In the Land of Ancestors
An American’s Trip to the Philippines Delivers Insights on Theater’s Larger Purposes
By Amanda L. Andrei
Philippine children play with coconuts from a felled tree. Upper photo: Moon over Mount Matutum in Mindanao (all photos by Amanda L. Andrei)
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The possibility of seeing theater hummed in the background, but paperwork, cousin visits, and eating as much fresh papaya as possible were at the top of my mind.
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I came to the Philippines strictly on family business with no plans to see any theater. I came to the Philippines knowing that time moves differently here, that simultaneously it feels like you have been here forever but before you know it, you’re back at the airport praying you didn’t exceed the weight limits on all the pasalubong you’re bringing home. Island time is different. Traffic is different (any jam on the 405 is a stroll in Descanso gardens compared to Manila). The possibility of seeing theater hummed in the background, but paperwork, cousin visits, and eating as much fresh papaya as possible were at the top of my mind.
Yet with the way the Filipino diaspora is, with friends-of-friends eager to help you around and with a sensibility of being open to possibilities, I found myself seeing five performances across three events within my month-long trip. Between each show, I found myself deeply reflecting on what it means to not merely be a Filipina American playwright, but how a theater artist in the diaspora encounters one’s roots onstage. How do such encounters change your artistry and identity?
The first play I saw was the closing night of Walang Aray! written by Rody Vera and directed by Ian Segarra, an adaptation of Severino Reyes’ 1898 sarswela Walang Sugat. The latter translates as “No Wound” or “Unwounded,” while the former I would personally translate as “No ouch!” or given the play’s silly absurdist tone and word play, “Un-ouched!”
A Filipino twist on the Spanish genre zarzuela, sarswelas typically consists of a three-act play interspersed with music, dancing, and comedic scenes, often focusing on a love story and satirizing current events. In their prime of the early 20th century, these plays could also be highly subversive by critiquing Spanish government and friars through use of comedy and anti-hero characters, eventually also critiquing the transition from Spanish to American colonial rule during and after the Philippine American War (1899-1902).
Like Reyes’s original, Walang Aray! takes place during the 1896 Philippine Revolution against Spanish authorities and focuses on the love between a star-crossed couple, Tenyong and Julia. In Vera’s contemporary adaptation, there are jabs at former president Rodrigo Duterte, hilarious references to national hero Jose Rizal, the joy of queer culture (rife with bekimon, gay lingo in the Philippines), and the playful entangling and mangling of Filipino and English that can only come from an environment with over one hundred distinct languages.
Now, I did not grow up hearing about Severino Reyes, a seminal figure in both Philippine theater and literature. (It’s worth noting that I do know Rody Vera – through a virtual playwriting/Tagalog class with San Francisco-based Filipino American theater Bindlestiff – and in attending the show, I was able to meet him in-person for the first time.) I had learned about the Philippine Revolution not through schools in America, but rather through two channels: my mother, a Filipina journalist who spend the last decades of her career as a foreign correspondent in the States, and a semester-long, self-constructed undergraduate study abroad program in the Philippines, where I took as many intro courses as I could, scooped up history and literature books, and visited museums and historical sites.
I find that few Filipino Americans have the opportunities or guidance to learn about Philippine history without leveraging a great deal of effort, usually once they get to college and can join a Fil-Am student group. Why does our history have to be a scavenger hunt, when it could be a banquet? And as a playwright in America, so often in my writing, I find myself in the position of explaining Philippine history before I can riff off it.
“I doubt I could make a joke about Jose Rizal or Duterte without setting up who they are,” I sighed to a poet friend over dinner. “Instead, I’m always in the position of explaining all these events. It’s so serious. You can’t laugh unless you know what’s going on.”
He looked up from one of the books we were trading and replied, “There is no identity without memory.”
Food court in South Cotabato, Mindanao
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Watching these shows, I gained insight into intimate relationships among contemporary Filipinos that I don’t often see on American stages.
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Walang Aray! gave me a wondrous opportunity through humor and song to revel in the history I knew while also learning new aspects of one of my heritages. Even if I didn’t catch all the cultural references and my Tagalog comprehension was stretched to the max, I found relief through laughter in the references I did recognize. Witnessing Filipino politics and history in comedic, romantic, irreverent ways, all while deeply touching shared values, means you don’t have to explain yourself. It means you can feel more at home.
But it’s also worth noting that home, place, and country should not necessarily be conflated. There can be a danger in romanticizing a parent’s country as home, or assuming that life would be easier in that country compared to America. I am always reminded of the complexities of homelands when I look at that country’s politics and current events.
The Philippines is currently one year into the presidency of Ferdinand Jr. “Bongbong” Marcos, son of Imelda and the late Ferdinand Marcos, former dictators of the Philippines. Prior to this administration, the office was held by populist leader Rodrigo Duterte, the first president to come from Mindanao, the largest island in the southern region and a place where inhabitants often feel overlooked by “imperial Manila” and other parts of the nation.
Several weeks after Walang Aray! and after visiting more family in Luzon, I stopped in Manila and caught a showing of The Reconciliation Dinner by Floy Quintos, before flying off to General Santos, the southernmost city in Mindanao. Witnessing this show gave me even more to discuss with my cousins, all of whom I had only known virtually and never met in person before (another hallmark of my generation’s diasporic experience). A full review of the show is here.
The last set of shows I saw was part of Virgin Lab Fest, the Philippines’ premier festival of new plays. VLF includes featured works (new one act plays programmed into sets, for an evening of three plays), staged readings, and a playwright fair with panel discussions of emerging and established playwrights to discuss their theatrical and writing journeys. In its 18th year, the festival had as its theme “Hitik”, which can translate to “abundant” or “bountiful,” with somewhat of a sexual connotation: something ripe, luscious, luxuriant, the way a full mango on a tree is attractive through its round shape and heady fragrance.
I caught the technical rehearsals for Set A: Adulting 101, with three one-acts: 10 to Midnight by Juliene Mendoza, directed by Sarah Facuri; O by Raymund Barcelon, directed by Missy Maramara; and Regine: The Fairy Gaymotherby Chuck D. Smith, directed by Mark Daniel Dalacat. The first show concerned a book-smart yet unemployed alcoholic attempting to convince his brother to let him sleep in his home. The second show involved a straight couple negotiating the fact that they were engaged and sexually active—and yet the man had never given his partner an orgasm. The final show highlighted a gay son’s decision-making process of when, how, and if he wanted to come out to his family, particularly his overbearing yet loving mother—all with the provocative help of his fairy gaymother, “Asia’s Songbird,” superstar and gay icon Regine Velasquez.
Watching these shows, I gained insight into intimate relationships among contemporary Filipinos that I don’t often see on American stages. In particular, I noticed these plays offered more nuanced looks at Filipino masculinity: the vulnerability of addiction, the softness between brothers, the vestiges of machismo, the goofiness and peril of lovers, the fantasy of queer alter egos, the secrets between parents, the freedom to choose how to come out, whether in quietude or confetti.
Playground in South Cotabato, Mindanao
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For me, seeing theater in the Philippines is an entirely different experience from encountering any other media or cultural artifact from my mother’s homeland.
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So often in the States, Filipino American masculinity is filtered through Americanness, whether White men are the standard of desire or Filipino men are in relation to other minoritized racial groups. And in conversations with male actor friends, I am disheartened to hear that they have been passed up for roles for being too dark, too short, too flat-nosed—both not White enough or (East) Asian enough—and that this body dysmorphia weighs them with additional baggage in a field already saturated with anxiety. Watching these plays, for a moment, de-centered America and allowed me to enjoy Filipino stories without these overt entanglements. Furthermore, after the shows, I could imagine stages where Filipino American actors—who look like these Filipino actors—could enact their own heartaches and triumphs without the anxieties of Whiteness or Americanness.
And I reiterate that it is crucial not to romanticize the Filipino or one’s heritage country, but rather for a moment to physically feel and witness the overlap between home and diasporic countries and feel the possibility of freedom. It’s through the stage that such a convergence of potential, such a sensation of lightness, can be felt.
For me, seeing theater in the Philippines is an entirely different experience from encountering any other media or cultural artifact from my mother’s homeland. Being with other Filipinos, reacting in real time to live people a mere distance away, electrifies my role as spectator and my relationship with the actor and audience, compels me to attention even more than I would to a Filipino film or a song. I notice when the audience laughs and I don’t, usually due to language barriers on my part from missing a snappy joke or quick dialogue. Simultaneously, I notice when the language doesn’t matter because the emotion has hit our hearts: we sigh together in empathy or hoot raucously at a character’s clownish antics. After all, being a member of the diaspora back in the homeland feels alienating in its own way, like being an actor on an unfamiliar stage with spectators who seem to already know the script and story being played out. Only through island time and space can you eventually relax into this stage, make it your own, even if the tension between you and the others around never quite eases up the way it does for those born there.
One of the biggest obstacles for Filipino Americans can be language barriers – shame around not knowing Tagalog/Filipino, or shame around not knowing all of a parent’s Philippine languages (for example, my mother has four). But in the theater, the barriers become a game, challenging my brain to relax and stop translating each individual word. Instead, I take in the flow of the utterance, which has all along merely been a vehicle for emotion and desire. And while cultures deal with emotion and desire differently, we still recognize its archetypes, especially in characters as easily recognizable as mothers, fathers, siblings, lovers. I become a better playwright because of this experience—I pay closer attention to yearnings, I appreciate the language I write in even more (while recognizing its arbitrary nature), and for brief moments, I forget the alienation of the diaspora and simply become part of this theater audience.
In packing my newly purchased books for the transpacific flight home, I kept one close in my backpack: Notes for the Filipino Playwright (2016) by Malou Jacob. Best known for her 1979 play Juan Tamban, about a graduate student social worker assigned the case of a runaway street child and exploration of impoverished life in the Philippines, Jacob offers the following advice to playwrights from the Philippines:
Feel the pulse of the people. This will help you in the molding of your characters, plot, and conflict.
But don’t leave the country. Perhaps for a few years, yes—to expand yourself. But beware, you might not be back or might be back too late. You might spend the best part of your years doing something that you don’t really want to do, something other than writing. That would be the greatest tragedy of all in the life of a playwright from the Third World.
Back in the States, I mull over this advice. After all, I am not a playwright from the Third World. But I am the daughter of a writer from the Third World (and an economist from the Second World). I often hear similar sentiments as Jacob’s from other American artists, to stay engaged with communities, to gain “real world” experience. But leaving the country (or not)? That’s new.
How often as an American am I challenged to leave or stay within the states as part of my role as an artist? Frankly, not often. More conversations revolve around whether to move to New York, whether to be bicoastal, whether LA’s theater scene is a pit stop on the way to television (ouch/aray!). And yet as an artist with many ancestral lands, how can I honor and spend time in each place, regaining collective memory so as to negotiate and eventually riff on my identities? Despite any language or cultural barriers, seeing theater in the Philippines has refreshed me. It has helped me feel that slow island time and steady pulse in ways that differ from my childhood and family experiences and mature my outlook as an artist.
And so I would tell multi-heritage American theater artists (which, when you think about it, is all theater artists): find your memories. Leave the country if you have to. Come back if you have to. The memories and stories might not be on the stages you expect. But if you look for them, they will find you.
