‘Saglit Lang’: A deep dive into mentors and mentorship
I walked into the fifth-floor space of Mirror Studio as the team of the independent theater company Infinite Cantina was setting up the venue for their play, “Saglit Lang,” opening this weekend for a brief two-weekend run. It’s a new play by BJ Crisostomo and directed by Anton Juan.
It’s a small, intimate production so much so that the playwright, actors, and even theater luminary Anton Juan were all helping arrange the chairs for the first technical rehearsal.
The stage is set as a traverse, with the audience on both sides, sandwiching the performance space. The ceiling is draped with white fabric that covers it entirely, flowing down to encase the space in white. At the center of the ceiling is an aerial installation, resembling the skeleton frame of an umbrella that the set crew was adorning with pink straw.
When Anton Juan sees me looking at it, he leans in and says, “They are setting up the veins.” Seated in the front row, I tell him it looks like a chamber of the heart. He smiles. “It could be,” he says, “but it’s really a womb. You’ll see later.”
It’s a technical rehearsal, so I’m informed that the projections won’t be seen and the lighting cues are being set during the run, but the actors will be performing the play straight through from beginning to end. “Saglit Lang” is a two-hander, one named Bata and the other named Maestro. Maestro is played by Ron Capinding, while Bata is played by alternates Rico del Rosario and the playwright himself, BJ Crisostomo. For this rehearsal, I’m watching Crisostomo. Del Rosario is seated in the audience, watching.
An homage to theater
They start the run-through. The Maestro steps out and says a line that seems familiar—maybe Shakespeare? And then, he quickly exits. The music crescendos, and Crisostomo enters through the curtains, crawling, making strange noises. It is a womb, and the play begins with a birthing.
It’s a dense piece set in a metaphysical plane. Bata is not a literal child but a newbie to theater, and as he cries, the Maestro criticizes his performance. They talk about theater—its purpose, the crafting and building of it—and the Maestro begins to teach the student about plays.
But the maestro is not so much lecturing as he is inviting, allowing the student to be overcome by the power of theater. He guides Bata into being taken over by the practice of it.
Maestro is less pedagogue and more facilitator. They go through seven different scenes—translations of different plays like “La vida es sueño” by Pedro Calderón de la Barca, “Condemned Squad” by Alfonso Sastre, Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” and “Waiting for Godot” by Samuel Beckett—each scene bonding the two together, with Bata growing as an actor and as a performer.
It’s no wonder Juan had invited people to watch the show on his social media, saying this piece is a tribute to theater practitioners and all the lovers of theater—a true love letter to the stage.
Maestro as mentor (and the music behind it all)
“You know, I begin with music… personal music that was given to me, say by Rolando Tinio, to use in ‘Death in the Form of a Rose.’ Another piece by Tariverdiev, who personally wrote that piece in the 1980s. Music that Tony Perez and I had used in ‘Bahay ng Mga Masasamang Lalaki’ when we were doing plays when we were 17,” he tells me when I ask him about his social media posts, adding that the music in the play is from his personal collection of musical pieces.
He uses music to sync the actor to “that sound-sense of what is not only the feeling, but also the trajectory of a scene and how it moves from a single line to the many lines.”
“Like in music, where it gathers and builds into an apogee, into an ecstasy,” he continues. “I use that in every scene because one can see in the construction of the play, he [Crisostomo] is actually also doing all of these scenes for him to say what he has gone through with his mentor.”
“Saglit Lang,” according to Crisostomo, was written in 2024 when his mentor, Ricky Abad, passed away. “I wrote the first draft in one night,” he shares. “One act play pa siya noon. And then through conversation and through collaboration with the team—Sir Anton and Ron—unti-unti na siya nadagdagan until naging full-length na siya.”
Being a teacher, I ask Crisostomo if the play is not just about Ricky Abad but also about himself. He answers, “Nag-e-echo na siya. What I learned from my mentor, and not only from him, from Sir Ron [Capinding], he was one of my directors in high school and in college, and with Rico, who directed me three years ago, and also me, what I try to teach to my students—it all compounds to what the idea of what a maestro is.”
Echoes and ripples
“We all have mentors,” Juan says. He shares his own inspiration, his mentor Professor Nieves B. Epistola, who “taught me everything in life.” He adds that she had taught him stylistics and semiotics—which he would later receive his PhD in—and continues, “That is why when I do this piece, I see that all of us are part of that growing, that transformation, and yet there are those that don’t remember their mentors.”
He stresses the importance of memory and remembrance. He says that there are artists who “get from their mentors and they say, ‘this is mine.’”
“They never give honor to their mentors. They don’t carry their mentors on their backs as though they don’t remember their history,” he laments. Then, like all good playwrights, he connects this thought to the larger world and society, and adds, “This is what is lacking in our country: We forget what history is. We tear down theaters. We claim the dead when they die, we claim the grief, and then after a while, we forget, or we use that death for us to say, ‘Look, we grieve.’”
For Juan, while the play is about a specific mentor—which he says is a good thing—he thinks this is really about all mentors. “I told BJ,” he says, “eventually, when you look at this, you will see many stars in one galaxy. You will see many mentors in one mentor.”
Like the echoes that Crisostomo had mentioned, they all compound into this one character—the Maestro—and come alive in this one play. Juan adds, “I was actually directing this as if I was the mentor embodied without me being seen. It becomes almost cubistic in that way. I am the surface of the mentor, and yet, the mentor is of itself.”
