Next to Normal showcases pure Pinoy talent

It’s been difficult to pin down Atlantis Production’s Next to Normal for two reasons. One, it was an unexpectedly resonant work, something that hit me from left field, a surprising punch in the stomach, full-on. Two, never before has it felt to me as if a foreign text was meant to be done here, never have I seen the distance between the Filipino actor and the foreign text breached in this way. Now, granted that good material will and can be universal, i.e., will cut across race, gender, class no matter where in the world, but Next to Normal isn’t what classroom literary texts are made of – those that are deemed universal by default. In fact there is nothing here that’s expected, no grand narrative, no stable ideology, no gods in baskets to tie everything neatly together. Instead there’s just a family in crisis in the silences they hold dear. Right there might have been the reason for its resonance with me, and at the risk of too much information it has to be said: a lost child is one you grieve for forever, a lost marriage after it less so, but means its own suffering. In Next to Normal, grief and loss, the unwieldy and unstable, are rendered controlled by the man, Dan (Jett Pangan), the husband and father who keeps things together by falling back on Western medicine and by staying. His crisis is one that’s rational: he knew Diana (Menchu Lauchengco-Yulo) before the psychological breakdown on which Next to Normal begins and is hinged upon. Diana’s crisis is expectedly emotional, where the loss of a child is not just personal, it is also one that’s physical: where you might only know of soul and spirit because you feel its weight.

That the science of psychology messes with the emotional is what’s fodder for the funnies, and so is the smart-ass daughter (Bea Garcia) and her notions of love and life given her dysfunctional parents. The unraveling of this dysfunction is one that ceases to be funny of course, as it becomes this beautifully tenuous line that all characters here are balancing on, a line that’s riddled with ghosts and white noise, with the unsaid and the denied. Here is Next to Normal’s ability at echoing what we know to be true of families in general, the lives we live within them in particular: no matter where we are in the world, regardless of clinical psychology and the family crises we live through. Here are the silences we hold dear, the ones we live off of, the suffering in the quiet. The sheen of normalcy is one that this text obviously works upon. The brightness of truth is its gift. That it works though, in this context, to an audience of middle to upper class Pinoys who could afford tickets, has much to do as well with the kind of brilliance that was ultimately about talent here. And it’s talent that isn’t just about being competent in these roles that are American, nor is it at all about skill – though both are part of it for sure. Instead it is ultimately about forgetting altogether that this is an American text being played by Filipino actors, and vice versa. Because the small cast achieves exactly that. Garcia as the daughter Natalie was properly feisty and desperate, her rendering of the troubled child anything but stereotypically whiny or just angry. Markki Stroem as Henry, her counterpoint as more stable druggie, proves he’s got stuff made for stage, his voice surprisingly stronger here than TV has allowed it to shine. Felix Rivera’s strength as the silence that sings here is not just in that voice, but in that anger, one that doesn’t matter in its ghostly presence as Gabe, but which on that stage took control in every song he was in, even when he was up against the veterans in the cast. Which brings me to Pangan, who’s the best that I’ve seen him here. Without the trappings of a more complex because highly fictionalized or fantastic role, with only the seeming simplicity of a father and husband character, what’s here is pure unadulterated Pangan, and a voice that can move from optimism to helplessness to nostalgic in equal turns. But it’s in that breakdown scene that Pangan proves himself theater actor, with anguish that echoes with everything that has to do with male suffering in the hands of skillful denial, a rendering of patriarchy that we rarely see because it is so painful. It is pain too, as it is insanity, but even more so clarity, that is in Lauchengco-Yulo’s portrayal of the complexity that is loss and grief in one woman. And when I say woman here, it is Lauchengco-Yulo as body. Her Diana moved across that stage and told this story, not just with words spoken or songs sung, but also and more importantly with movement, deliberately going against that one rational narrative line. Her frowns of confusion, her furtive steps, the questions she asks of doctor / husband / daughter, the routines she kept, the ones she forgot – all gestures not just words, all happening with the weight of her distress. And in the final moment, Lauchengco-Yulo allows Diana to clearly swing between uncertainty and control even as she makes logical the decision to favor self, the most powerful glorious moment in the whole musical, the one time the woman’s body is allowed lightness, is suffused with grace. Suffice it to say that even just memory of the individual moments of Lauchengco-Yulo’s Diana and Pangan’s Dan brings tears, almost like a melancholia that’s always been and will always be yours as audience. Here is a brilliance that seeps into your spirit and makes you less spectator and almost co-conspirator in the story that unfolds. And this can only be a response as well to the question that’s in the back of one’s head when watching such foreign material: how do we imagine this to be valuable and valid, altogether relevant for third world Philippines in all of its other tragedies, where psychological ailments are disbelieved, family crises denied? We do so through talent. In this run of Next To Normal you forget that you’re in the middle of Makati, can go beyond the fact that Pangan is the lead singer of The Dawn that you grew up with, can forget completely who Lauchengco-Yulo is in the context of Philippine theater. And when a local production allows you to do that, breaching the distance from an American text, with no racial baggage in sight, no disjunction in any form or manner, you find that right here is not Pinoy talent. It’s just talent, period. - YA, GMA News Next to Normal won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 2010, with music by Tom Kitt, and book and lyrics by Brian Yorkey. The Manila run was directed by Bobby Garcia for Atlantis Productions.