Most of the trademarks of a Peta play can be gleaned in “Endo,” the company’s latest offering for the second quarter of the year. Snippets of dialogue on the burning issues of the day (fuel prices, flood control projects) slide in every now and then. The koro is in full throttle, signifying the bigger community or the social context. Almost predictably, the denouement forges the protagonist’s resolve, his body now framed within a tableau that signifies collective will. 

Jasmine Curtis-Smith and Royce Cabrera (alternating with Rissey Reyes Robinson and Esteban Mara) topbill this film-to-stage adaptation of a 2007 Cinemalaya favorite. In the presentation I viewed, Curtis-Smith plays Tanya, sassy and high-spirited, who abandons a nursing career for multiple side hustles, including a short stint at a BPO company. Cabrera plays Leo, Tanya’s lover, quite the opposite of her character — unskilled for the demands of today’s workforce, tentative, indecisive, forever saddled by family obligations. 

The main narrative arc of “Endo” is the love story of Tanya and Leo, packaged in the modus operandi of a romcom, and while this plot is the source of the show’s popular appeal, connecting the material to the audience, it is also the main drawback, the fulcrum that dislodges the levers of the material’s imagined potential. 

Economic insecurity

I was told by those who saw the film that director Melvin Lee and playwright Liza Magtoto took liberties with both plot and style, but they hewed close to the theme of economic insecurity, the situation of a huge labor force for whom employment (let alone health care and other forms of safety nets) is anything but guaranteed. For this workforce, their vision of the future is overshadowed by anxiety — where to apply next, how to put food on the table, how to sustain an ailing loved one. 

Precarity is how the feminist philosopher Judith Butler calls this condition of extreme vulnerability. She further asserts that it is politically induced because the networks that guarantee gainful employment and social protection favor the rich and exclude the poor and marginalized.

The theme of precarity inspired the evocative movement pieces assembled by Christine Crame, backdropped by D. Cortezano’s set, a panoply of blue-grey abaca ropes dangling from the battens, suggestive of tenuous lifelines. The stage lifts and then tilts to either side, suggesting the precariousness of lives afflicted by anxiety and insecurity.

Tanya and Leo shuffle gigs and part-time jobs, shuttling from one delivery destination to the next and from one workplace to another when employment is summarily ended. While Tanya dreams of overseas employment as a nurse in Switzerland, their relationship is tested when Leo refuses to take swift, decisive action to join her.

Crame’s choreography could be “Endo’s” most haunting element, as it evokes how bodies are treated as mere cogs and gears of the rickety machines of unjust employment mechanisms. The koro incessantly moves, dancing and prancing, flexing and flailing, arching and ascending the fragile hopes dangling from those hanging ropes, treading the lifelines of uncertain jobs as mall salespersons, BPO agents, massage therapists, or the odd jobs peddled on the internet. 

Gig economy 

Those who have seen the cinematic source cite the grit, the stark realism that grounded the storytelling, and the foregrounding of the issue of endo, a Pinoy portmanteau of “end of contract,” a practice of hiring workers for less than six months so management can evade the employee benefits that go with regularization. 

Peta’s adaptation starts with a sharp pivot — to privilege the dramatization of the gig economy over the parallel phenomenon of endo. Such representation features the short-term, flexible jobs of Tanya and Leo, mostly requiring low-level skills such as online selling, ride-hailing services, couriers, mostly driven by e-commerce and digital platforms. 

While both endo and gig economy fall under the rubric of precarity, the adaptation’s choice favoring the latter results in a defocused plot that fails to tighten and intensify at the right dramatic moments. I can only infer that the film version’s end-of-contract scheme, as it was applied in its storytelling, provided a temporal structure, organized around the start and end of the employment, and gave more salience to the unjust labor schemes over the romantic relationship.

In contrast, the gig economy moves the workforce to be more agile, to shift from one job to another, or to be racketeers, meaning juggling multiple jobs at one point in time. The spaces they occupy are mostly virtual spaces, carved from digital platforms. Such fluidity does not contribute much to achieving a tightly-plotted, well-paced narrative structure.

For narrative drive, the love story of Tanya and Leo is foregrounded, including the hackneyed entry of a third party, Candy (Iana Bernardez, alternating with Kate Alejandrino), to push the dramatic tension for an audience acclimated to romcom beat sheets. 

The framing of “Endo” as a romcom is a functional, deliberate, and perhaps economic choice to cater to a growing theater audience eager for meet-cute relationship comedies. The choice of Royce Cabrera as Leo — flaunting triceps, biceps, abs, what have you in his shirtless glory — gratifies a romcom audience but does not give flesh-and-blood dimensions to a character in the most desperate situation. 

Director Lee’s mounting of an initial pas de deux, Tanya and Leo’s first intimate encounter, is an inventive approach — delicate, its lyricism a contrast to percussive movements of the koro. However, its repetition of four times (three with a condom and the final instance without) is not only a narrative overkill but also an excessive pandering to genre expectations.

Leo’s last resolve may be a significant point in the character arc but it still does not serve to deepen the take on the structural inequities that are produced by gig economies worldwide. Our romcom hearts are full, but the love story does not reconcile with the precarious situation of our modern-day labor force. 

“Endo,” produced by Peta Plus and Ticket2Me, runs at the Peta Theater Center from April 17 to May 10. CS

Maria Jovita Zarate is a member of the newly formed Manila Society of Theater Reviewers.