Madness over reason, magic over reality

MANILA, Philippines - In a stirring scene where award-winning actress Eula Valdes narrates via kilometric lines vignettes of her miserable marriage to closet homosexual Allan Gray, she sits alone on the stage. She is the fragile Blanche Dubois in Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, winner of the 1948 Pulitzer Prize.

The spotlight hogs Valdes. A tear crystallizes in one of her eyes.

Suddenly, her cheeks glisten against the singe of the single spotlight, made more visible by the pitch black background. Tears appear on her face as she delivers her climactic monologue.

Not for a second during the monologue that her voice cracks, showing her graceful but masterful control over her emotions that need to be unleashed at this strenuous scene.

The challenging monologue — at the closing scene of the first act of Tanghalang Pilipino’s Flores para Los Muertos, the Filipino translation by Orlando Nadres of Williams’ winning classic was a defining moment for Valdes. In 1955, the Cat on a Hot Tin Roof won Williams his second Pulitzer Prize.

Valdes was last seen on legitimate stage as a vampy character in the musical Zsa Zsa Zaturnnah, Ze Muzikal, where critics gave her the 2006 Aliw Awards for Best Stage Actress for her role in her very first musical.

Valdes, logged in the journals of Philippine entertainment industry as one of the original Bagets, has conquered the dramatic side of legitimate stage. Earlier, her dramatic roles in TV soaps had already earned her several acting awards.

In playing the role of the mentally unstable Blanche Dubois, Valdes joins the league of revered performers who had interpreted the coveted role in its various mutations in Broadway, in a 1951 movie directed by Elia Kazan, in television, and as an opera and ballet adapted by André Previn with a libretto by Philip Littell.

Locally, almost 30 years ago, PETA first mounted Flores para Los Muertos at the Rajah Sulaiman Theater in Fort Santiago with Lino Brocka directing Laurice Guillen as Blanche Dubois and Phillip Salvador as Stanley Kowalski.

Floy Quintos used the original translation by Nadres, which was also utilized in the Brocka production, for his Flores para Los Muertos, with minimal revisions and additions.

In his director’s notes, Quintos said that a Tony Mabesa production featured Rita Gomez and Vic Vargas and an Anton Juan production had Dina Bonnevie and Raymond Bagatsing.

Among foreign actresses and actors who had essayed the roles of Blanche Dubois and Stanley Kowalski were Jessica Tandy (who won the 1948 Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play for her portrayal) teamed up with “an overtly sexual but with boyish vulnerability” Marlon Brando, Vivien Leigh (who won a 1951 Academy Awards for the 1951 film version) partnered with Bonar Colleano, Rosemary Harris with James Farentino in 1973, and Jessica Lange co-starred with Alec Baldwin in 1992 where he earned a Tony Award nomination for Best Actor in a Play, among others.

In this 2009 edition by the venerable Tanghalang Pilipino, as Blanche Dubois slowly disintegrates while she sinks into the subterranean recesses of her neuroses, Valdes initially slithers, absolutely grabs the audience, and then powerfully drags them along as she tensely shuttles back and forth between reality and fantasy, until she finally crumbles and loses her sanity after Stanley Kowalsky played by Neil Ryan Sese, who reeks of an awesome 100-percent raw masculinity, rapes her.

Merryl Soriano (as Stella Kowalski) and Jonathan Tadioan (as Harold Mitchell), in their understated but no less formidable acting, manifested total mastery of their craft that could rival — in certain scenes — those of Valdes and Sese. The Valdes-Sese duo did not overwhelm nor overshadow the Soriano-Tadioan team. Scenes where Soriano and Tadioan tangle with Valdes and Sese linger in the mind.

Marjorie Lorico (as Eunice Hubbel), Paulo Cabañero (Steve Hubbel), Jerald Napoles (Pablo Gonzales), Tara Cabaero (as a woman character), William Manzano (Doctor), and Jo-Ann Requiestas (matron) competently accomplished what were expected of them. Rocky Salumbides (as young man) made his first appearance in legitimate stage.

So haunting and gripping were the major performers and the supporting cast in this riveting Quintos-directed version that this reviewer watched this two-hour-and-fifteen-minute stage play twice on Oct. 17.

Two fellow journalists from other media outfits were disappointed that the run of the English version of the play, also directed by the inimitable Quintos, was cut short by Typhoon Ondoy.

It would have been incredibly pleasurable to compare the performance of the cast in the Filipino version and the English version. It is quite rare to have a stage play mounted in two languages back-to-back.

The English version had Ana Abad Santos (as Blanche Dubois), the impeccably sexy Reuben Uy (Stanley Kowalski), Mailes Kanapi (Stella Kowalski), and Paolo O’hara (Harold Mitchell). The supporting cast appeared in both versions of the plays.

Quintos said his version of the Williams classic deals with the following themes: “filtered through a modern sensibility of what men and women are like,” obsession, dysfunction, co-dependency, longing, self-imagining, and “the plain and simple need to cling to love in whatever form or shape.”

“These are concepts we know, concepts we live with, concepts that connect us with the essential truth of Williams’ work,” said Quintos in his director’s notes. “Surely, a woman who chooses madness over reason, magic over reality, is in, some strange way, powerful.”

In what he described as the only form of “directorial conceit” in this production, Quintos gave Blanche Dubois “a happy ending… who after all these decades truly deserves one.” This particular scene has a therapeutic effect, after two hours of tension, violence, lies, deceit, and a tortured journey between imagined reality and “actual” reality.

Quintos was excellently supported on the artistic side by Tuxqs Rutaquio as production designer, Jay Aranda as lighting designer, Jethro Joaquin as sound designer, Hazel Gutierrez as production manager, Jo-Ann Requiestas as assistant production manager, Michelle Fuentes as stage manager, and Trineth Villasis as assistant stage manager.

Special shows are available upon reservation. For ticket inquiries, call Tanghalang Pilipino at 832-3661, Ticketworld at 891-9999, or the CCP Box Office at 832-3704.