Intense Drama: Simply doing one’s job
THE two plays by Reuel Aguila—Alimuom and Walang Maliw—are separated by almost three decades of recent tumultuous history. Yet this temporal divide all the more make the twinbill production resonate into one another, arousing audiences to shudder and weep in succession. One can say pity and fear still work after all, albeit not to purge the emotions but to remind the audience how much the tradition of immunity has ripped the moral fabric of the Filipino.
The UP Department of Filipino and Philippine Literature’s roduced the twinbill, under the direction of Chris Millado. It is modestly staged but the performances are substantial. Veteran actors Sherry Lara and Teroy Guzman, and Julia Enriquez, Kathlyn Castillo and Jonathan Tadeoan acted out the scenes with just the right timbre of emotive exposition, letting the subtexts take the limelight.
Alimuom refers to vapors redolent with earthy odour, rising from the ground after a heavy summer rain. This is the apt term to describe the period right after EDSA 1. At that time, everyone was euphoric because of the newly won democratic space, splashing in the rain after a long dry spell. Yet behind the seemingly invigorating atmosphere, evils past lurked in places called safehouses, giving off the smell of death and decay. The leader of a band of military agents, a newly promoted Captain, nurtured under the Marcos regime, brags of his career as the scourge of captured activists.
The highlights of his soliloquy are the gruesome tortures taken straight out of a militarist’s book of cruelty. Just imagine one particular case: a rebel’s right eye gouged out and the still living organ forced into that person’s mouth for him to swallow. And the harrowing thing is it’s not at all fictive. Documents from Amnesty International, Task Force Detainees Philippines, former political detainees and other NGOs on human rights make the play an almost docu-drama in genre.
We may ask, what’s eating the military man to reminisce about the gore? It is surprising to know he was once an honorable man. He wants to believe he still is. To his mind, he is like every other professional in Philippine society. He is no different from the teacher, the accountant, or even the bishop. He is simply doing his job. He says it his duty to secure peace and order. And if the activists are putting the state in crisis, it his job to eliminate these irritants. It is his job to kill the enemy without mercy.
But this particular military officer is hounded by his conscience. He wants to have the amenities the other professionals enjoy; certainly marry and raise a family. Yet he knows he cannot completely delude himself as the faces of the women he raped appear in his mind everytime he would make love to his wife. In the play, he visualizes himself as able to cross the borderland between evil and normal life. But before he can do that, he had to contend with his immediate superior who, he rightfully intuits, is out to eliminate him.
We know that in real life, many former Marcos regime cronies and cohorts—the boys from the barracks included as represented by this Alimuom character—were able to cross the borderland just in the nick of time to reinvent themselves as the sponsor and supporter of the people power revolution. Many are still in high government positions. Alimuom points a finger at them. Do they ever think of atoning for their lapses in judgement (they believe they have not commited any crime)? We will never know because the feeling of guilt, if they ever had it, is a purely personal and subjective matter.
In contrast, Walang Maliw, with its elegiac tone, did not not horrify the audience, and at a romantic repartee, made everyone starrry-eyed with the former activists’s young love-at-first-sight story. The tender moment did not last long because the couple (who are faculty members of a university) again and again remember their desaparecido activist daughter. The wife is obssessed with memorializing the daughter while the father advises her to stop the relentless grief from overtaking their lives. She is surprised the husband has turned callous. On the contrary, he confessed he is very proud of her daughter, and in attempt to find her, knocked on the doors of government servant friends. He said that instead of getting assurance and support from them, the despicable former comrades offered him the position of undersecretary in state department. He told her he walked out in disgust. Now he is prouder of her daughter who has become what they have only dreamed of becoming. This somehow assuaged the wife, and in a touching dream scene with the daughter, heals herself and decides to resume her teaching duties in the university. She is able to cross the borderland of near insanity and into a renewed interest of sharing wisdom with the young.
Sherry Lara’s performance as the grief-stricken mother and Teroy Guzman’s as the cool and witty husband can be regarded as a love song,with the life of the desaparecido (ably played alternately by Julia Enriquez and Kathlyn Castillo) as the refrain. The audience was unabashely moved, and some members sniffled throughout the show. It is an indication of how much the real intrudes into the reality of the play.
As in Alimuom, the action of the play is inspired by real events and lived experiences, reimagined and reconfigured by Aguila to turn into drama of high order.
Then we start thinking, who the hell abducted the daughter? We can only suspect, but we can think of no other than than new an continuing generation the Captain who perpetrates those old terrifying deeds in Alimuom. Through these plays, we realize nothing much has changed since those august days in February 1986. We console ourselves with the
felicituous figures of the loving couple, but for sure somewhere in the metropolis and in the countryside as news headlines confirm, state sponsored agents of reaction are presently just doing their jobs.