Last February, enthusiastic ex-members of the Tanghalang Pilipino Actors Company banded together to stage a performance in what they have come to call a found space. They called the new troupe Kolaborador Co., or Kolab for short. They chose as performance space a huge lot that bore the remnants of a restaurant later repurposed as a warehouse for food supplies and a parking area for company vehicles, tucked along the dim fringes of Sikatuna Village in Barangay Malaya.
To reach it, theatergoers had to traverse a poorly lit street lined with cramped, low-income homes bearing the marks of time and neglect; sari-sari stores; a queue of tricycles; and shirtless men gathered over bottles of beer and tóngits. The journey to the theater became a passage through the textures of ordinary urban life.
This landscape became the context for “Lamay sa Malaya,” a series of performance vignettes that offered a haunting meditation on grief, loss, and their many incarnations in the human spirit. There was grief occasioned by death, as in Narcisa Rizal’s desperate search for the body of her brother José after the guns were fired in Bagumbayan, or in the lament of a brother whose most loved and respected sibling never returned from the war in the mountains. But there was also the grief of renunciation: a Shakespearean ingénue turning away from her dream of making it in Philippine theater, mourning not a death but the painful necessity of letting go when dreams become so elusive.
Threading these episodes together was a Greek chorus wearing masks of grotesquely contorted faces, their bodies writhing, perhaps turning private anguish into ritualized mourning, because grief is also a profoundly social act.
Those who witnessed the performances were quick to hail “Lamay sa Malaya” as one of the more remarkable offerings of the local fringe theater, which has increasingly come to represent an antithesis to today’s spectacle-driven productions. Arturo Hilado, my colleague at the Manila Society of Theater Reviewers and a tireless patron of fringe productions, observes that these companies possess a rare audacity: They pursue theatrical visions that lie well outside the conventions of what mainstream audiences have come to expect—and feel comfortable with.
Part of that audacity lies in the embrace of unusual spaces—found spaces, as they call them, which share the same logic of discovery as the “found stories” that independent filmmakers have come to embrace.
Such venues rarely possess the comforts of conventional theaters. There are no battens from which elaborate lighting can be suspended, no sophisticated sound systems, no computerized lighting consoles, and certainly no dedicated backstage or holding areas for actors. Every technical and spatial solution must instead be improvised, fashioned from the possibilities—and constraints—of the existing architecture. Yet these limitations become less obstacles than invitations: They compel the theater-maker to look again at what is already there and wonder what else it might become.
This was the challenge taken on by Porvenir, a young theater company led by Mark Mirando, a graduate of the BA Theatre Arts program at the University of the Philippines. Throughout our conversation, Mirando repeatedly spoke about his mentor, Tony Mabesa, who, in the years before his passing, had encouraged him to stage Tennessee Williams’ “Summer and Smoke.” The suggestion stayed with Mirando until he found a partner in Eljay Castro Deldoc. Together they fashioned a spare adaptation of Williams’ 1948 Southern Gothic drama, transplanting its emotional landscape to a rural Catholic Philippine town.
For “El Fuego del Alma,” Porvenir transformed Sine Pop—a renovated 1950s building along St. Mary’s Street in Cubao, a short walk from the Gateway complex in Quezon City—into a found-space theater. Surrounded by carinderias, motels, beer houses, and small family-run businesses, the building houses a café and event space on the ground floor and a small cinema upstairs. Mirando and set designer Ohm David conceived the performance around the building’s most striking architectural feature: a large rectangular glass window that fronts the 50-seat audience area.
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At the center of the play is Alma (Nour Hooshmand) the daughter of a devout Catholic minister, who has harbored a lifelong love for Juanito Yago (Sandino Martin), her neighbor and playmate since childhood. The rigid religious life imposed upon her is made more suffocating by the burden of caring for her mother (Madeleine Nicolas), whose mental condition confines Alma to the home. When Alma reminds Juanito of his promise to take her riding in his automobile, he acknowledges his lapse but quickly excuses himself, ensnared by the wily presence of another woman. Alma remains isolated, inhabiting a narrow social world that cannot reconcile her spiritual ideals with the love and desire for Juanito that she struggles to suppress.
Her hopes are shattered when she learns of Juanito’s plan to leave for the city with his fiancée, the sexually provocative Rosa (Opaline Santos), daughter of a saklaan operator. Rumors have already begun to circulate about the drunken revelries the couple have initiated in the Yago household while the elderly Yago is away on vacation.
Disturbed by these revelations and desperate over Juanito’s impending departure, Alma calls the father, Doctor Juan (Rolando Inocencio), who returns home and evicts Rosa from the ancestral house. He is gunned down by Rosa’s father (JP Lopez)
In the aftermath of his father’s death, Juanito turns his anger toward Alma, blaming her for the violent incident that took his father’s life. Alma grows more desolate, withdrawing further from the community, while Juanito attempts to reorder his own life and commits himself to marriage with Nelia (Ingrid Villamarin), a much younger woman.
Alma finally breaks free from a life lived in hesitation and makes one last plea to Juanito to take her with him. Juanito, crushed by the guilt of having to say no, pries away the arms that encircle him from behind, freeing himself—and Alma—from the long, painful history of a love that could never quite decide.
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In this adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ “Summer and Smoke,” Eljay Castro Deldoc turns smoke into fire, while Director Mirando transforms summer into an indeterminate season of love and yearning, waiting and pining.
I suspect Deldoc, even as he pares the playing time down to 1 hour and 20 minutes, expands the dramatic moments that amplify the text’s lyricism. In such an intimate space, the spoken lines do not simply reach the audience; they seem to settle around it. Consider Williams’ line in the original text: “Why did you come close enough—and no closer?” Deldoc expands it into: “Lumapit ka nang pagkalapit-lapit para lamang huminto at tumalikod papalayo.” We revel in the music as much as we writhe in pain over Alma’s bold declaration.
Mirando exploits the building’s architecture with remarkable ingenuity, turning the open bamboo grove framed by the glass panel into more than an extension of the stage. It becomes an active dramatic space, where characters enter and leave the frame, their movements unfolding in parallel with the action inside.
At certain moments, especially during evening performances, when bodies glide through the half-darkness and the bamboo stems glisten with the residue of late-afternoon rain, these figures resemble spectral presences hovering at the edges of the audience’s perception—neither fully present nor fully absent, perhaps occupying the same uncertain territory as Alma’s love and longing, now left to linger in the spaces of hesitation and regret.
Nour Hooshmand turns her frail, lithe body into a vessel of desire. In the final scene, she breaks free of Alma’s restraint, as she embodies the shamelessness of begging for someone’s love. Opposite her, Sandino Martin seems tethered to Hooshmand’s anguish. Their bodies pull toward and away from each other, until the scene becomes an alchemy of pain: a simple truth that love, however fiercely desired, cannot always be returned. CS
“El Fuego del Alma” returns to Sine Pop, 14 St. Mary’s Street, Cubao, Quezon City, on Aug. 21–23, with matinee performances at 4 p.m. and evening performances at 7 p.m. Tickets can be purchased at https://www.ticket2me.net/
