REVIEW: Dolly de Leon and Lea Salonga power 'Request sa Radyo'
While the posters with Dolly de Leon and Lea Salonga’s faces have been up for a couple of months now, it’s safe to say that the play they’re promoting, Request Sa Radyo, will catch most audiences off-guard.
Based on German playwright Franz Xaver Kroetz's Wunschkonzert (Request Program), the play is a starkly intimate, wordless exploration of isolation and loneliness, with the two world-famous actors playing the same role in alternating solo performances.
Staged at the Samsung Performance Arts Theater in Circuit Makati, the gala premiere had Salonga and de Leon delivering back-to-back shows for an audience comprised of Manila’s theater elite. Even before the lights dimmed for the first show, the audience buzzed with excited energy, as all in attendance knew they were bearing witness to history.
Request Sa Radyo opens with an unnamed Pinay coming home to her New York apartment. From her scrubs, we’re meant to infer her profession, and the bulk of the show has us watching as she goes about her day, with the only spoken words (and music) coming from the radio program she’s tuned in to. In de Leon's performance which PhilSTAR L!fe attended, the plays’ wordless format cast an almost unbearable sense of tension over the proceedings.
In a show bereft of monologues, speeches, or even dialogue (from the main character) for the most part, de Leon delivered a master class in naturalistic acting, performing ostensibly mundane household and personal hygiene tasks in front of a packed house with nary an ounce of self-consciousness. Whether she was preparing a meal or taking a moment to relieve herself, de Leon sold the unspoken realities of her character’s situation.
As she moved through her living space, performing the unseen rituals that come with decompressing after a long day at work, the character’s melancholy rang true, to an uncomfortable degree. As she went about her routine, her only companion was the radio program, “Request Sa Radyo”, a Fil-Am show playing contemporary Philippine tunes, injecting a modicum of auditory joy into her dreary existence.
 coming from the radio program she’s tuned in to (photo by Sandro Paredes).jpg)
When the play reaches its ultimate denouement, we, as an audience are made complicit in the events that take place, and in more ways than one – where the source material had its protagonist railing against the imposed mundanity of a menial factory job, the new version is contextualized with something far more insidious and relatable to its Manila audience: the Philippine diaspora.
Indeed, despite its constant reframing as an act of heroism (as opposed to, say, an escape from a nation unable to provide for its citizens) the very concept of someone having to travel halfway across the world to care for strangers to provide for those they leave behind isn’t just ironic, it’s inhuman, and a cruel fact of life for millions of Filipinos.
The fact that this narrative remains effective across different contexts underscores the universal nature of depression and the dehumanization that modern society imposes on its people. Request sa Radyo takes its character’s loneliness to its ultimate endpoint, and one honestly can’t imagine it ending any other way.
While one is under no illusions that this play could have been staged in this manner—much less at this venue—if not for the participation of its headlining actors, it’s undeniably thrilling to consider the possibilities that this run could open. If it takes two theater and cinema icons to get more experimental productions made, and name actors to take bigger chances, then so be it.
Request Sa Radyo won’t be for everyone, and it may not even be one that you’ll want to see again, but it’s a show that you won’t regret having experienced – regardless of whose face is on the poster.
Request Sa Radyo is onstage now until October 20 at the Samsung Performing Arts Theater, in Circuit Makati. Tickets are available at Ticketworld.