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The absurd as real in Titus Andronicus


In the age of doing Manila runs of foreign plays versus doing the more creative task of adapting these for local audiences, Dulaang UP’s Titus Andronicus: Tinarantadong Asintado can only be valuable. Directed by Tuxqs Rutaquio and adapted into Filipino by Layeta Bucoy, what’s remarkable about this work is that it does justice to the Shakespeare original while delivering a contemporary narrative that by all counts is a success. The moment pop/street music filled the theater, the moment the clown (Nicco Manalo) established his role as both symbol of death and life, in those first few minutes Tinarantadong Asintado grabbed me by the throat. Yes, it’s as violent and visceral as it sounds. This might have been an absurd tragedy set in the end of the Roman Empire, in the original that had at its core a cycle of revenge, but in this adaptation the absurd is so bloody real – and that’s no bloody exaggeration. When we say truth is stranger than fiction, we must have the Philippines in mind; in Tinarantadong Asintado the fictional takes that truth and runs away with it.

The truth after all is nothing but propaganda given election season, especially within a provincial space that doesn’t make the national news. Carding is this adaptation’s Titus, also known as Asintado (Bembol Roco), who provides the guns and goons given the gold that the incumbent vice mayor Torres (Paulo Cabañero) needs to get elected as mayor. But this brotherhood between dynasty and policeman becomes embroiled in what we would know in this country to be down and dirty gantihan: this is an eye for an eye taken way too seriously. And it must involve a woman in Clarissa Castillo (Mailes Kanapi), small town civil society member, wearing a cloak of religiosity to hide the insanities in her life. She had lost a son, as had Asintado; during election season everyone is fair game. But in the hands of the powerful this can only mean an escalation of violence, where sons and daughters are sacrificial lambs. The material is as heavy and harrowing as it sounds, with the original’s tragedies made heavier by the truths of current times. In this adaptation there’s a clear sense of political dynasties and the versions of violence it upholds, and the audience is held captive by a social realism taken to such preposterous extremes. Here is also where Tinarantadong Asintado’s genius lies: it creates a world where the real and absurd are intricately intertwined, where each character is both oppressor and oppressed, the powerful and the victim, and anarchy is a space that allows for everyone to hold a gun and render humans as animals, lives as mere bodies. Bodies as objects are also in videos interspersed seamlessly into the narrative, where the gaze of the camera is always sensationalist on the one hand, matter-of-fact on the other, capturing what it wants an audience to see: the vice mayor appearing distraught at the site of a massacre he himself ordered, the ex-bold star turned mayoralty candidate’s sexy campaign ad, the sex video of the mayoralty candidate’s wife. These bodies, necessarily objectified by the camera, are also killed on stage: raped, dismembered, slit across the throat, shot through their bodies, all versions of death rational and logical, validated by vengeance. At the point when something clicks in Carding’s head, Tinarantadong Asintado allows for everything to still make sense: the shift from seeing humans as bodies, to seeing humans as animals as meat, is logical and ultimate retribution, as it is the point of no return. Which is not to say that it ends with death, as it does end up highlighting how the one truth in contemporary Pinoy politics is that the rhetoric never stops, that there will always be someone who lives to tell a reconfigured tale, a narrative that will mean keeping power and allowing the cycle of corruption and violence to continue, only tempered down but ready to wield its ugly head at any given time. Here is the power of Tinarantadong Asintado: it’s life as we know it, without exaggeration, with no sense of magnification, just the daring to throw the absurd and highlight it as real. Here it’s also the gift of characters that work because it’s a cast that can wrap its head around the narrative’s goals. Roco in the lead is wonderful as expected, particularly in parts where he seems to have snapped, moving from the angry logical policeman to the diabolical butcher and cook. Along with Asintado, those who made up the lead political characters played by Kanapi and Cabañero, as well as Paolo O’Hara’s Chua were all succinct archetypes of the times. But what actually resonates here is the work of craziness done by Manalo as the clown, and by Cris Pasturan as Clarissa’s son Nomer. Pasturan as cross-dressing addict, rapist and murderer, all tied into a schizophrenia that’s extremely macho (i.e., why couldn’t he get it up?) and intelligent (i.e., dismemberment versus murder is suffering), outdoes himself here because there’s a sense of control in the midst of the craziness, one that makes his portrayal even more haunting. But it is Manalo’s clown that’s the stuff made of nightmares, as both threat and warning of the crazies in us. It might start with echoes of Heath Ledger’s Joker, but Manalo soon enough goes beyond this peg, interspersing the evil clown with the role of death angel and jester. Here Manalo is shown to have impeccable comedic timing, precise rhythm, an energy that fills the stage and permeates through the make-up and costume, disturbing in its eeriness, powerful in its resonance. All these of course owe to an adaptation that works at creating characters within a situation that’s all at once real yet still surprising, of common knowledge but is behind closed doors. Here Rutaquio and Bucoy, along with Jethro Joaquin’s musical direction, prove that there’s a correct way of doing an adaptation of a classical text, that doesn’t fail to respect the original, even as it is a reconfiguration that challenges a contemporary audience. A gem here might be having Judy Celine Ick, PhD. on Tinarantadong Asintado’s side – for her expertise might lie in Shakespeare, but her kind of dramaturgical notes allows for a tying together that’s properly contextualized in us, not just as audience but as the ones who live in the absurd and tragic of nation. But what might ultimately be a measure of Tinarantadong Asintado is that at the end of it, as you are told that the cycle of violence and corruption only continues, you actually know that the solution was to kill them all, the crime that is murder now valid in your head, the insanity all yours. If that doesn’t make it a success, I don’t know what will. - YA, GMA News Dulaang UP’s Titus Andronicus, Tinarantadong Asintado runs at the Wilfrido Ma. Guerrero Theater in UP Diliman until October 2 2011.
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