Theater review: Virgin Labfest 9: The silenced and the disappeared in 'Imbisibol'

The story of our overseas Filipino workers is our crisis as a nation.

It is easy to think that we have over-told this story, that we have had enough. And yet there are more stories to tell, if only because, like poverty, it is what informs our contemporary existence as nation. Look at the Filipinos leave! Wait for them to send money back home! Silence the stories of their lives lived elsewhere. Call them heroes.

“Imbisibol” refuses this silence, and lends the story of the OFW to some comedy. Of course half the time, and given the weight of sadness and distress that this story carries, the joke can only bring you to tears.

The disappeared Filipinos

The idea of the OFW as hero glosses over many things that is true about Pinoys who dare try their luck in foreign lands. There are of course the stories of success, the ones who are hired as professionals from Manila, and gain employment based on their area of expertise and years of experience.

But many stories are far from being about greener pastures and professional development. Too many stories are about sacrificing family and profession here, to become underemployed elsewhere, because the latter will mean better pay. Too many stories are about abuse – every kind imaginable – that is premised on the kind of status that the Pinoy worker holds elsewhere in the world. Becoming second- if not third-class citizens is default.

“Imbisibol” reminds us that it can also be, and is, about disappearance. That is, disappearing into the woodwork of one’s new nation, if only to keep one’s job, if not keep one’s illegal status under the radar.

The goal is to be invisible. The task is to keep moving. If not be as quiet as possible.

Manang Linda (Lui Manansala), who was married off to a Japanese national to ensure her legal status in Japan, runs a halfway house of sorts for OFWs she recruits from Manila. She spends for them – and earns from them the moment they find employment. The interest she imposes on debt is such that even old friend and illegal Pinoy Benjie (Lou Veloso) cannot ever completely pay her. The latter arrives by surprise, on an otherwise regular cold Japan day. He is passing through to pay Manang Linda, but also to pick up letters for him sent to this one legal address.

The latter is true as well for Manuel (Onyl Torres), a younger OFW who’s found a career as a hosto. Benjie talks only about how much he earns, critiquing the various jobs Manuel has had to take on, only to earn so much less. But Manuel takes takes pride in having worked as everything, from apple picker to factory worker, as he takes pride in having survived all these years in Japan as an illegal.

This halfway house ties together these three Pinoys, who continue to struggle individually, no matter their status in Japan. Manang Linda herself still stops in her tracks the moment she hears someone knocking at her door: it is because she’s gotten so used to being illegal, when every knock means fearing being deported. Benjie, Manuel and Manang Linda are set to have  dinner together, where the competition between the two men is all but fodder for comedy, and is nothing but friendly and competitive, Pinoy macho style.

But another, younger Pinoy, a new recruit, comes home and ruins the party. Rodel (Amando Quintana Jr.) is quiet and confused, and the evening news reveals what has warranted this kind of behavior. The banter within the house, the friendly exchange among the three Pinoys, changes completely. Rodel’s presence in that house endangers the lives of every other Pinoy there, and Benjie quickly leaves. Manuel reprimands the young man: why did you do that? You know we cannot fight back here. Manang Linda gives him money and tells him to go. Rodel leaves.

The quiet between Manuel and Manang Linda is deafening. It is the noise that survival and being disappeared brings. It is painful and horrific. It is also cold and unkind.

The absentee nation

The power of this narrative is that while it can only speak of nation in the story of the OFW, it also highlights how absent nation is.

That is, there is no sense that there is a Philippine Embassy to run to, or a Philippine institution that the embattled or illegal OFW could run to. There is no sense of coming home and being “cared for” by nation. There is no sense of a government that even matters to these four characters.

They talk about nation, yes, but only in relation to the families who are here, and the lack of opportunities for employment that have pushed them to stay elsewhere no matter how dangerous. And yet this also speaks of the heartlessness that being away demands, the need to let go of compassion and understanding for another, even when he might be Pinoy, too, who just didn’t know any better.

The need for self-preservation is what shines through in “Imbisibol,” and it is what makes this OFW story worth telling: there is heroism here, yes, but it is rendered secondary to the task of survival. We are being told: in order to be heroes at home, heartlessness might be the order of the day for struggling Pinoy workers anywhere in the world.

And for these Pinoys, whether invisible or with papers, there is no nation. No nation to come home to, because that would mean hunger and poverty. No nation to depend on for protection or support, because government offices are non-existent. No nation to fall back on for anything at all, because it is already calling these OFWs heroes – how can nation see them as anything else? How can nation admit to their illegal statuses, their being invisible? The heartlessness that their survival elsewhere demands?

The nation is not so much absent in this play, as it is the reason for its unraveling. As it does reveal that right here is the crisis of nation’s inability to provide employment for its own citizens. Right here is its inability at helping and protecting its workers wherever they are in the world.

Humor as no medicine

The fact that there is laughter to be had here, that there is humor in a play that would otherwise be about sadness and despair, and that it believably shifts drastically from banter to urgency, is the gift of skillful storytelling. That it ends the way it does, with the silence shared between two veteran invisible Pinoys, is its power.

Because these two, along with Benjie, were enough reason for laughter, the kind that is about a longing for home, as it is about taking pride in the ability at creating that home and family elsewhere. For most of the play it is about navigating a nation that’s not theirs, and finding that there are many things funny and absurd about their existence as illegals, if not as invisible.

Of course that had a lot to do with Veloso himself, who would take that house down with every punchline, as he is wont to do. Manansala is the perfect counterpoint to Veloso, as she balances the humor with a particularly real and scary Pinoy shrewdness, the kind that we know to be in the manangs of our lives, the ones who shift from doting to cunning. Their age as migrants, legal and otherwise, allow for stories to be told in retrospect, with a sense of having rationalized the way things have turned out, the manner in which they find themselves in that living room, having tea, laughing like old friends.

While he was only onstage in the latter half of the play, Quintana as Rodel is worth seeing in “Imbisibol” as he was able to successfully singlehandedly turn that narrative around, tone and mood and all, his voice and disposition already the embodiment of his undoing, and the play’s unraveling. You know the moment you see him on that stage that something unexpected is going to happen, and in the hands of a less skilled actor, that would fall flat on its face.

But nothing fell flat in “Imbisibol,” not even Manansala mistakenly pressing a button on the TV that made the evening newscast disappear. She, and the cast, carried that silence well, and when she recovered, it was as if nothing had gone wrong. That is the gift of a cast that works, but also of a story that was so tightly told, you would believe a faux pas to be nothing but part of the life we were becoming privy to on that stage. The characters were whole, and they were not just familiar, but easy to empathize with – even when they had to choose between compassion for the a young Pinoy in trouble, or their own survival.

My only beef is that it doesn’t mention the world “imbisibol” again, after Manuel mentions it in the beginning in relation to being an illegal migrant. It seemed that in the end, and faced with the problem of Rodel, it would’ve been crucial to remind him about this task of staying invisible, of not messing with the order of things, because that would mean messing with the rest of the Pinoys in that foreign land. It is important that Rodel be told about the task of disappearance as critical to surviving as an OFW, and how silence is the answer to discontent and injustice.

Because that would be telling us all, too, about this invisibility. The one that keeps our economy in this country afloat, that one which we all depend on. It is this invisibility that we live off, it is what makes sending our workers elsewhere, a contemporary crisis. One that is not solved by calling them heroes. — BM, GMA News

“Imbisibol” is written by Herlyn Gail Alegre and directed by Lawrence Fajardo. It is part of Set A of Virgin Labfest 9 being staged at the Tanghalang Huseng Batute at the Cultural Center of the Philippines. Set A will run again on July 6 at 3:00 p.m. and July 7 at 8:00 p.m.

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