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PLAY REVIEW
Inquirer Mindanao : Bak2bak: ‘Babuyan Island’ and ‘Isa Pang Kawing’

reprinted from the March 12, 2006 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer, page A13
by Christine Godinez-Ortega

SEXUAL politics and schemes by two women on how to survive were some of the major themes in the Mindanao State University-Iligan Institute of Technology’s (MSU-IIT) resident theater company, Integrated Performing Arts Guild’s (Ipag) production of Bak2bak.

The two plays by two of MSU-IIT’s resident playwrights, Steven Patrick C. Fernandez and German V. Gervacio were a joint venture between Ipag and the MSU-IIT AB English Dramatics & Stagecraft class.

Carlos, convincingly played by Orwell Theodore Obach in Gervacio’s “Babuyan Island” drew attention to one movie writer’s struggle to write while the movie was on a location shoot in the Batanes Islands.

The set filled with all the clichés of the writer’s room: A typewriter beside a cassette player, one decrepit table, an old chair, a garbage can of crumpled pieces of paper spilling over the floor, an ice bucket crammed with canned beer, an opened suitcase, a folding bed and a dead cockroach beside it.

Innuendos

The play opens with the writer typing away when his mobile phone rings and is told his mother was being rushed to a hospital. The play turns exciting when the movie starlet, Toni (played by Phoebe Gayanelo alternating with Pricybelle Aguilar) steps into the writer’s shack to engage Carlos in a mind game replete with sexual innuendoes of borrowed dialog and titles from the movies that paralleled their own lives.

Conversations rise and fall as Toni opens her heart, then, suddenly, punctuates all this with kisses on the lips of the indifferent, I’ve-seen-everything-and-done-everything Carlos.

For all the sexual dialog and the flirtations of a shabbily dressed and nervous actress around a spread out folding bed, the expected bang finally happens when Toni, pregnant by her pervert lover of a movie director shoots the director.

The shooting is done offstage, however, and so much for Fernandez’s classicist background, the audience learns about the shooting when a bloodied Toni reappears on stage seeking comfort from Carlos.

Sexual politics

The next play, “Isa Pang Kawing,” a revision of Fernandez’s serious play, “Kawing” (Maranao-Maguindanao for marriage) explores sexual politics between scions of politically powerful families married for political expediency. Fernandez’s play like Gervacio’s relies on quick, well-paced dialog between two persons trapped in a loveless match.

The groom, a lawyer who has ambitions to run for town mayor in the next elections, learns his bride is three months pregnant by her previous boyfriend. If such happens in real life given the couple’s tribal affiliations, the bride has to be killed before family honor is restored.

But the play offers a twist. Definitely sympathetic to a woman’s plight, Fernandez’s woman character, Aya, in “Isa Pang Kawing’” proves to be more cunning and fearless than the groom. Aware of tribal laws herself, she blackmails her husband to force him to accept her pregnancy.

Whatever bravado the groom possesses at first in dropping his pants and his vain attempts to pin his bride on the bed in his floral HerBench briefs, played sensitively and effectively by Hobart Savior, an appreciative audience immediately grasps the tight situation.

The groom goes jelly before the audience when his photos with his gay lover are shown to him by his bride played by Lara Fatima Maglinao alternating with Xyza Pyr Consul.

In this play, the gun fails to go off on stage or off stage, all right, because Fernandez had successfully set its irony in high relief.

If Gervacio’s dialog in “Babuyan Island” is teasing and painful, Fernandez’s is frank and full of ironies. The exchanges between the two sets of characters peak in “Isa Pang Kawing” because its ending is more definite for an audience aware of the play’s cultural implications with what new and old stories they must have heard about “gi-buya” couples (couples in arranged marriages).

Interestingly, both plays are about women who solve their problems in the way they know how, like aiming for a man’s balls and pulling the trigger. The women in both plays triumph over their relationships with men who had the tendencies to blur myth and reality.

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BABUYAN ISLANDCarlosORWELL OBACH·ToniPHOEBE GAYANELO PRICYBELLE AGUILAR (alternating) ISA PANG KAWINGSorayaLARA FATIMA MAGLINAO·XYZA PYR CONSUL (alternating)·MikeHOBART SAVIOR Direction STEVEN PATRICK C. FERNANDEZ     Stage Management AMADO GUINTO     VICMAR PALOMA     JUDITH GALINATO     Production Management ROSELLER FIEL     Marketing ALELLI FAITH PUNO