Under the influence
July 7, 2003 | 12:00am
An editorial deadline at another publication kept me from joining the tribute to Cecile Guidote-Alvarez last Monday at St. Paul’s College in Quezon City, but let me make up for my absence with this brief recollection of my early brush with the theater, which Cecile helped to make possible.
We were high-school juniors in 1969 when we took up drama with a very young and bubbly Lorli Villanueva, who put us through the paces with such modern standards as Alberto Florentino’s The World Is an Apple and Paul Dumol’s Ang Paglilitis ni Mang Serapio. Something about playing baliw and pulubi roles must have unleashed the acting demon in us, because, the following summer, we all marched over to the Rajah Sulayman Theater in Fort Santiago, where Cecile’s Philippine Educational Theater Association was conducting a workshop.
It was to be one of the headiest, most marvelous summers of my life. I was 16, the "callow fellow" of song, ready to fall in love with the next pretty young thing (and there were quite a few), and aflame with the kind of fervor that only the sweetly maddening demands of the theatrical life could quench. All of us trainees were, of course, the lowest of the low, and we gladly suffered carrying the props, manning the lights, and selling the tickets, for the pleasure and the privilege of looking up the stage at all those wondrously transformed lords and ladies who only minutes earlier had been in flowered pants, puffing Pall Malls. (There was this stunning actress whom I walked in on, inadvertently I swear, while she was changing costumes, and I was about to croak an excuse but my throat went absolutely dry. In the darkness of the dungeon we were using for a theater, her shoulders shone with a ghostlike luminosity.) In the daytime, before the show, we learned the ropes and took classes in acting, directing, playwriting, and stage design, helped along by a visiting Czech playwright named Ladislaw Smocek, and PETA’s indefatigable moving spirit, Cecile Guidote (then just being squired by the young Sonny Alvarez).
We practiced what we preached, joining productions of Doña Clara (an adaptation of Friedrich Duerrenmatt’s The Visit) and Bertolt Brecht’s The Good Woman of Setzuan (where my only speaking line was "Would you like another cup of tea, Mrs. Yang?"); I played Tusenbach in Anton Chekhov’s The Three Sisters (now showing, coincidentally, in UP). Offstage we spoke breathlessly about art, love, girls, politics, the future, and then the same things all over again.
But little did I know where that summer’s immersion in theater would lead. During a visit to the PETA office, I picked up a copy of a teleplay used in Balintataw, the Channel 5 drama anthology on which many of Philippine cinema’s best directors cut their teeth, working with original scripts written by Filipinos. I took a hard look at a script – the first I’d ever seen – and convinced myself that the thing was actually simpler than I’d thought, and that I could write one myself. I thought of a plot, copied the form, broke up my plot into sequences, put in some dialogue – lots of dialogue – and pronounced my first teleplay ("Bethlehem," which would star a very young Roderick Paulate) finished. I turned it in, and was grandly surprised when I received word that my piece had been accepted – and that a professional fee of P250 would be coming my way. I was 16, it was 1970, and my life was going to take even more dramatic turns in the few years ahead – but thanks to PETA and the inspiration of such mentors as Cecile, I discovered the wonders of theater (in dungeons and above them), and would dream evermore of imparting that wonder to a crowd of faces in a darkened room.
Last year, I had the chance join Cecile and Sonny Alvarez at the World Summit in Johannesburg, and once again I was amazed to find that she had lost none of her single-minded energy. Live long and well, Cecile.
There’s no doubt that artists and drug use have had a long and explosive history together – from the British Romantics to the Beats to Joplin-Hendrix-Cobain to "Fidel" and the fellow sitting next to you at the National Artist Awards. (If you want to read the whole hallucinogenic history, check out The Road of Excess: A History of Writers on Drugs by Marcus Boon.) It’s largely because many of these artists were so good at what they did that a mystique grew up around the inevitable association between what they, uhm, inhaled and exhaled. Boon reminds us, for example, that "Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, and Billie Holiday were all on heroin, Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie smoked marijuana."
Thomas de Quincey, whose famous Confessions of an Opium Eater (1821) I stumbled on in college, described his "trip" thus:
"I was stared at, hooted at, grinned at, chattered at, by monkeys, by paroquets, by cockatoos. I ran into pagodas: and was fixed, for centuries, at the summit, or in secret rooms; I was the idol; I was the priest; I was worshipped; I was sacrificed. I fled from the wrath of Brama through all the forests of Asia: Vishnu hated me: Seeva laid wait for me. I came suddenly upon Isis and Osiris: I had done a deed, they said, which the ibis and the crocodile trembled at. I was buried, for a thousand years, in stone coffins, with mummies and sphinxes, in narrow chambers at the heart of eternal pyramids. I was kissed, with cancerous kisses, by crocodiles; and laid, confounded with all unutterable slimy things, amongst reeds and Nilotic mud."
Writing in The New Yorker, John Lanchester tells us that when Sir Walter Scott saw the proofs of The Bride of Lammermoor, which he had written while taking laudanum, "he did not recognize a single character, incident or conversation found in the book."
I’m sure that others have had it far worse – or far better, depending on where you stand. I’m no big fan of Joey Lina and his blanket drug tests, which I suspect will descend into persecution on the one hand and profits on the other. But purely from a literary point of view, this what I wrote Fidel back:
"Thanks for your messages. Your lifestyle is your business, as well as your work methods. But let me just say that you would hardly be the first to have gone this route – Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas de Quincey did this centuries ago, as well as many others in the 1950s and 1960s, with varying degrees of success. (Many simply died without writing much of value.)
"It’s not something I would recommend or even believe in. I think people write best when they’re in full control of their senses... I believe in releasing and listening to the subconscious, but I doubt that very good writing actually takes place in that subconscious state... my mind doesn’t need to be chemically altered; it needs to be clear when I write.
"If you say it works for you, I won’t disagree; just take care it doesn’t destroy your body or your mind, which you need for more important things than writing (and yes, there are more important things than writing)."
What I didn’t get to say was that I hate it when drugs are used as a crutch, one way or the other. When the government and the police blame rampant drug use for nearly everything that’s gone wrong in this society, something sounds phony there, somewhere. When artists claim that their genius won’t work except under the influence, I cock an eyebrow.
The aforementioned Lanchester opined that "When you take a broad overview of what has been written about drugs, you can’t resist the conclusion that it doesn’t add up to much. Artificial Paradises and Bright Lights, Big City, Naked Lunch and The Basketball Diaries, The Doors of Perception and Trainspotting: It’s not a bad list – all these books are worth reading – but no one could pretend that drugs have given us anything resembling a canon of major writing. Not much of the news it has brought us is truly new."
Be so advised.
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