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Review

TOKHANG AND TALKBACKS

TAO PO!
Written by Maynard Manansala
Directed by Ed Lacson
Features Mae Paner (aka Juana Change)
An initiative of Let’s Organize for Democracy and Integrity (LODI)
April 16, 2019, PETA Theatre Center

Two events transpired last April 16 at the PETA Theatre Centre under the auspices of an alliance
made up of artists, cultural workers, and media professionals, known as Let’s Organize for
Democracy and Integrity (LODI). The first was the performance of Mae Paner (aka Juana
Change) of a four-part monodrama written by Maynard Manansala and directed by Ed Lacson.
The second was the talkback—a forum that followed after the curtain call where the play’s lone
actor, playwright, and sources and inspiration went up the stage to answers queries from the
audience and elaborate on the play’s provenance and how it continues to grow as it tours the
fringes of today’s vibrant theatre scene.

This is a rare occurrence in today’s theater scene—when the talkbak is more than ancillary to
the performance, when it weighs as much as the performance, and when the individual
experience of building meaning from the performance is shared with a community.

Tao Po! as anthropologist Michael L. Tan clarified during the talkback was used during the
Hispanic times, as when a friendly person knocked on someone’s door and affirmed his
humanness presence as a human being, not the aswang or maligno that roams the barrio on
some occasions. “Tao po” is both an assurance that a conversation can be pursued, or a
mutually beneficial transaction can ensue once a person has been allowed entrance into the
dwelling.

Maynard Manansala’s play, Tao Po! as a community expression is subverted to mean a host of
meanings, both good and evil, both betrayal and redemption. The title could mean “tao po
kami, hindi baboy na kinakatay na lamang…” or “Tao Po” could be the a squad of men
iknocking or breaking into your door and when allowed entrance sends a volley of gunfire. “Tao
Po” could mean an appeal to our to our consciousness so that we may listen to the plea of
those whose families have lost so much humanity.

Mae Paner takes on the role of each of the characters in the four vignettes, shifting gender,
class and even social positionalities. The first tackled a photojournalist in front of a student
body, talking about his with the camera as it engages with blood and gore, mangled bodies,
bullet-ridden and, on some occasions, wrapped in packaging tape. In the next vignette, Paner is
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Nanay Rosing, a zumba instructor stalked by the ghosts of her husband and son who were killed
when by an army of goons who barged into their shanty. In another role, Paner is a police
officer who doubles as killer aboard a motorcyle, and how his underground job has allowed him
to tend to his family. Last was a prepubescent girl who visits the grave of her parents in a
public cemetery made more crowded as the fatalities of the drug war continue to be interred in
freshly cemented niches piled one after another layer.

The best of the four is arguably the first vignette—taut and lean, with a narrative arc that
moves ever so subtly, arguing his case, asserting his politics vis-à-vis with his craft with restraint
and quiet dignity, as it should be. Nanay Rosing’s story still bears a lot of potential and the
tensions that arise from the ludic pleasure of gyrating to the thumping rhythms of workout
music besieged by ghosts and a trauma that will never heal. Consistent with the nature of
monologue, TAO PO! is a theater of interiority, an elucidation of human subjectivity and the
contradiction that emerges from the choices, even the trauma, that is both in the mundane and
in the atypical, even in the spectacular. In the scalawag’s vignette, we know that killing has
become second-skin to him, but it is his subjectivity is still unnerved by the system’s
predisposition against the poor, leaving big time druglords free from the dragnet.

There could be unifying string that can fuse together the four narratives, but it is always
optional. In Buwan at Baril in E-flat Major, it was the moon and its various images like a
goddess, quiet in her demeanor, looking down on eight individuals whose lives are now
intertwinef by an omnipresent moon.

THEATRE TALKBACK

Not everyone stays for the talkback sessions. Several times in the PETA theatre, I have found
myself clucking my tongue at the patronizing appreciates talkback sessions particularly in this
theater because the moderator is very patronizing, that famiiar tendency to talk down to the
audience in a bid to elicit responses that will dovetail with the company’s intentions, or will
amplify the work and its merits.

Tao Po! had different tack, perhaps largely through the sensitive handling of theater actor and
cultural activist, Joel Saracho whose maneuvers were nothing close to patronizing.

From the audience the participants ranged from a DLSU law student eager and curious to ask
“how can we help?” to a PUP student who in a deadpan manner and without much affectation
in his talking simply said “nakaka-relate ako kasi tatlong kamag-anak ko na ang naging biktima
ng drug war na ito.” Actress and screenwriter Bibeth Orteza rises up to reiterate the play’s
potential to speak to publics, and goaded the creative team to translating the play into the
major languages of the Philippines. College of St Benilde’s Sunita Mukti was visibly moved as
she uttered words drawn from her underbelly and can only utter about theatre’s capacity to
redeem us as a people from ignorance and apathy.
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But the most powerful came from the people whose stories were culled dredged up to form the
narratives of Tao Po! There on the stage, clutching her handbag, was Nanay Rosing, whose
story inspired the vignette on the zumba teacher besieged by the ghosts of her husband and
son. And there was Lovely, a teenager now, and an orphan.

With a baseball cap’s bill burrowed deep on his head, and his head slightly bowed, Raffy Lerma
body language suggested diffidence and we thought we will hear nothing from him. Fair game
his photographs of the drug war spoke
spoke eloquently about the drug war —until a member of the audience stood up and said “Can
we hear from Raffy Lerma?” and so he was compelled to affirm it was his story that inspired the
first vignette. Earnestness, humour, quiet dignity, honesty were the virtues that enveloped the
listeners as he spoke.

That was his story, the first vignette we encountered: quietlt proud of the trade but equally
adamant about the system that underpins photojournalism in the country today—the hunger
for sensation, revering tabloid material which meant both spectacle and gore, and a number to
add to the growing statistics. Lerma admitted being numbed by the sight of bodies, but he had
to call his own attention and disturb his own psyche. And the way out from such numbness was
to think beyond photography—it meant reaching out to the families of those who were killed,
seeing them weather the tragedy, and helping them rise up.