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NICK
JOAQUIN’S May Day Eve was a piece that was
bursting out of its short-story closet. It was hissing
to be a play and to be a film. Melodramatic and
dramatic, tempestuous scenes read like blocked movements
of characters and personas performing to a live audience
rather than to a silent, introspective, quiet reader of
this celebrated fiction. With an opening sentence that
was all rococo and baroque, May Day Eve has the
feel of a Verdi opera with its fondness for star-crossed
destinies and Fate that tricks and traps. True enough,
gestures are large in this story, and where there is
sadness—and, oh, we have lots of them here—it is not
mere sadness but one that has the ancestral right to
melancholia.
If there
is a value to this work of Joaquin, it can be there in
the depiction of the belle époque as experienced by a
few. To this “few,” to this class, we would also
attribute later the structured inequality, you know,
that keeps the poor poorer and the rich richer.
THE great Naty Crame
Rogers, still vibrant at 85, who, in Tanghalang Ateneo’s
staging of Nick Joaquin’s May Day Eve, proves that the
impossible, like genius and consistency, remains the
prime gift of theater
On its
30th anniversary, Tanghalang Ateneo confronts the devils
of this piece by mounting Alberto S. Florentino’s stage
version of the story. Florentino was also a celebrated
playwright, having written The World is an Apple
early in his career. He also contributed significantly
as a scriptwriter for Balintataw and then for films.
Interestingly, when the late Joey Gosiengfiao directed
the film Babae: Ngayon at Kailanman, three
scripts from Balintataw were used. From a great writer,
Wilfrido Nolledo, came his Juego de Prenda. From
Florentino came an adaptation of Amador Daguio’s story.
Another adaptation of May Day Eve came by way of
Jose Lacaba’s Agueda.
Almost
inherent in Nick Joaquin’s May Day Eve—and for
that matter in his other works—is a sense of rhythm
blessed by counterpoints and crescendos, alliterations
and enumerations. I was looking for this immediately in
the staging, the building up of scenes: “they had
waltzed and polkaed and bragged and swaggered and
flirted all night and were in no mood to sleep yet—no,
caramba, not on this moist tropic eve! not on
this mystic May eve!—with the night still young and so
seductive that it was madness not to go out, not to go
forth—and serenade the neighbors! cried one; and swim in
the Pasig! cried another; and gather fireflies! cried a
third—whereupon there arose a great clamor for coats and
capes, for hats and canes.”
At the
opening scene in Tanghalang Ateneo’s staging, the rhythm
was lost, with the young actors paying more attention to
their being drunk. I kept looking for the “young bucks
newly arrived from
Europe” who were “simply bursting with wild spirits, merriment,
arrogance and audacity,” but I could not find them
there.
The
theater group describes the play as a “tragic tale of
love and love forgotten in the patriarchal 19th-century
Philippines.” Tanghalang Ateneo’s director, Dr. Ricardo
G. Abad, in the discussion that followed the play (each
performance was followed by an open forum), talked about
how he decided not to end the play in a sorrowful tone.
More than Agueda forgiving Badoy Montiya, the play
should have hope, Abad stated. I feel uncomfortable with
this decision. But then again, the gems of theater
pieces are only found when directors start digging up,
becoming brave miners in search of jewels especially if
the play is one site that has been mined over and over.
With
those discomforts verbalized, I say that Tanghalang
Ateneo’s May Day Eve proved to be a divine night.
With the young bucks away and with the hallway dimmer,
the night of divination came right through. The scene
was almost actor-proof; what was required was just a
young girl with a candle facing a mirror and looking
into the future. The maga, Anastacia, tells Agueda that
if things turn out well, she would see the man whose
woman she would be. The Devil would appear if things
were not right. The Devil who appears, of course, looks
like the man she has married. The middle part soared as
it incarnated Joaquin’s baroque spirit.
In the
story, the cyclical power of fate marks the direction of
events. In the staging, it was disarming to see Don
Badoy Montiya’s reminiscence made literal. He is seeing
what he is remembering. The pains then becomes real for
the man and his memories and the audience. In one scene,
the old man tries to reach out, not to touch but to
attempt to correct past mistakes. We knew that the young
girl sobbing would be the “whimpering withered
consumptive, lashing out with her cruel tongue.” But
right there in that moment, we were witnessing a lovely
girl sobbing and a man discovering his cruelty.
Tanghalang Ateneo for this presentation had young
student actors acting with professional theater
personalities. It is not fair to compare their skills
but it is always good to look at energies. Young
performers should take advantage of the passions of the
pros. In May Day Eve, at times such “pairing”
worked and sometimes it did not. It worked wonderfully
and magically in the scenes of Bodgie Pascua as Don
Badoy Montiya witnessing “how she had bitten his hand
and fled and how he had sung aloud in the dark room and
surprised his heart in the instant of falling in love.”
The poignancy recalls Thornton Wilder’s Our Town,
where the living look at the burial site while the dead
observe the living observing the graves.
There
was no epic tale of a town in May Day Eve of
Tanghalang Ateneo but just this old house and the
magnificent draperies of Gino Gonzales, who did the
production design. Marred by the mirror, the two layers
of drapes invited symbolizing and rightfully so.
Darkened, the drapes were almost the funereal drapes for
a bygone era; lit up, they evoked wall, ruins, sunsets
and moonlit nights on brown floors, even the passing of
time.
Two
actors were in this valediction. There was Bodgie Pascua,
as Don Badoy Montiya, who proved to us that there are no
impossible lines even if those lines are from a densely
written paragraph. When Pascua grimaced, he was the old
man who “looked out upon the medieval shadows of the
foul street...the bowed old man sobbing so bitterly at
the window; the tears streaming down his cheeks and the
wind in his hair and one hand pressed to his mouth.” The
other one was Naty Crame Rogers, still vibrant at 85, as
Anastacia, who proved to us that the impossible, like
genius and consistency, remains the prime gift of
theater. On that note, I shall write more about this
Grand Lady of Philippine Theater.
The
performances from May 7 to 10 were in English; from May
14 to 17, the performances will be in Pilipino, using
the translation of Jerry Respeto, at the Ateneo de
Manila University. |
