TP’s ‘Kisapmata’ delivers chilling, powerful adaptation
Watching Tanghalang Pilipino’s (TP) “Kisapmata,” one easily forgets the film on which it is based. In a way, this is the ultimate compliment.
“Kisapmata” the film, directed and cowritten by Mike de Leon, is widely considered one of the greatest contemporary Filipino works of art. It is about a household under the suffocating spell of its patriarch—a horror film about the systematic erosion of a person’s ability to say no, to the point that constant obedience becomes their only idea of dealing with reality. At the time of its premiere at the 1981 Metro Manila Film Festival, the film became the perfect allegory for the preceding, diabolical decade of martial rule under Marcos Sr.
In “Kisapmata,” retired policeman Dadong dominates his wife Dely, daughter Mila, and son-in-law Noel with an iron fist (sometimes literally). His word is law; going against him is wishing for death.
De Leon depicts the terror permeating Dadong’s household in a straightforward manner, the man’s quiet evil—and his family’s inability to escape him—laid out in plain sight. The result is a kind of cinematic claustrophobia. The doom that befalls the characters feels obvious and inevitable, and one leaves the film shaken yet also seething with frustration at their choices.
“Kisapmata” the TP play retains the film’s story, but somehow takes it all a notch higher. To say it improves upon the film is downright inaccurate (not to mention heretical); instead, the play is its own creature.
Evil transcending time
As written and directed by Guelan Luarca, TP’s “Kisapmata” seems to reach for another kind of horror: something atavistic, an affliction embedded in the deepest recesses of the human psyche. The evil the play portrays is one that seemingly cannot be named—naming it might as well incur the most devastating fate. It is evil that, as in the film, exists in the present in broad daylight, but it also appears to transcend time: reaching heavily into the past and carrying with it the trauma of generations, while also portending an unspeakable future.
No wonder the characters often speak in whispers, as if scared they might be heard by the devil himself. Dely, in particular, has become a kind of Cassandra; she is the audience’s eyes and way into the world of the play, her murmured pronouncements—interjecting the action every so often—becoming omens of the characters’ unchangeable ends. “Whisper and cast your troubles to the grass, to the wind, to the night,” she advises Mila, and so the daughter does.
As simple as it seems, this acting motif of whispering is essential to the atmosphere Luarca has built for the play—one that thrives in abstraction, but is no less fatal. This “Kisapmata” means to throttle the viewer and take the breath out of them bit by bit. And it is unrelenting in this pursuit, the whispered moments becoming intermittent reminders that the characters already exist in a diseased household but have yet to face the worst. Nothing is more frightening than the unseen.
Combined, the design elements fulfill Luarca’s vision for the play: the bareness of Joey Mendoza’s set (mainly a raised platform surrounded by some talahib), like space for an ancient ritual; D Cortezano’s deployment of light not just to illuminate the action, but envelop the stage in shadows; Arvy Dimaculangan’s intelligent use of silence as soundscape; the way JM Cabling lets the actors navigate the spaces of the stage, stalking its “passages” and inhabiting its “corners,” such that moving in and around this imagined house becomes an evocation of the slowness of terror itself, a sort of prowling in the dark.
Story stripped bare
With the actors performing barefoot and in the same costume throughout, the production feels not just like a back-to-basics, but something akin to classical myth, a story stripped bare to expose the evil at its narrative core, poisoning its very bones.
In more than one occasion, in its scenes of violence, this “Kisapmata” unironically becomes “peak theater,” so to speak: as when one character “falls down” a flight of stairs, or when another gradually realizes he’s been deliberately locked inside the house.
Exhuming its characters’ fundamental fears alongside the patriarch’s deep-seated depravities, this “Kisapmata” also renders its political analogies crystal-clear. (In fact, a moment toward the end when overhead projections flash images of certain historical moments in Philippine history feel unnecessary.) In its portrayal of Dely, Mila, and Noel’s inabilities to escape Dadong, and especially in the women’s rationalizations of their choice to stay with him, the play becomes a piercing depiction of the Filipino people’s Stockholm syndrome with their strongmen.
Collab of a lifetime
How apt that the production should be running right now, when Duterte loyalists are making fools of themselves before the International Criminal Court and the rest of the world in the wake of the former president’s arrest and extradition.
And how lucky Manila audiences are not just to be living in the same timeline as Luarca, but also to be able to witness the TP Actors Company senior members in what feels like the collaboration of a lifetime.
Jonathan Tadioan (Dadong), Lhorvie Nuevo-Tadioan (Dely), Toni Go-Yadao (Mila), and Marco Viaña (Noel) have appeared together in TP productions for at least a decade now. The variety is staggering: to name a few, “Ang Pag-uusig” (Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible”), “Pangarap sa Isang Gabi ng Gitnang Tag-araw” (Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”), “Katsuri” (John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men”), and last year’s “Balete” (based partly on F. Sionil José’s novel “Tree”).
In “Kisapmata,” the four actors are each never better, but their work also collectively feels like a culmination of sorts. Each is giving a performance that evinces total mastery of craft, from physicality to emotion, from groundedness in the present to evocation of a character’s past. Yet, they also feel like a single organism, the years somehow having honed their discrete abilities to “feel” each other, such that now they breathe and move and live as one with ease.
In a year that has so far witnessed many new, big-name productions come up short, Luarca’s “Kisapmata” is a force to be reckoned with—truly best-of-the-decade material—and its four actors, epitomes of generous theatrical performances.
Tanghalang Pilipino’s “Kisapmata” runs until March 30 at Tanghalang Ignacio Gimenez, CCP Complex.
