Dulaang UP’s 'The Dressing Room: That Which Flows Away Ultimately Becomes Nostalgia' is a bittersweet ode to the power of art

The premiere theater company of the University of the Philippines, Dulaang UP, is currently restaging Shimizu Kunio’s play, from a translation by John Gillespie and Chiori Miyagawa.

Directed by Alex Cortez, "The Dressing Room: That Which Flows Away Ultimately Becomes Nostalgia" is a bittersweet ode to the resilience and luminous power of art—in particular, of theater—to arrest the implacable flow of time, and hold the fleeting moment close.

Wabi-sabi, the quintessential Japanese aesthetic (that embraces the “beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete”), meets the metaphysics of regret in this play’s mise en abyme.

Photo courtesy of Dulaang UP/Facebook

To be specific, the smaller story that it frames comes from Anton Chekhov’s "The Seagull," with its in-depth character studies of artistic compromise, dissatisfaction, foolish desire, and sacrifice, as fatefully embodied in the heartbreaking character of the dreamy-eyed theater actress, Nina.

This, of course, is a prized dramatic role that’s been coveted by so many aspiring performers — some of whom are bit players, if not frustrated understudies who never quite make it to center stage, but rather merely serve as prompters, murmuring anonymously from the sidelines.

These sullen souls are not, for this reason, entirely devoid of passion even if, perhaps, they indeed lack the requisite talent (and/or the “looks”) to achieve the greatness and success that, unfortunately, only a modicum of artists at any one time ultimately get to enjoy.

And so, there’s the rub: as against its humanistic claim, the practice of art in the real world is far from democratic, for it is entirely imbricated in the art industry whose forces mirror the social inequities that it often critiques and yet in fact enable its transactions — between producers on one hand, and consumers on the other. For every lucky and typically prepossessing actor who achieves fame, there are any number of homely, mediocre, and/or simply ill-fated apprentices and aspirants who fall by the wayside.

"In The Dressing Room" these legions of forgotten dreamers are literalized in the persons of three ghosts haunting the dressing room of an old theater, zanily playing and replaying their frustrations, recreating the dramatic tableaux that they know only too well. This time, rather than remain unsinging and unsung, they can dare to arrogate unto themselves the much-admired and career-defining roles that had eluded them in life, as they place themselves at the very center of their collective delusion’s dramatis personae.

In the process of assuming the roles they had long craved to incarnate, they remind themselves — and the audience — what the essence of this vocation arguably is: surely not fame nor the acquisition of material wealth, but rather the all-consuming yearning to transcend the present moment (and its strictures), in order to catch a glimpse of the eternal, in whose light everything is transfigured and renewed. As we have been told again and again (both by sacred scripture and the great works of art), this is a passion that requires nothing less than self-immolation.

Needless to say, while art — when it is fitting and well-realized — can and does approach this numinous objective, at the exact same instant it invariably also recognizes its own inability to fully embody it, in the same way that a metaphor’s transformation from vehicle to tenor is and can only be premised on and therefore haunted by their literal irreconcilability.

And yes, of all the arts, it’s in theater where people turn themselves into veritable figures of speech—its “impersonations” being nothing if not performative metaphors that enact one person’s truth in terms of another’s, and yet by this very same token establish their non-convergence—a difference that haunts the illusion of identity proffered by the mimetic act.

On the other hand, this play’s invoking of the ghostly makes us reconsider the hauntedness that inhabits all art, whose texts are infused with—are haunted by—the presences of texts that have come before, in an endless daisy chain of meanings and utterances. Just now I’m reminded of the dizzying concatenation of difficult and unanswered loves in Chekhov’s masterful play—where the erotic desires of the characters, while intertwined, are far from symmetrical or reciprocal. 

This is a hauntedness that "The Dressing Room" itself also reflexively emblematizes, boldly referencing Chekhov’s "The Seagull," which is itself constitutively possessed by another spooky and ghosted text, William Shakespeare’s superlative Hamlet.

Hence, the spectral “reality” being referenced here is not as hokey or as improbable as it may initially appear, for it is really nothing if not the “afterlife” of all works of art—the preexisting tradition into which they are born, that at once assimilates and preserves them, and that they actually “proliferate” and perpetuate, in turn.

Art’s eternity is nothing if not the truth of its self-promotion, which assures its continuance, precisely because its texts are helplessly interimplicating intertexts, iterative reincoporations of past presences that themselves will be cited and reincorporated into other haunted performances and texts, other spectralities.

While they may indeed be individually doomed—as egos—artists are enjoined by this play to find comfort in the suggestion that collectively they indeed may well be immortal (its final tableau, populated by nondescript and nameless “actresses” all reciting the same line—that they are the seagull—makes this blindingly clear).

What this renders plausible is the idea of “cyclicality”—the alternating fortunes and misfortunes that works of art (as well as the individual or collective lives that engender them) may and do undergo—as seen from the perspective of the impersonal eternity of influences, significations, and “energies” into which all artful creations must flow. 

The haiku-like epigrams that are projected in various parts of the play are serene invocations of this peaceable eternity, whose imperatives lie beyond the polarities of terror and desire, which are the afflictions of even the most impassioned artists, who still generally don’t see that their ultimate redemption lies not in the relentless championing of their individuality, but rather in its obsolescence and demise.

This is a message that comes vividly in the alternating bathos and pathos of the three frustrated ghosts, whose entire “existence” in this play is nothing if not the dramatization of a cautionary tale—a humorous (because self-aware) essay on non-detachment and regret.

Cortez does an entirely commendable job situating the vision of this adaptation comfortably in the “translational modernism”—arguably our contemporary art world’s great tradition—that most suitably frames it, rendering it eminently intelligible, memorable, and affecting.

This form of postcolonial and transformative modernism is what mostly accounts for the aesthetics of Dulaang UP, after all, its repertoire across the decades being primarily composed of adaptations and “devisings” of theater pieces from around the world, alongside the stagings (always excellent) of both contemporary and classical original Filipino plays. In both cases this company’s theatrical gestures have typically aspired after unproblematic cosmopolitanism, even as they can only end up fraught and syncretic (and undeniably local) in their textures, movements, and inflections (and yes, “accents”).

How entirely delightful that, this time, the four women leads—the inimitable mother and daughter tandem of Frances Makil Ignacio and Paulina Maxine Ignacio, Ces Quesada, and Missy Maramara—are able to turn in remarkable and distinct performances, powerfully incarnating the Chekhovian polarities of success and failure, compromise and passion, the temporal and the eternal, and yet recasting them in the diaphanous light of Eastern mystical “disinterest,” which indeed renders acceptable (if not comical) even the ordinary tragedies of unrequited lives. (I intend to catch the Filipino version, if only to relish the additional layer of “impersonation” that the all-male cast will bring to bear on this already headily imposturous play).

Of course, the amazing choreography by Dexter Santos, lighting by Meliton Roxas Jr., costumes by Faust Peneyra, and stage design by Ohm David, all deserve commendation as well, worlding this play in the ghostly and interstitial space between cultures, languages, realities, and times—a space that we may also call, among other names, nostalgia. — LA, GMA News

The play's Filipino version runs until Nov 18, while the English version runs until Nov 25.