with Ian Rosales Casocot

I still remember those years when we persisted to stage Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues amidst the horrified protests of many who labeled us as pornographers—which is testament, of course, to how even well-intentioned (and educated!) people can be led astray by sheer ignorance of the material. Because these materials are edgy, they are mostly left untouched by a community afraid to rock the boat, any boat. Which is to our detriment—because how do we grow, how do we fully engage a changing world (and it is changing fast!) when we refuse to acknowledge the presence of new dynamics and new realities? Even Tevye in Fiddler in the Roof acknowledges that: tradition, yes, but sometimes even the deep-rooted ones can be swept away—whether we like it or not—with the unforgiving wave of new things. When we are not ready because we are not fully engaged, the end is a painful uprooting.

There is a wealth of new (and even not-so-new) materials out there, both foreign and local, that demand our attention, and perhaps our willingness to adapt them on our local stage. Most will be, of course, unfamiliar to the locals, and some may make them uncomfortable by tackling subject matters that threaten to upset, or perhaps unmask, Dumaguete’s Peyton Place veneer. There’s, for example, David Mamet’s Oleanna, about the intricate politics of sexual harassment. Or Rene O. Villanueva’s Asawa, about the sexual darkness of marital abuse. Or John Patrick Shanely’s Doubt, about religious certainty and priestly pedophilia. Or John Larson’s Rent, about a disappearing bohemia in the Age of HIV. I dream of the day when we get the courage to stage materials such as these, and gain an appreciating patronage as well. Enough of old farces like Wilfrido Ma. Guerrero’s Wanted: A Chaperone, those old standbys. Leave them to amateur productions, if we must do them for the sake of introducing the tried-and-true for new generations of playgoers. Any theater person worth his or her salt should be a kind of trailblazer instead.

Sometimes, we ourselves are culprit to such accommodations: the Silliman University Cultural Affairs Committee once looked into the possibility of staging Altar Boyz locally. The musical by Gary Adler and Michael Patrick Walker is a satire about Christian boy bands—and we felt, at that time, that perhaps Silliman—a Protestant institution—was not ready for such material. (But later, I would ask myself: When will we ever be ready? And isn’t the point of higher education also to challenge conventional thinking and create debate? What are we so afraid about?)

The whole thing can be disheartening, given the fact that Dumaguete has always had a rich tradition of theater. We have been routinely staging Shakespeare since the Americans came over to our shores. And we have produced a steady string of award-winning playwrights—Elsa Martinez Coscolluela and Bobby Flores Villasis among them—but whose works have largely remained as file cabinet fodder instead of full stage productions. We gave the Philippines and the world such luminaries as Junix Inocian, who went on to become The Engineer in Miss Saigon; Frances Makil Ignacio, who went on to become the title character in the widely-acclaimed sarswela Atang; Luna Grino-Inocian, who went on to pen and produce the local production of The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe…. What happened since the days of Paul Palmore, Elmo Makil, Amiel Leonardia, Meg Doromal, Gamaliel Viray, Rhoda Pepito, and Belen Calingacion?

But look. Things are changing.

I can’t pinpoint the exact moment when I felt that theater was changing for the better in Dumaguete. The evolution has been slow and steady—and there have been many productions over the past few years (Evelyn Aldecoa’s, Ana Borja’s, Mayah Dulnuan’s, Laurie Raymundo’s, Ronnie Mirabuena’s, Claudio Ramos’s, Naddie Orillana’s, to name a few) that kind of contributed to the whole development, but I guess I recognized it for sure when I saw the quirky Kikay Kalaykay, a locally crafted Cebuano musical about—of all things—solid waste management, in Saint Paul University’s Fleur de Lis Hall last year. A YATTA production directed by Dessa Quesada-Palm, from original material written by Joji Benitez and the cast, the musical somehow provided those who witnessed it an incentive to see that we are also capable of making our own theater, from scratch, and make something that truly hums and enchants.

And somehow, theater has become something ubiquitous, but also deeply enmeshed that we almost taken it for granted now—and this is an observation of something good—because it is just there. We’ve already had, in the past two years alone, a wealth of national productions coming to our own town—and beguiling us with possibilities beyond the usual: Repertory Philippines staging an adaptation of Mitch Albom’s Tuesdays With Morrie, New Voice Company in Eve Ensler’s The Good Body, Tanghalang Pilipino in Chris Martinez’s Welcome to IntelStar and Jose Dennis Teodosio’s Gee-gee at Waterina, Actors’ Actors Inc. in A.R. Gurney’s Love Letters and Yasmina Reza’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Art, and, just this weekend, PETA with Christine Bellen’s acclaimed Batang Rizal. That’s five institutions—stalwarts in the Philippine drama scene—descending on the Claire Isabel McGill Luce Auditorium to give Dumagueteños a dose of some of the best of national theater, cast with some of the best names in local theater—Bart Guingona, Miguel Faustmann, Monique Wilson, Juno Henares, Pinky Amador, Audie Gemora, Jaime del Mundo, Lou Veloso, Mailes Kanapi, among others.

And in the coming days alone, we will have local productions of Chris Martinez’s Last Order sa Penguin (directed by Carl Vincent Lim), Bobby Villasis’ Demigod (directed by Jiomalee Ege), Nick Joaquin’s Tatarin (directed by Rusty Ometer), and Wilfrido Ma. Guerrero’s Three Rats and Aureus Solito’s Esprit de Corps (both directed by Claudio Ramos), all in assorted performing spaces around town.

I don’t know what happened, but I must say if this is a harbinger of things to come, then drama has found good legs in the city and it is here to stay until the last stagelight falls away.