‘Anino sa Likod ng Buwan’: Tonal whiplash
In theater, tone is paramount. It sells the piece to the viewer and makes whatever the play is going for believable, regardless of genre. So what happens when a production bungles this most crucial of artistic elements?
You get something like “Anino sa Likod ng Buwan.” Thirty-two years ago, in 1993, Jun Robles Lana wrote “Anino’s” original iteration, a play that won first prize at the Bulwagang Gantimpala competition. In 2015, his screen adaptation of that play hit the cinemas. Now, Lana has written “Anino’s” third incarnation, adapted from his film script and brought to life at the Peta Theater Center by IdeaFirst Live (its maiden theatrical offering).
The story has remained unchanged, apparently. Emma and Nardo are introduced to the audience as a couple living a life of minimal means in 1990s Marag Valley in the northern reaches of Luzon. They are friends with Joel, though they shouldn’t be—he’s a soldier, part of the military forces patrolling and terrorizing the Philippine countryside in their mission to quash the communist insurgency.
Within an intermission-less 100 minutes, this friendship between the soldier and the couple is revealed to be a con played from both sides. Emma and Nardo are no ordinary couple; they are actually (semi-spoiler alert) part of the resistance. And while all the characters believe they are fighting for what’s best for the country, the larger, moral picture is never less than certain: One side is fighting on behalf of elite capture and the oligarchy; the other, for the displaced, the landless, the land itself.
Lana—inarguably more famous nowadays for his films—writes all that in language that betrays a fondness for poetry and an eye for gritty realism. His technique occasionally heightens the imaginative qualities of the play, but more often results in abrupt shifts in tone. Nevertheless, it’s also language that evinces the writer’s flair for the theatrical, as in some of his recent work: that bravura, 14-minute, one-take scene in the Vice Ganda vehicle “And the Breadwinner Is…”; the doppelgänger device in “About Us But Not About Us,” for example.
Love and desire
Moreover, it’s not difficult to appreciate the dramatic heights to which Lana’s writing for “Anino” aspires. As much as the play is about the politics of state-sponsored conflict in the countryside, it is also about the politics of love and desire, its three characters weaponizing their bodies and urges to wage a war much bigger than themselves.
When the characters talk about bloodshed in the community, then suddenly wax lyrical about love—for a partner, for the nation—it kind of makes weird, imperfect sense.
It’s an entirely different story when Lana’s script is situated within this production directed by Tuxqs Rutaquio. Unable to tame the playwright’s random shifts between metaphor and the literal, such moments simply register as whiplash by way of language. For lack of a subtler phrase, this “Anino” is a tonal mess.
Nowhere is this theatrical schizophrenia more conspicuous than in the fact that the three actors spearheading this production each appear to be inhabiting a different play on their own.
As Joel, Martin del Rosario (in his stage debut) has the complexion of one who has never spent enough hours outdoors and the build of an urban gym rat. When he speaks—whether he’s justifying the army’s actions or defending the government’s atrocities—he frequently does so in an oratorical manner that would make him a promising period-drama star (think Vicomte de Valmont in “Dangerous Liaisons”). He’s a could-be Shakespearean in a play that wants nothing to do with the classics.
As Emma, Elora Españo has such a pinched presence that her crucial big moments later in the play feel disjointed, like the work of another. Lately, Españo has been a darling of the screen, churning out excellent turns in at least three films that premiered locally last year (Lana’s “Your Mother’s Son,” Sigrid Andrea Bernardo’s “Pushcart Tales,” Dominic Bekaert’s “An Errand”). But in “Anino,” Españo is just… small, and also ungrounded. In fact, sometimes she almost floats into the background.
Firm grasp
Only Ross Pesigan, as Nardo, shows a firm grasp of the grammar of theatrical performance. Unsurprising, given Pesigan is a native of the stage (his excellent turns in Dulaang UP’s “Fake” and “Ang Nawalang Kapatid” paving the way, nine years later in 2023, for a Gawad Buhay-nominated performance in Barefoot Theatre Collaborative’s “Laro”).
Yet, his Nardo is not entirely convincing, either; there’s not enough gravity, cunning, or weariness in his portrayal of a secret agent of the revolution.
Let loose onstage by Rutaquio like clay figures in a creation myth, the three actors brave scene after scene—and mood after mood—the best they can. One moment they’re approximating Samuel Beckett’s existential poetry; 10 minutes later, they are starring in an afternoon soap; another 10 minutes and they’re doing realism by way of Lino Brocka.
No wonder the audience is equally unmoored. Consider the play’s second “act”: With Nardo momentarily gone, Joel and Emma reveal the sick game of lust and power they have been playing behind his back; they have rabid sex repeatedly, then make professions of love to each other, all while trying to get the other to submit.
On opening night, this whole portion of the play turned the theater into a comedy bar; people kept laughing because the action became unreadable, and therefore unbelievable and downright silly.
Misogyny
Sadly, the tonal contradictions are not the last of this production’s problems; they only make two other things more glaring. One is the perverse misogyny of the play. In “Anino,” the female body (Emma’s, to be exact) is both object of worship and weapon of war. Consequently, there is a lot of nudity here. What’s troubling is how all this is handled: in perhaps the most male gaze-y way possible, the naked body and the sexual act spectacularized and intended only to shock, their necessity to the story chucked to the sidelines. Has Rutaquio’s production heard of an intimacy coordinator?
Relatedly, this misogyny also shapes the play’s imagination of the revolutionary movement, and women’s roles in it. Here it all goes back, yet again, to the female body, and how Lana imagines its purpose—its uses, in the most utilitarian sense of the word—in realizing ideology. Without spoiling anything, I will say that somehow the play appears to be so enamored with the spectacle of melodrama that, in the end, it comes off as hollow histrionics — quite a disservice to the movement and all its women martyrs.
‘Anino sa Likod ng Buwan’ runs until March 23 at the Peta Theater Center.
