Virgin (Labfest) no more - next year again

I had to skip a Sunday, post-movie family dinner and hail a cab in the rain, somewhere in the maze that is SM Mall of Asia to make it, with barely a second to spare, to the final set of Virgin Labfest 5, but, at the end of the two-week indie theater festival, I successfully watched all but one set—and I would have watched that one, too, if not for the fact that it was only being shown on weekdays. I’m proud of myself because I’d been promising myself I’d go for four years before actually doing it, and now that I’d finally created the time in my schedule to go, I can only hope that this wonderful showcase of Filipino talent keeps growing stronger and getting bigger every year.

This year’s festival is definitely a bigger event than the previous years’, with a book of plays from the previous festivals launched; a number of sets sold-out; and the introduction of Fragments, which features site-specific works that run less than 10 minutes.

All the performances were held in the Cultural Center of the Philippines’ Tanghalang Huseng Batute. The room is a little bigger than a standard university classroom, so you can just imagine how intimate the set-up was—and to what creative lengths production designers and stage managers went through! I’d say the directing of the mini-“action” scenes were brilliant too, as there were murder, mayhem, and a lot of crazies in between on the little stage and the front-row people were literally inches away. I say Filipino artists really do well when it comes to facing the challenge of little spaces and even littler budgets!

All those being said, here are my top favorites among the plays:

Ang Huling Lektyur ni Misis Reyes by Tim Dacanay, directed by Hazel Gutierrez, starring Marjorie Ann Lorico. In this play, Misis Reyes, a music teacher in a Catholic school run by nuns decides to teach sex education on the last day of school as she struggles to focus on the lesson despite heavy professional (the school head had vetoed her graduate school thesis on a teenage pregnancy prevention program) and personal problems (she had caught her young son viewing porn online and her teenage gay nephew is in the hospital with some kind of immune system illness) weighing down on her. This extremely hilarious monologue shows how—and why—the music teacher can go from Chopin to condom in a span of a classroom hour.

Isang Araw sa Karnabal by Nicholas Pichay, directed by Chris Millado. Toni (Skyzx Labastilla) and Zaldi (Paolo O’Hara) meet at a fair for the latter’s birthday. Both have dark desaparecido stories behind them, with Zaldi already finding his sister’s body and Toni still looking for her father. They’re also in a complicated relationship — they hadn’t seen each other for months, and Zaldi, who had pulled the disappearing act on Toni, doesn’t know that Toni’s pregnant. They face the horrors in their lives as they board a crazy, killer, horror roller coaster ride. It’s crazy piled upon crazy, and it leaves you not knowing if you should laugh or cry or lose your own mind and do both.

Asawa/Kabit, written and directed by George de Jesus III. Two women, played by Raquel Villavicencio and Sherry Lara, sharing one man meet. One is well-educated and classy, one is sexy and sassy and they end up exchanging words of resentment, regret, and all things in between as they discuss the complications of their relationship. The play is full of witty exchanges between wife and mistress and presented in rounds of imagined consequences. The situations and words are often hilarious, but in the end, nobody really wins the man, as the only thing that’s proven is how they differently they truly love.

Festival director, playwright Rody Vera, has already announced that Virgin Labfest 6 is already in the offing. As early as now, he says, they’re welcoming plays from amateur playwrights who want the chance to have their plays staged in the festival’s sixth year or at least “workshopped,” meaning the country’s best playwrights would be dissecting your play and helping you improve it for staging. Just email your plays to rodyvera@ gmail.com. Vera also said that they also hold open workshops for playwrights every month. Workshops would be held in Manila, of course, but you have got to commend this generous offer for the love of theater, as any renewed spark of interest in theater would benefit all theater artists in the country.

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