‘The Female Heart’: Reflections on loob/labas

Filipino-American playwright Linda-Faigao Hall’s The Female Heart is a familiar cautionary tale about a family of two siblings and their mother, who manage to escape their impoverished lives on Smokey Mountain only to lose themselves and their chance at true happiness to the empty promise of their own heedless ambitions.

UP Playwrights Theater's production is the directorial debut of UP professor, theater actor, and singer Banaue Miclat-Janssen. Her direction is as straightforward as the script, which is arguably Filipino in its aesthetic sensibility and temperament: at different moments, its earnest didacticism calls to mind the social realist productions of the 70s and 80s (something easily identified with such local theater companies as PETA); cinematic melodramas from the days of LVN and Sampaguita Pictures (an apparition of the departed and long-suffering brother returns to center stage toward the end, to deliver some vital epiphanous lines); and the filmic dramas and telenovelas of the present.

And yet this artistic mode is valid, not only because hereabouts it is empirically ubiquitous, but also because it does possess referential power, in the end: what’s real about it isn’t so much what it represents as the social efficaciousness it wields. The fact that Filipinos love melodrama—in their daytime and evening TV-viewing routines, in their movies, in their personal lives, in their politics—means that it isn’t so much an aesthetic mode as a perceptual one, and that for this reason it may well be worth visiting and revisiting, even on the typically ironic stage of contemporary Filipino theater (especially in a putatively self-reflexive place like the University of the Philippines). It’s important to remember that even contemporary anglophone fiction has of late been shamelessly utilizing this mode, whose artifice and contrivance do say something urgent and real about people who simply love and seem never to get enough of it.

The Female Heart does have a particularly culturally prescient moment, and it’s in regard to its dramatized understanding of the spiritual loob/labas binarism that intellectual schools like Sikolohiyang Filipino have long recognized to be an important ethical structure in our culture. It’s easy to see that this logic operates in the lives of the central characters, siblings Adelfa and Anghel, who prioritize the external (financial amelioration) to the neglect and eventual ruination of their inner lives. What’s important (and new) here is the fact that this conventional diasporic story takes this well-worn hierarchy past the domain of the morality tale that it is usually made to serve, and keenly and productively recognizes its genderedness. As Adelfa professes during the play’s denouement, it’s actually her selfless, nurturing, and loving brother Anghel who in truth possesses a female interiority or “heart.”

Pusong-babae is, as we all know, the operative idiom to describe the affect of the effeminate bakla in our culture, and Adelfa’s realization of its pertinence in regard to her brother’s life is the undoing of her own previous bigotry (earlier she chides him upon discovering that he has been working as a macho dancer and call boy, in order to put her through school), and an acceptance of her own emptiness and “inauthenticity” (living what is literally a make-believe life with her sexually dysfunctional and psychologically unstable American husband, for whom she agrees to become a mail-order bride and sex toy in order to save the life of her AIDS-afflicted brother, and fulfill her family’s dream of a better life).

This play therefore turns arguably “queer” in the end, expanding its relevance beyond the materialist commentary and critique—of inequality on the local, national, and global fronts—that the tradition of socially committed theater to which it belongs typically traffics in.

Moreover, a Filipino diasporic imagination is clearly in evidence in this text, for it casts a nostalgic glance back on the mother country not only in regard to its oft-repeated admonitory story of origins (here, of a wide-eyed Filipina leaving privation behind, to seek out greener pastures overseas, only to encounter tragedy at the hands of a cruel stranger), but also as a matter of recuperating and remembering cultural values, in particular the primacy of kalooban or “insideness” in the everyday living of a Filipino—to be more precise, a Filipino-American—life. That this kalooban is gendered is admittedly not often discussed in our national theater, and as this text demonstrates, there’s perhaps no clearer way of representing and examining it than in the case of characters in whom the loob and the labas—the inner spirit and the outer body—don’t necessarily neatly line up.

As often happens in most socially conscious or “liberationist” texts, however, the emancipation of one kind of marginal subject inadvertently calls for the abjection of another, and here the feminist viewer may rightfully complain about the “tangent narrative” that, in this play, simply doesn’t receive its fair share of dramatic treatment.

We may invoke the unsatisfying character of the mother Rosario, who seems entirely devoid of ethical subjectivity. So single-mindedly focused is she on the vision of a materially improved life that she practically immolates the lives of her own children by, among other things, simply not providing them any (commonsensical) guidance.  To make things worse, as awful things proceed to happen all around her, she doesn’t even seem to be all that moved either—a strange thing because both her children experience epiphanies that she doesn’t seem remotely capable of imagining (or even just perceiving). We need to remember that while it’s true that art is not life, as far as the former is concerned audiences do have the right to hanker after some dramatic inevitability (here, some “rondure” in the mother’s—or even the violently neurotic husband’s—unfortunately simplistic characterization).

In any case, other than a directorial showcase—on dramaturgical even-handedness and tonal restraint, which Miclat-Janssen exhibits in admirable measure, especially in view of the play’s ungainly moments and textual excesses—The Female Heart is also an actors’ play. The leads deliver sincerely and laudably enough, in this regard: the ingénue-looking Chase Salazar and the agile Al Gatmaitan (whose forte is musical theater, but who is apparently just as competent in straight drama), and of course the always dependable Peewee O’Hara, whose delivery of her lines is, as expected, spot-on (even if her motherly role is not as realized and “full-bodied” as she might have normally preferred).

Finally, this production is interesting because it brings to Filipino theater audiences a transnational vision, with which our own dramatic representations (and reflections) can fruitfully dialogue. UPT’s staging of The Female Heart (which was originally written for American viewers) allows us to see ourselves in/from the “in-between” imagination of a Filipino-American artist, whose wistful and dualistic nostalgia is comparatively instructive of our cultural difference, even as it coincides—and, of necessity, doesn’t or cannot ever coincide—with our own fraught and helplessly complex realities. — BM, GMA News

UPT’s The Female Heart runs from July 1 to 10 at the Wilfrido Ma. Guerrero Theater in UP Diliman. For tickets, visit Dulaang UP's Facebook page.