Theater review: Virgin Labfest 9: A missing beat in 'Kapit'

There remains a daring and a bravery in cultural texts that reveal relationships that are painfully real.

In a festival that sells itself to be about the untried and untested and unstaged in local plays, what one rightfully expects is the display of relationships that are particularly difficult to watch, because we deny they exist.

In “Kapit,” the relationship is one that is between mother and son, where Ma (Sherry Lara) is on a roll, reprimanding her son (Chrome Cosio) about the kind of life he lives. He has a growing child out of wedlock, the expenses for whom fall on Ma. He is jobless, or has again resigned from work, and for the most part is a dependent. It is reason enough for this relationship’s crisis.

This is but the tip of the iceberg.

The bedroom as setting

You know there is something you’re not getting the moment you see the bedroom as setting. As one-act plays go, you know this will mostly be the backdrop against which the story will happen, and there is very little time to consider how this bedroom might change the course of this relationship – if not foretell its unraveling.

In the meantime, it is the room that these two characters navigate. The son is frustrated and defensive, and cannot understand why the mother is insisting on his taking responsibility for his life, at this point in time. She questions his decisions and asks about his child’s mother, about whether or not they have gotten back together, about why that relationship persists – and asks why the son lies at all to his mother.

They walk that room like they are mother and son. They are distant but trapped in the tiny space, they are spewing words that are about disengagement as these are about compassion and caring. This is a conversation that’s borne of the history they’ve had together.

It is this togetherness that’s layered with the strangest of demands from the mother, where she is one to talk about the son’s history of lying, as she is one to get suspicious of the son’s new job. Where she is one to have checked his Facebook account, and demands to know the truth about the photos that she sees. Where she vacillates between being an angry mother demanding that her son be more mature and responsible to being the jealous other in the relationship, highly emotional and unreasonable.

These small things should have made this relationship’s conclusion less surprising. But these small things seemed to get lost in the shouting at each other, in the emotions that were happening on that stage. These small things could’ve been the set-up that the unfolding needed, so that it would not fall into the trap of being falsely assessed as incest.

Because it isn’t.

A missing part, lost words

The task for the a play like “Kapit” that talks about a real but rarely discussed relationship between a young man and an older woman, a son and a Ma, is that of careful nuanced telling. It needs to be a narration that does not disenfranchise the audience by surprising it so, and messing with our sense of morality or lack thereof. At least for me, the goal should’ve been to tell this story and make it so real, we forget that it happens behind closed doors, we forget to judge it because we can empathize with these characters, if not we know this love to be true for us, too.

“Kapit” lacks what was crucial to its telling, given its subject matter: a slow(er) evolution of the conversation, and therefore of the relationship.

There is a shift that happens the moment Ma’s new grandchild and lost son are mentioned, and the only indications of that shift are the two characters sitting with their backs to each other on the bed and the lights dimming on that stage. But this shift should not have been so sudden, as it should have been about a slow telling, a slow reveal, given the words being exchanged between the two characters.

To some extent it seemed like parts of this conversation were missing, like there was too much left unsaid. The relationship’s undoing as such was not completely told, and the audience – as the open forum would reveal – would only get lost in that quick shift, that unexpected conclusion.

Unexpected, if only because it was a shift in love, too. Unexpected, even as that bedroom should’ve told us enough. It was upstaged by that conversation though, and it was that conversation that needed to be better.

Love and its undoing

Despite what seem to be missing parts, what “Kapit” treats its audience to is its notion of love, where it is also about compassion and caring, one that is as real as it might happen to the rest of us. The play ends with that, with the idea that we reprimand each other, that we get angry with an other, because we love them more than we should, and we care what might happen to them without us.

It ends with the task of letting go, where the unraveling of the relationship is about precisely the need to put things in order, the need to independently make decisions, to decide as individuals where a relationship might go. It is almost violent in its being emotional, and in that sense “Kapit” is still more than what we’ve seen on any original theater stage in a while.

What is missing in the script is made up for in the acting. Cosio as the son does the lost adult macho Pinoy quite succinctly, and the way he looks and speaks is already an embodiment of the social class difference that is within that bedroom. His voice could’ve been a little louder though, where the instances in which he turns defensive and quiet means losing exactly what he says.

But this is Lara’s stage, where she is what you expect a veteran actress to be: confident in her anger, sincere in her caring. Her words are strong, her voice even more so. When she finally reveals what she is having this conversation for, Lara was at her best, traversing that line between emotional and lost, to rational and decisive. The weight in her step, the stability in her voice, the certainty in her actions, all trapped in the undoing of her character.

Between son and Ma, Cosio and Lara, what is on that stage is a grand display of compassion between two people, no matter how the conversation began. In that sense the reminder of “Kapit” is that ultimately what matters is not how things end, but who we are at that moment of unraveling.

Because all endings are violent, as it is highly charged and emotional in this play, regardless of whether it is about the relationship, or about the individuals within it. “Kapit” reminds us that love happens in many ways, between different people. It tells us that there are relationships we’d rather not see or validate, but they could be as filled with caring and compassion as the ones we acknowledge.

If anything and at the very least, here is a play that forces us to reassess the relationships we would rather not talk about, if not the kind of love and compassion that we have in the relationships that we hold on to. — BM, GMA News

“Kapit” is written by George de Jesus and directed by Melvin Lee, as part of Set A of The Virgin Labfest 9. It will be staged in the second week of VLF, on July 6 at 3:00 p.m. and July 7 at 8:00 p.m., at the Cultural Center of the Philippines’ Tanghalang Huseng Batute.
 
Click here for the schedule of Virgin Labfest and here for the plays' synopses.