"Pag may nagmamahalan, may handang mag-alay ng buhay."
Tanghalang Pilipino productions are for the serious theater goer. You know the type. The Serious Theater Goer goes to be enlightened, not merely entertained. Ushers barely need to remind them to put away their phones, they already have a mode entitled "Theater (DO NOT DISTURB)" enabled with one click. They thrive on unraveling layers of meaning. They scour the program and obsess over taking good documentation photos of the statement set: all entangled webs of wire and rope, projections on a screen, and an eerie soundscape that almost (but not quite) sounds familiar.
TP has never shied away from challenging material, and NEKROPOLIS was very much on brand for them.
Let me paint you a picture of what audiences found when we sat in our seats: actors came in one by one, lay down on the stage, and were covered up with newspapers. Immediately, every Filipino in the audience knows what to expect.
I think it was Nanding Josef, the Artistic Director of Tanghalang Pilipino himself, who said in the talk back after the show that NEKROPOLIS was very much still a work in progress, with last minute changes being made to script and story even as late as last week. And I thought this nailed my general impression on a very memorable, if very raw, production.
The cast and production team admitted it freely, saying that they were inspired by the book THE SOVEREIGN TRICKSTER, and that Director Charles Yee and playwright Guelan Varela-Luarca initially came up with activities and games, before crafting a collection of interconnected tales from that melting pot of ideas, a paean to our shared humanity, a plea against the repeat of a not-so-distant past.
To have so many creative minds at work inevitably means that something gets lost in the transmission, such as the goal to give an impression of "a thousand cuts" in the light (had it not been mentioned by production designer Tata Tuviera, we wouldn't even have known this was the intention).
The major pointer for improvement was definitely the directing of the actors and how they projected their lines to the audience. Having heard the senior TP actors in previous plays, I was bewildered to find myself straining every muscle to hear lines from these same fine thespians who have previously projected their voices so effectively, in even bigger venues. Only Marco Viaña was blessed to have blocking that enabled him to "shoot" his words at a conveniently located boom mike, although the way he murmured and raced through his lines was also an auditory challenge. The rest of the impassioned cast could barely be heard, which was such a waste!! As a play like this rises and falls on the power of its text.
And yet, with the 75-80% I understood (thank goodness for context clues), there is indeed power in this tale of a city of the dead, that so closely resembles our real one.
NEKROPOLIS is the sort of play it is best to get into without knowing anything about it, so I shan't say much about the plot except that it is most definitely for mature audiences, as there is much that triggers.
But that is really the goal of TP, I think. It is too easy to be numb, to become automata focused on surviving the daily heat and commute, to put food on the table. Watching a show like this is the artistic equivalent of being shaken from a stupor, ending with a definite call to action.
The goal is grand and noble, and NEKROPOLIS' creative team deserves our highest respect for that, as are all art endeavours that are THIS brave, THIS idealistic.
There is no such thing as a perfect prod, but Nanding Josef said it best, in Filipino: "We try to show uncomfortable truths about our society, however imperfectly. It is all in the attempt to contribute to Truth and Goodness, in our own small way."
NEKROPOLIS runs only this weekend at the Cultural Center of the Philippines ' Black Box Theater. I look forward to a more polished re-run in the future!
Many thanks to Theaterfansmanila.com and TP for the ticket!
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