Theater review: Virgin Labfest 9: The bravery of 'Kudeta! Kudeta!'

There are very few original Pinoy theater comedies that succeed by daring to go beyond the conventional and usual set-ups. Because we do fall back on what we know will elicit in our audiences the gut reaction to laugh. The stereotype has become the easy, most familiar fallback for comedies – in theater and movies both.

None of that is in “Kudeta! Kudeta!” And it is the better for it.

It might even be the best comedy I’ve seen on a theater stage in a while. That it in fact talks about the state of our national politics – if not our national psyche – is its achievement.  

Good, evil, everything in between

The premise is easy enough. At the turn of the millennium, on the corner of EDSA-Ortigas, beneath the hands of the strangely proportioned Our Lady of EDSA, is a parallel universe. A taong grasa (Opaline Santos) and a blind street singer (Myke Solomon) co-exist on this plane, and are interrupted by a lost soul in the form of a comatose patient roused from sleep, in-between life and death as he is (Garry Lim).

The patient is a victim of what is sold as the peaceful revolution of 1986, and he knows not what has gone on since. The taong grasa gives him the rundown, of how bad it’s been, what we have since done on EDSA and beyond. The patient is confused: what is he doing here?

The taong grasa is a rogue devil, asking the comatose patient to strike a deal with the heavens: the patient must ask for a heaven-sent and -justified coup d’ etat, the kind that will mess with the dichotomy of good versus evil. Otherwise, this is nothing but a vicious cycle that the nation navigates, the failure to break it the reason for its undoing.

Lo and behold, the prayer brings to life the good angel in the blind street singer. He fights it out with the taong grasa for the patient’s decision: intervene in the way things are, or settle for what it gives him? Go back to the coma having achieved nothing, or assert the need for change and mess with the order of things? The crisis is one that’s about the individual versus society, if not about the individual choosing between the status quo and the disruption of it.

At which point it is revealed that the passing – and seemingly negligible – character of the yosi vendor (Jonathan Tadioan) is actually a devil as well, higher up in the hierarchy than the taong grasa. The latter is silenced: she is nothing but a puny rebel, wanting to mess with the balance that is necessarily precarious.

The patient calls for free will: the right to choose what he wants to do. Go back to the coma and forget all this completely? Choose to die now, and be judged and go to hell or heaven? He refuses the coup d’ etat altogether. After all, the rogue devil in the taong grasa had already been silenced by the superior devil. The status quo was meant to succeed.  

Or is it?

The comedy of our lives

“Kudeta! Kudeta!” seems like an easy enough text about the age-old philosophical question of good versus evil, the way things are versus change, status quo versus revolt. But what saves it from its own simple premise is its comedy, the kind that we rarely see. At some point the taong grasa tells the heaven’s angel: “Nag-a-allegory ka pa!”

Which is in fact at the heart of this play, which might also be to do scant justice to its comedy. Here, there is a very clear sense of the absurd, borne as well of banking on the intertext of pop culture. Here, there is a deliberateness to the everyday and familiar as central to the crisis that is both its doing and undoing. This is why things are funny: these four characters are over-the-top fictional and nothing more, at the same time that they are the voices in collective psyche as a nation that looks upon the world as black and white, evil and good, thanks to the Pinoy Church.

Say, the taong grasa as the rebel, the androgynous angel, who is not about good and evil, but is the very intelligent in-between. And no, she is no fence sitter: she has thought this out. The taong grasa had thought about the state of nation, and had thought of its hopelessness. The taong grasa wants change, and she looks crazy enough for it. That Santos is the one who plays this role is a gift in itself; hers is the performance that stays with you.

But the laughter happens with the coma patient, the one who’s alive but dead, and the crisis of choice that he is being given. He does not know what’s going on, and the innocent and out-of-place is always fodder for comedy. There is also reason for his lack of discontent, and yet there is too the fact of his refusal to decide on anything that will mess with the status quo.

The yosiboy as the representative of hell is of course layered with the fact of vice and viciousness, the kind that is about stealing from the blind street singer. Here he is also the voice of militarism, as he is the painfully true f*#!-you-all Pinoy chauvinist.

The counterpoint to him is the blind street singer, who not only suddenly reveals himself as a soldier of the heavens who sees everything, but who also speaks Tagalog with a Bisaya inflection. That in itself is fodder for comedy, yes? But also this is about Solomon outdoing everyone else where the comedy is concerned, where what one is left with is a sense of how underrated he is as theater actor, even when his performances bring the house down.

What one realizes is that save for the situational and character-based comedy, much of what makes “Kudeta! Kudeta!” funny is the daring of its staging. That is, a director who had the sense to see the play through to its absurd end: from the light that shines upon whoever is the new revelation complete with background music, to the slow motion action scene between good and evil. The decision to have the blind street singer go on stage before everything begins, the yosiboy actually selling cigarettes and candy in the theater.

The ability to engage the audience in the absurdity of a parallel universe, a parallel event, that happens vis a vis our real past – and in fact, our present – was the bravest task of this play. And the writer and director, that whole cast, just succeeds at giving us all that.

And one thing to think about.

National comatose

Being set at the turn of the millennium, that time which we all thought would be marked by some drastic and wonderful change, is a crucial part of this comedy, if only because it speaks of a juncture in our recent past that is everything and absurd: having the masses vote for Erap as president, and having him kicked out via EDSA Dos.

The ending of this play is its spirit. That the rogue devil becomes the every-Pinoy in the process is its magic. It is also what resonates.

As does the nation that “Kudeta! Kudeta!” speaks of. The nation here is moving swiftly, decisions need to be made. Nation, as it unfolds on that stage, is tight: there is barely any space to move, and each tangential thought is spoken of – and for – among the four characters. You hold your breath as the audience, because another shoe always drops.

The play takes you on a ride, via a conversation that we would rather not have, but which, cloaked in comedy, is palatable. Is not too painful.

The decision to have these everyday characters is crucial to this: the taong grasa as rogue devil, the blind street singer as the angel from heaven, the yosiboy as the devil’s top man – all these allow for the creation of comedy we rarely see on this side of the world. Because the characters are picked not because they are familiar, but because these are the people we silence, the ones we would rather imagine were without opinion or meaning, even as we co-exist with them every day.

But also there is this: where what echo in your head after watching “Kudeta! Kudeta!” are its words, and how they weigh heavily upon the state of things – upon the status quo – what we realize is how we have settled for this. And it seems that there is a collective inability to think bigger, think the way the rogue devil would, and intervene in the way things are, if not the way we’ve always done things.

In the end, that comatose patient? He is us. — BM, GMA News

“Kudeta! Kudeta!” was written by Jimmy Flores and directed by Ariel S.R. Yonzon. It is part of Set A of the Virgin Labfest 9 being staged at the Cultural Center of the Philippines’ Tanghalang Huseng Batute until July 7. “Kudeta! Kudeta!” will be staged again on July 6 at 3 p.m. and July 7 at 8 p.m.

Click here for the schedule of Virgin Labfest and here for the plays' synopses.