Miracles August 23, 2006

I SAW an interesting play at Peta last Saturday. In case you still don't know, Philippine Educational Theater Association (Peta) no longer mounts plays in Rajah Sulaiman, Fort Santiago, it has its own home now on Sunnyside Drive, Quezon City, near St. Luke's Hospital. The play was "Walang Himala," written by Rene Villanueva, Liza Magtoto and Janneke Agustin. It premiered last Saturday to an audience that included Cory Aquino and some of the members of her former Cabinet. They were not there by accident. They were invited there because the play dealt in part with the dreams of Edsa People Power.

But only in part. The play deals with the more general state of this beautiful and wretched country and how at one point the dazzling event that was Edsa People Power offered the hope of salvation, freedom, a better life, however people then chose to think of it. It deals as much with failed dreams as realized ones, as much with escapes as discoveries. The title "Walang Himala," of course, refers to the concept of Edsa as a miracle, not just in the sense of something that took place against all expectation but in the sense of a liberation from all oppression. There are no instant cures, the title suggests. But oddly enough, though it says that, the play, well, miraculously leaves you feeling hopeful.

The play has no single story line; what it has is a single theme. It brings together several strands, or the stories of several people who dreamed the dream of Edsa. There's the "katutubo" [indigenous person] who learns to fight rather than depend quite literally on his stars to stop being an underling. There's the fellow from Mindoro Island who once gazed in awe at the wonder of Edsa but is eventually forced to leave for Italy to fend for his family. He becomes the victim of his own success, exchanging food for soul, breaking his family up in the course of trying to keep it together. There's the activist couple who fled to China before martial law and came back to the Philippines after Edsa People Power I in 1986, fired up by its possibilities. The wife eventually discovers that more deeply liberating than the liberation of society is the liberation of self: from being a comrade, a helping hand, a nurse to her husband, she realizes she is her own person, too. And so on.

And there are their children, a seemingly lost generation not knowing what happened in the past or caring to. They find themselves at Edsa II in 2001 having to go through the struggle -- or being doomed to repeat history? -- all over again.

I like several things about the play. First off, I like the theme. The questions -- "What happened to Edsa?" "How did we fall this low after soaring that high?" -- most of us have asked at one time or another. Our answers, if we have given them at all, we have framed largely in political terms. For understandable reasons, particularly given these days when we find ourselves thrown back to the days before Edsa I, fighting a dictatorship all over again. One wrought richly ironically -- the stuff of which drama is made, notably of the Greek-tragedy variety -- by a beneficiary of another Edsa. But it's also nice to see the answers take on the form of the unraveling of human lives, or how the dreams of Edsa have unfolded for people personally. The answers, you find out, are many and varied, sorrowful and joyous, despairing and triumphant.

I like the sensibility as well. It's fairly modern, and one the MTV generation in particular (to whom this play is best pitched) will be at home with. The storytelling isn't linear, it's jagged -- the kind of jaggedness you'll find for example in Paul Anderson's "Magnolia," Paul Haggis' "Crash" or any of Quentin Tarantino's movies, where characters flit in and out, connected plot-wise to each other often only tangentially but each one contributing to telling a story bigger than themselves. The storytelling may be a little alien, or alienating, to an older generation (I kept wondering how the one last Saturday found it) but shouldn't be so to today's youth.

I like the tone. It blends myth and history (it's right there at the start in the conversation between Bernardo Carpio and Jose Rizal, the mythical savior of the Tagalogs and the historical liberator of the Filipinos), humor and pathos, flute and stars and cars and MTV. The scenes bounce off and build on each other, as in the comic one where the cops and the thief's mother talk of jail and punishment and the lyrical one where the katutubos talk of not having any words for crime and prison.

And I like the acting. Joy Soler is back after a hiatus of ages, and she's a joy to behold.

Not everything succeeds in the play however. It's nice to have many strands, which make for richness of tapestry, but you've also got to be a very good weaver to weave those things together. The threads don't always seem to mesh here. I thought the first part was full of possibility that the second part would explore more fully and put closure to. I don'texpect neat closure -- art, like life, doesn't always lend itself to that. But some parts went in rather stereotypical directions, as in the "balikbayan" [visiting overseas-based Filipino] who ended up in a "balikbayan box," or coffin. And the sum of the parts seemed smaller rather than bigger than the whole. Enough to make you feel somewhat "bitin," or unfulfilled -- not unlike the feeling Edsa itself leaves you with.

But its merits far outweigh its flaws. Do watch it -- it runs I think for several weekends more. Whether young or old (concepts that as you grow older tend to be as elusive as Edsa itself), you will come away from it with much to ponder. You might even find your increasingly despairing soul replenished by hope -- not the easy kind that comes from piety or platitude but the kind that comes from having glimpsed a truth or two from the tangle of life.

Miracles have always been tricky business. You find them where you least expect them.

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