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On its final week: Dulaang UP's 'Ang Dalagita'y 'Sang Bagay na Di-buo'


Running on its final week at the Wilfrido Ma. Guerrero Theater of UP Diliman is Dulaang UP’s latest offering, "Ang Dalagita’y ‘sang Bagay Na Di-buo".

Directed by UP Theater Arts professor Jose Estrella from a translation by Rody Vera, of Annie Ryan’s stage adaptation of "A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing" — the soul-searing and multi-awarded debut novel of Irish writer Eimear McBride — "Ang Dalagita" is easily distinguished by the magisterial nature of its drama, which also happens to be its most formidable challenge: the two-hour-long solo and necessarily bravura and ovation-worthy performance of its female lead.

Skyzx Labastilla fiercely, urgently, and astonishingly essayed the role when I first saw the play two weeks ago, which a subsequent viewing revealed to be an exceptional enactment.

I first watched it alongside the delegates of the UP-sponsored and then-ongoing International Asian Theater conference, for whose sake the original lines of the extended monologue — selected judiciously and mostly lifted verbatim by Ryan from McBride’s associative and verbally fractured text — were being flashed on the topmost portion of the bare and unbearably dark proscenium stage.

This “translational” experience was apparently only a provisional and temporary arrangement, and all the other shows would no longer feature it (as my second viewing a week later would clarify, to my surprise).

In any case, I begin my review by remarking on the effect of this “primal” encounter with the text, whose story, while admittedly harrowing and affecting, must finally be distinguished not because of its plot — come to think of it, given the plenitude of miserablist and sordid narratives in our time, not entirely unique — but rather because of the singularity of its language.

The novel’s language is one that McBride arguably invented, fashioned out of the formal affordances that the modernist technique of stream-of-consciousness continues to offer to contemporary novelists on one hand, and out of the promptings of her subject matter itself on the other: the complete and utter ruination of a female life, whose story can only be told in a language that must itself be, to all intents and purposes, ruined.

For the sake perhaps of dramatic clarity — and to facilitate its theatrical delivery —Vera’s Filipino version seems to have “smoothened” and “fixed” what had originally and deliberately been made broken and “jagged.”

 

Photo by Jaypee Maristaza courtesy of Dulaang Unibersidad ng Pilipinas (DUP Official Page), Facebook
Photo by Jaypee Maristaza courtesy of Dulaang Unibersidad ng Pilipinas (DUP Official Page), Facebook

I need to stress the importance of the word “seems” in the foregoing sentence; it may have simply been the actor’s enunciation that rendered the play’s lines more linear than they may have actually been in the script (to facilitate their own internalization, or to establish audience rapport, or both).

Still and all, I’m left speculating just what may have been lost in the translation —especially as I read McBride’s extraordinary and original words being flashed above the actor’s head that first time.

In any case, because the lines as delivered became less verbally estranging and more theatrically madulas, as staged Jose’s production has chosen to “domesticate” the text and make it more culturally relatable, which is an ordinary enough translational decision hereabouts. One wonders how apt this choice finally and artfully is, given the original text’s own obdurate decision to defamiliarize or “foreignize” itself, within the context of its own language (which is English).

On the other hand, the novel’s text is one free-flowing monologue, and it meanders linguistically at the same time that it notionally shifts from one “speaker” to another. While modernist conventions of the past century have made it possible for readers of the novel to navigate these shifts — and to accept, soon enough, the dissolution of the usual markers of fictional dialogue in the text — the solo dramatization of McBride’s text elicits a complexity of affects in the audience, at the same time that it provides the actor a most potent and difficult dramatic vehicle. 

The overall impression one gets from this form of dramatization is one of isolation, for all these voices are being channeled through the agency of only one person(a), whose solitude comes in even starker relief precisely because she must compulsively “ventriloquize” and make present the veritable absence of the other characters in her life.

Clearly, Labastilla and all the other actors doing their own versions of the ill-fated dalagita are to be roundly commended, simply because their performances must see them bravely and believably mouthing the lines of 20 or so characters.

The astonishment of this text is that its dramatis personae are indeed all these different figures, and yet, throughout the play, the dramatic voice is undeniably single and singular.

In giving voice to all the speaking parts, the solo performer of this kind of play may be said to wear the masks of all the perspectives, emote all the psychological stances and movements, and perform all the stylistic and verbal shifts of the story she is enacting.

 

Photo courtesy of Adrian Begonia
Photo courtesy of Adrian Begonia

Translated by Ryan (and subsequently by Vera) from the fitful undecidability of the novel’s narrative language to the dramatic clarity of a solo performer on the stage, the dalagita is to be seen as the one soliloquizing all these lines, and they are mostly self-evident and “realistic,” which gives one the impression that she is “mimicking” (hence, mocking) the people around her.

We understand that this is a task that she can do with abandon and unqualified scorn, precisely because she is already emotionally and psychologically distant from them, to begin with.

However, her words become audibly her own, become lyrically disjointed and evocative — rather than narrative and representational — when she addresses herself to her infirm older brother, whose childhood cancer has recurred, and this time, terminally.

We understand that their life has been less than kind, dominated as it is by the imperious figure of their resentful, embittered, superficially religious, and entirely uncharitable mother, who has herself cruelly suffered at the hands of the men in her life: her intolerant and tyrannical father, and her husband, who abandoned her and their sick son and yet-unborn daughter.

Under the nose or perhaps precisely because of the willful actuations of her mother, the dalagita is, in turn, victimized by a succession of other men: from her older brother, whom she has been trained to unquestioningly favor and defer to (in imitation of their mother, who shamelessly dotes on him), to her pedophilic uncle, to all the neighborhood and school boys and men who take turns raping her and beating her up, often because she actually wants them to—pain being a way (as she puts it) “out of the pain.”

When the fateful end comes, we cannot say that we are caught completely unawares: at heart a grim and naturalistic tale, the horizon of the dalagita’s story has been nothing if not an incrementally determined one, its watery conclusion already fully foreseeable the first time we are presented the archetypal image of the lake behind their primordially unhappy home. 

We need to say that the programming of this play for this theater season has not exactly been random: it opened on the last week of UP Diliman’s Arts Month, whose theme this year has been “Kat(h)awan: Bodies, Society, and Culture,” and runs through the first half of National Women’s Month. In fact, among its campus sponsors and/or beneficiaries are the university’s Anti-Sexual Harassment and Gender and Women’s Studies offices.

Clearly, this powerful production will lend itself to any number of difficult but possibly generative classroom discussions about the problem of gender inequality. The patriarchal domination of women, that reduces them to sexual objects, and that women themselves internalize, is an issue that this play painfully brings up.

 

Photos courtesy of Adrian Begonia
Photos courtesy of Adrian Begonia

The “newness” it adds to the feminist debate is the realization that it is sometimes the women themselves who purposefully cause or at least reinforce and/or perpetuate the suffering of other women. Inconvenient as this idea is, this is perhaps ang dalagita’s most productive question, for it introduces complexity to what has otherwise been conventionally seen as a black-and-white issue.

The dalagita’s own agency as a sexual person is yet another question that this play can occasion, keen as it equally is on insisting upon the truth of the eroticism of the adolescent girl’s inner life, which has its own innate dignity, and must ultimately be respected. (Of course, the Roman Catholic references that abound in this play also constitute a generative point of interest, that immediately grounds the story in our own context on one hand, and veritably confounds it, on the other).

Finally, we need to say that Estrella’s directorial hand is as deft and masterful as ever, complemented as it is by a superb production design. There is restraint in the overall “theatricalization” of this text — entirely appropriate, since it is McBride’s startling words, and their canny performativities, that must matter, above all. 

While the dramatization of A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing congeals into a solo voice what in the novel had been a fluidity of darkly disjointed and fractured voices (or intimations of voices), this heightened sense of isolation does, because it is a well-shaped vision, fend off existential desolation, in the end.

Savaged by her own family as well as a panoply of inexorable social forces, the small and unfortunate life that this play evokes may indeed, tragically, not have been fully realized or “formed.”

But because art has been its radiant and privileged vessel, this selfsame life is, finally, in and of itself, whole. — LA, GMA News

'Ang Dalagita' runs until Sunday, March 11. See the schedule here.

Tags: theater
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