The play, written by Rody Vera, tells several tales about Muslim Mindanao all at once—including that of the original short story by National Artist Abdulmari Imao; anecdotes about real-life tragedies and historical figures; and the childhood of Imao’s son Toym, the set designer for this and many other productions. 

If these diverse perspectives add up to more contradictions than similarities, it’s by design; this is a work about how the severe persecution of a people can lead to a crisis in identity in the new generations—as well as a newfound drive to pursue justice.

“Anak Datu,” then, functions primarily as a history lesson covering a region of the Philippines whose stories remain vastly underreported farther up north. But while the show employs its fair share of expository dialogue and newsreel footage, it primarily speaks through movement and ritual. Impressively lengthy chunks of the play are made up of prayer, song, dance, and simulated martial arts fights choreographed by Hassanain Magarang and Lhorvie Nuevo. Even without any explicit “progression” in narrative, these scenes become the play’s centerpieces—emphasizing how rituals preserve both storytelling and cultural memory, especially the stories and details that remind us that Mindanao’s identity should never be reduced to just violence and suffering.

Sense of reverence

There’s a serious sense of reverence to the direction by Chris Millado (together with assistant directors Marco Viana and Antonette Go), especially when the production has to depict tragedy. Screams or gunfire never once overpower the voices of those actually involved in these massacres. Representations of Ferdinand Marcos’ regime and of the military responsible for the killings never truly figure in the foreground, although their role is underlined repeatedly, never to be ignored. 

What “Anak Datu” wants us to focus on instead is the beauty of a culture and a religion threatened with erasure, and how the lingering trauma from these threats continues to leave young people struggling to put the pieces of their heritage together.

However, while the play’s two frame stories—wherein Carlos Dala plays both a young Toym Imao and a young Datu Karim—serve as essential connective tissue for the entire thing, they wind up being its least striking components. They aren’t wanting for interesting material; in fact, the tension in Toym’s home between Islam and Christianity, between taking action and keeping one’s head down, makes for naturally potent drama. 

But these sections (particularly the use of Japanese anime series “Voltes V” as a symbol of dissent) come off as unresolved, perhaps to leave their true resolution in the hands of the youth and of audiences today, since the issues presented are far from settled.

Unrealized potential

Similarly, while the play’s use of the Cultural Center of the Philippines’ new Black Box Theater leads to many powerful images (the most memorable of which involve sparse lighting from Katsch Catoy and simple designs from Imao and costume designer Carlo Villafuerte Pagunaling), one gets the feeling that this space isn’t quite used to its full potential just yet. Depending on where you’re seated on the bleachers, both sound and action might be partially obscured for you, since the stage is set up along a single flat line with rarely a raised surface.

But this doesn’t significantly detract from the production’s strengths, or the rousing work put in by its ensemble. The isolated missteps only end up emphasizing by contrast how well “Anak Datu” works as a group show, with characters from past and present occasionally colliding on stage. As precolonial pirates from Sulu share the spotlight with Abdulmari Imao’s internationally renowned artwork, and with fiery, controversial figures like the Moro National Liberation Front’s Nur Misuari (Arjhay Babon), the play’s thesis only comes into sharper focus. 

By the time “Anak Datu” arrives at its final, massive tableau, it becomes so easy to accept that all these seemingly contradictory facets to Muslim and Mindanaoan identity should be allowed to coexist without the prejudice of bigots hounding them at every turn. Nobody has the right to tell a group of persecuted people that their pain is deserved, or that their suffering did not happen.

“Anak Datu” runs until Oct. 9 at the Tanghalang Ignacio Gimenez Black Box Theater. —Ed.

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These questions are doubly important today, in an era when social media and other digital platforms tend to lump the critical verification of facts with unthinking chismis (gossip).

Tanghalang Pilipino’s latest production, ”Anak Datu,” addresses these issues head-on in a multilayered, multidimensional approach to interlocking tales that involve family, community, and a speck of forgotten history in Mindanao. 

The viewer should leave linear thinking at the door. The three main stories leap from one era to another, from precolonial Philippines to 1970s martial law. They also span different universes, from real life and fiction to historical remembrances. 

At the heart of it all are the various protagonists’ quest for identity, struggle with alienation and disenfranchisement, and a valiant fight to uncover truths that have been distorted, replaced, or removed from the history books.

“Anak Datu” started with a short story published in 1971 and initially adapted as a children’s play with “a very simple, predictable folk story,” says director Chris Millado.

But what the current production has now is “a jump”—or several of them—“from myth to memory to history.”

Related: ‘Anak Datu’ preserves cultural memory through contradiction

3 heroes

This fascinating labyrinth is built on the three heroes of the play and their respective journeys.

First is the fiction part, the 1971 short story written by National Artist Abdulmari Imao. A teenager who grows up in the pre-Hispanic Sulu Archipelago discovers that his father, the village chieftain, is not his actual sire. The man he long respected and believed was his old man was actually a pirate who raided his original village years ago—and took captive his mother who was pregnant with him. This discovery triggers the boy’s journey to find his real father, his roots, and his identity. 

The second part is actual family history. Again the perspective is that of the son, this time of Imao’s own, Toym Leon. Toym is the son of Tausugs who is struggling to belong and yet maintain his own identity in Luzon. While on that journey of self-discovery, he discovers how his family is part of a bigger milieu: the political turmoil in Mindanao.

The third part focuses on that piece in national history as seen through the eyes of Jibin Arula. He is the lone survivor of the Jabidah massacre, in which about 200 Tausug and Sema men were brutally killed in Corregidor in 1968.

Mirroring 

Playwright Rody Vera explains how the three journeys mirror and interconnect with each other: “One episode of the story will parallel the next story. For example, when the young teenager’s father survived, the parallel is that Jibin Arula survived. The three stories are connected not just in terms of themes but also in terms of events. Myth acquires layers because it was anchored on what had happened.”

Consider also “Toym’s memory as an artist, how he realized his commitment to the struggle,” Vera says. “You see his conflict as a kid with a political stand with regards to his land in Mindanao.”

At the same time, finding the common ground in these three approaches—this time, from myth to history to memory—can also uncover events that have been forgotten. 

Vera cites as an example the massacres that the play presents: “We don’t know that these things happened. All these came out with the documentaries in 1987. That was how we saw how many died. You can still see the bullet holes in the mosques and the skeletons that emerged. Now, in the time of disinformation, this is being denied. It came out through the Commission on Human Rights and the stories of the survivors and the desaparecidos.”

Millado weighs in on how verifying memory and checking the facts can actually change the course of generally accepted history: “We bought into the myth that what was happening in Mindanao was a Christian-Muslim conflict, but it was actually precipitated by the Jabidah and other massacres.”

Millado hopes that the enormity of the canvas that “Anak Datu” is painting will open the audience’s eyes to “the messiness of how we create our national narrative.”

“It is not a seamless weaving of myth, history and memory,” he says. “There are always fissures and contradictions. It shows the myth as pristine as it is, memory as malleable as it is, and history as messy as it is.”

“Anak Datu” runs until Oct. 9 at the Tanghalang Ignacio B. Gimenez. Check Tanghalang Pilipino for details. —Ed.

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