argument evolves between Emma and Robert, who’s just learned of her affair.
Encountering British accents from Filipino actors onstage in Manila is no parlor trick; as second-generation Filipinos living in the UK, the leads convey something of Lirio’s intent: to show the London gallery scene from a decentered perspective, one not usually seen: having Emma overlook a gallery launch sometime in 2018 is meant to place her at the center of a story where she arguably always was, but in Pinter’s 20th-century text, somewhat at the mercy of males and events. Here, Emma is more in control.
Displaying a Filipina’s art onstage points towards a more local context. This was Lirio’s design: not only to show us Filipinos working and living broad in an actual contemporary space, but to also remind us that Pinter himself was a second-generation immigrant to London—from Poland. An immigrant’s perspective is always ripe for insight.
But Betrayal sticks so closely to the text, there is little room to draw such insights except from the choice of news items recited onstage between scenes—Brexit taking place, Duterte being elected, Trump raging against Mexican immigrants—the events of 2016 leading us to the present.
Jerry hasn’t seen Emma since their breakup two years back, and they rekindle memories of the past during the Abad launch. The fact that Jerry and Robert are best friends adds to the tension. Alcohol is constantly at hand—or in hand—fueling the reveries.
Emma White glows with passion onstage, even in her crisp reserve. James Bradwell plays a clueless husband who seems beyond putting the pieces together of the affair unfolding before his eyes. James Cooney is the reckless lover, inserting himself into the affair and marriage with only the cards of romance in his deck, nothing else.
Coming in at a tight 75 minutes, it’s possible to get lost in the chronology of Betrayal at times. But what keeps us circling back is the language of Pinter, tattooing itself onto the stage—how language can be so precise and yet so imprecise, so inadequate to convey truth, all at the same time.
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For tickets to Pingkian, call 0915-6072275 or 0905-3534576 or email [email protected]. For Harold Pinter’s Betrayal, contact [email protected] or visit www.RepertoryPhilippines.ph for ticket inquiries.