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Chapter 7. The Philippine Theatre’s Quest for a Hero(ine)
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215 CHAPTER 7 The Philippine Theatre’s Quest for a Hero(ine) WhenitwasannouncedthattheairconditionerhadbrokendowninTanghalang Huseng Batute at the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP) just before a performance of Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa’s La Chunga (1994), no one knew just how hot and sultry it was going to get in the small black box theatre. While the Philippines shares several affinities with Latin American countries besides tropical heat—hundreds of years of Spanish colonization, Roman Catholic domination, an oligarchic power structure, poverty, dictatorships , and American neocolonialism—La Chunga explored the underbelly of another Spanish inheritance—machismo. The play opened to the sound of men stomping their feet as they dance around a table enacting a ritual both moving and oppressive, revealing their male bonding to be both a truth and a lie. Set in a small-town bar, four men get drunk and gamble, while the proprietor , La Chunga (Marisa Tinsay), looks on with indifference from her rocking chair. The scene seems eternal, as though she could have been rocking, thinking , watching for hundreds of years, in hundreds of similar towns. The men, however, begin taunting her about an evening when she invited a young prostitute into her room above the bar. When she refuses to indulge their curiosity, the past suddenly slips into the present, and a young woman, Meche (Olga Natividad), enters from behind the audience, walking backwards as she faces a bright hostile light and stumbles onto the stage. It is divulged that she is the whore of Josefino (R. J. Leyran), the toughest of the dice players. He flaunts his possession in front of the other men, but when he needs a loan from La Chunga, he suggests she take Meche in exchange. From the moment La Chunga leads Meche upstairs to her bedroom, the action spirals inward as each man 216 | ChAPTer 7 plays out his fantasy of what then occurs above their heads. They crawl, strut, limp, bulldoze their way into the women’s privacy, but each one is psychologically stripped by the two women who preserve their own mystery. A performance of unrelenting sexual intensity, it moved dance critic Basilio Esteban S. Villaruz to respond in kind: “It is one long screw of bare bawdy and brutal emotion, turning deep in one’s gut. The play is a kind of rowdy disemboweling very close to the groin.”1 Directed by Jose Estrella, the cast of six from Tanghalang Pilipino, the resident company of CCP, handled visceral desire with subtlety and complexity in taut ensemble work with the actors evincing none of the awkward self-conscious “now I am going to do something daring” that sometimes accompanies the representation of sex in Southeast Asian theatre. THE TRADITION OF COLONIAL HYBRIDITY In a cooler corner of the huge arts complex, Nicanor Tiongson, the then artistic director of the CCP, dismissed the common compliment that Filipino actors are so versatile that they can perform in major productions all over the world. Instead, he envied Indonesian performers their strong unbroken classical tradition that assimilated whatever new idea or movement they encountered into their own stylistic structure and ideology.2 Everything the Indonesians came in contact with became identifiably their own, in contrast to the chameleon mutability of the Philippine performer. This talent for mimicry, according to Tiongson, was a dilemma for Filipino actors, whose lack of a distinct national character stemmed from the culture’s lack of an indigenous core tradition. The Philippine theatre does not follow a typical postcolonial model in which dramatists must chose between an indigenous but antiquated tradition and a modern but foreign implantation. Instead, in the 1960s, playwrights resurrected older indigenized Spanish forms to counteract the effects of American mass media and the American dramatic realism taught in university drama departments. The absence of a precolonial court tradition is a major reason why Western theatre scholars have taken little interest in the Philippines’ unique developments. In the late twentieth century Philippine dramatists, particularly those at CCP, were consciously constructing a national cultural identity in their productions. The Philippines has been plagued with doubts about its cultural identity from both Asian and Western perspectives. In 1957, when the Cultural Foundation of the Philippines planned to send a troupe of dancers, singers, and musicians abroad, one member of the council expressed fears that since Philippine performing arts were so different from those in the rest of Asia, their [44.200.26.112] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 05:41 GMT) The PhiliPPine TheATre...