There’s a particular Filipino habit of dressing up sacrifice as virtue. For instance, we call our overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) “bagong bayani,” or modern-day heroes, and mean it sincerely, but the term also makes their leaving feel inevitable—noble, even—rather than the product of a system that has failed to give them any other option.
The latest production by Dulaang UP in its 48th theater season, “Ang Kaliitan ng Kasalukuyan,” explores this emotional landscape that OFWs and their families navigate as their lives are shaped by migration. The play written and directed by the Palanca-awarded Arlo Deguzman shows that with every departure, home slowly becomes unfamiliar and distant lands grow into hesitant spaces of routine.
It is also a production that unfolds through movement, lyrics, and fragments of reflection.
At the center is Bulan (played by Sandino Martin), a Filipino scriptwriter based in Dubai who wants above all to come home and write freely again. Through Bulan’s story, the play confronts the quiet paradox of migration: how the search for a better life can distance you from the very place that means comfort and the passion to do what your heart desires.
To leave, to return
“Pag-alis at pagbalik, pagbalik at pag-alis” (To leave, to return—only to leave once more). The line echoes through Bulan’s life, capturing the endless rhythm of departure and return that defines migrant life. It does more than describe a character’s journey; it reveals the cycle that countless OFWs endure: leaving home to build a future, returning briefly to touch base, and then leaving again.
Bulan leaves the country shortly after graduating college, his heart heavy, his luggage heavier with the weight of belongings and expectations. Like many Filipinos before him, he carries more than just clothes and documents as he boards the plane; he carries the promise of sacrifice for the family waiting at home.
Drawn by the hope of stability and the duty to provide, Bulan crosses oceans and borders and steps into a life far removed from the familiarity of home. What was meant to be a temporary absence stretches to 20 years, in which he endures the distance, the unfamiliar cultures, the ghost of being a “malayang manunulat” (an independent writer), and the loneliness that shadows migrant life, all while clinging to the belief that every day spent abroad is a step toward securing a better future for those he left behind.
Yearning
Martin’s performance is the play’s most valuable element. He plays Bulan not as a symbol of collective suffering, but as a specific, stubborn human being: a man who knows what he has given up and hasn’t quite made peace with. His grief is not theatrical but the kind that has learned to be quiet, the kind that sits with you across a long-distance call or in the space between finishing a work assignment and opening a blank document you don’t have the energy to fill out.
What Martin captures, and what Deguzman’s writing allows him, is the particular anguish of the creative who migrates. Bulan is not just an OFW; he is someone whose instrument is self-language, and the life he leads in Dubai requires him to use that instrument only in the service of others, for income, for survival. The self that writes freely—the one with opinions and convictions and a voice—is put in storage. And the play talks about what it takes to retrieve it.
What deepens this portrayal is how the production situates Bulan within a larger system. The presence of other narratives—a father worn down by thin remittances, a mother straining to make the sacrifice meaningful, a sister negotiating distance, a son burdened by silence—creates an emotional landscape that mirrors the collective experience of Filipino migrant families: a chorus of lives shaped by absence and endurance.
The ensemble, a mix of guest artists and Dulaang UP’s own, carries this collective weight with care. Tess Jamias, Fermin Villegas, Sheryll Ceasico, Marichu Belarmino, Jojo Cayabyab, Hazel Maranan, Domileo Espejo, and Mitzie Lao anchor the professional side. Student artists Kerr Allen, Angel Manansala, Raymond Aguilar, Julianne Quimio, Ralph Onrubia, Janae Delos Santos, and Cy Guerrero hold their own alongside them—a deliberate and meaningful integration.
Reckoning
The most charged scene arrives late in the play, in the conversation between Bulan and his sister. She doesn’t comfort him with false reassurances. She confronts him gently without blunting the sharp edges. “Don’t stop dreaming, working, demanding something for yourself. Always do what you got to do.” And then: “Go back to the self you had to forget.”
These lines land with a weight toward which the play has been quietly building. They name, precisely, what displacement costs—not just the distance from home, but also the erasure of the self that existed before the decision to leave.
The final instruction: “Magsulat tungkol sa sarili sa lente ng paninindigan.” Write about yourself through the lens of conviction. Not through the lens of apology or palatability, but of standing for something. For Bulan, this is the assignment he’s been avoiding. For anyone in the audience who has swallowed their own voice in the name of practicality, it cuts close.
Design, music, movement
The design work largely serves the production’s lyrical register. Third Salamat’s lighting and Jada Bartolome’s projection design create an atmosphere of liminality appropriate to the OFW’s condition—always caught between here and there. Siglo’s puppetry introduces a layer of visual metaphor that, at its best, is genuinely affecting: small figures standing in for the enormity of displacement.
Angel Dayao’s music direction threads through the piece with restraint, to let the text breathe. Kirby Dunnzell’s movement direction ensures that what can’t be said is legible in the body.
If there’s a tension worth naming, it’s that the play’s ambition—to hold multiple stories at once while staying tethered to Bulan as its emotional center—occasionally stretches thin. Some of the surrounding narratives feel more gestured at than fully inhabited. But this is less a failure of the material than a reminder of how much it is trying to hold.
Beyond its narrative, the play leans heavily toward symbolism to interrogate the roles of government, society, and the individuals in the migrant experience which also reflect what is currently happening in the Middle East.
The stage erupts in bursts of almost overwhelming noise as voices embodied by role players dressed in white before gradually dissolving into an uneasy calm. These players move like Bulan’s consciousness, giving shape to the questions he cannot silence: “Kasama nga ba talaga tayong mga OFW sa pag-unlad ng sariling bansa? Habang tayo ay naninilbihan sa ibang bansa? (Are we truly part of our nation’s progress? While we toil in the service of other lands?).”
In their presence, doubt becomes tangible, exposing the fragile recognition afforded to OFWs despite their sacrifice. The noise, once deafening, softens but never fully disappears—mirroring the persistent uncertainty.
One haunting line, “Ang mundo ay umaabante na, ngunit tayo ay naghihingalo pa rin dito,” along with the instrumental sound of a violin, lays bare a painful contradiction: While the world moves forward, those who sustain the nation from afar remain caught in a cycle of neglect, their worth constantly questioned even as they are called heroes.
In the form of luggage, objects move beyond their physicality to embody the weight of departure itself. Each piece Bulan carries is filled not only with belongings but also with the accumulation of sacrifice, expectation, and longing.
Onstage, these pieces of luggage become extensions of the process of the Philippine migrant system, mirroring the condition of workers abroad. As Bulan drags them across spaces and time, they mark the cycle he cannot quite escape: “pag-alis at pagbalik, pagbalik at pag-alis.” Leaving is never a singular act but a continuous process that weighs heavier with every return and departure.
Discomfort
What separates “Ang Kaliitan ng Kasalukuyan” from well-meaning but toothless OFW narratives that populate Philippine stages is that it refuses easy catharsis. It does not ask us to cry at the spectacle of sacrifice and go home feeling like we’ve honored something. It asks us to sit with the discomfort of a system that keeps producing sacrifices, and to consider what it would mean to refuse terms as they have been set.
Deguzman’s play trusts its audience with that discomfort. And in Martin’s Bulan, a man rediscovering the self he is forced to set aside, he presents a figure worth following back toward something that looks, cautiously, like wholeness.
To come home, the play shows, is not merely to arrive where your loved ones are, but to find your way back to the person you once were, or perhaps to the person you are still becoming. It leaves us with the unsettling yet comforting truth that home is not always a place or a person waiting at the door. Sometimes, home is the self we must learn, again and again, to return to. CS
Justine Francesca Jesalva and Bea Bianca Nicerio are senior journalism students at Bicol University in Legazpi City, Albay, and interns at CoverStory.
