A Life in the Theater

Representing the two major streams of contemporary Filipino drama, they broke ground and changed the scene for good—and for the better (Published in the Philippine Daily Inquirer, 1 April 2017. Also in http://lifestyle.inquirer.net/258785/peta-rep-turn-50-also-golden-moment-ph-theater/ ) Sometime in the first few months of 1967, Carmen “Baby” Barredo received a telephone call from her former classmate Cecile Guidote: Would Baby be willing to join in a new theater company that was being formed, envisioned to be the National Theater and which would be called the Philippine Educational Theater Association (Peta)? Baby politely declined, as she had previously committed to help Zeneida “Bibot” Amador establish what was intended to be the first professional theater company presenting a regular season of plays in the country. That company would be known as Repertory Philippines (Rep). As they say, the rest is history. Both Peta and Rep presented their inaugural productions th...

“OROSMAN at Zafira,” the 2008 reimagined dance theater production directed by Dexter Santos for Dulaang UP, based on the original text by Francisco Baltazar. Deviating from the standard komedya where the conflict is between theMoros and the Cristianos, this verse play is about warring kingdoms in the Middle East. A recent list by Entertainment Weekly of the best plays of the last 100 years prompted a timely question from the Script Analysis class I am conducting for the Tanghalang Pilipino Actors Company: Why is there no such list for Philippine theater? As a response, I hereby proffer a list of what I believe to be a representative sampling of 25 plays that can be considered as landmarks of Philippine theater. The list is arranged chronologically, and includes plays which were and are considered to have broken ground in local theater history, and/or plays which best represent particular theater movements or dramatic styles. I do not offer this as a definitive list, but...

After Guelan Luarca posted his list of theater productions that stuck with him, I was inspired to create my own list. As I went through my mind’s memory bank,  I realized I couldn’t limit my list to ten; as of now, it is made up of fifteen productions. In all of these, I watched as a member of the  audience. Excluded are productions where I was a member of the cast or the production staff, or later became involved in subsequent staging (that may be material for another list). As a foreword, I wish to narrate that my first theater production was a staging of the history of the Philippines for my second-year Social Studies class (under Ms. Rosaida Macuha) . I selected and adapted scenes from the Gregorio Zaide textbook and had my classmates perform these in the classroom as part of our requirements.  AS far as I can remember, our teacher and classmates liked our show.  Much later, the all-girls Canossa Academy put up a trilogy of plays that required...