“Who are you? Who am I? You are the truth teller. When you die to your old self, you enter into a new realm, physically feel your body, the drama of its fall, the healing of past traumas, including falling into the darkness, then, you begin to see light…” – Joey Lianza, an award-winning theater director in Leyte, Philippines.
Joey Lianza must have had seen it all, the result of Mother Nature’s bloodletting – floating bodies from the second floor of his apartment during Typhoon Haiyan, a cyclone that devastated his home province, from howling 145mph winds that resulted in 6,300 deaths in 2013.
What was remarkable about him as a theater director is he utilized his skills of play acting to help process “out with the trauma” amongst children who lost their family members, using hand puppets, and making the commitment of two weekends to be trained by psychotherapists, along with his teacher-colleagues, who made it their mission towards a collective healing. From that pain, he chose to emerge from the darkness, though he might describe it with such specificity, and became even more creative by training college students to act in different plays he staged in Leyte, garnering regional, national and international awards of recognition from UNICEF, the Cultural Center of the Philippines, and other cultural bodies.
By doing so, he exhibited the “the individualism of his personal commitment,” which is described by Charles Taylor’s “Sources of The Self,” “to make this central human moral power is to open the way to an outlook which makes commitment crucial.”
We are presented with a choice: “to live a life with an ethic of a whole will,” he said, or “as against the more lax and minimal rules demanded by society at large.” Awed by the rainbow that appears after a rain, and allowing oneself of feeling that rainbow, Lianza continues, “it gives new life.”
Boni Alvarez is equally adept at using the family dynamics of quarrels amongst siblings to ask the question – who is the aswang (witches) who seems to suck out the good energies in the room? Their parallel messages of choosing a higher self versus a wicked self interestingly speak to darkness, one in the form of trauma from witnessing a calamity; while in “Bloodletting” (a play Alvarez wrote and directed by Jon Lawrence Rivera will be staged as part of Center Theater Group’s Block Party 2018, March 29 through April 8, 2018) is about a brother and a sister losing their father.
“As they arrive in [Palawan] Island, Farrah (Ocenar) and Bosley (Alvarez) to scatter their father’s ashes, a typhoon hits and they are forced to seek shelter in a café. While in the café, the owner (Isaac) and his granddaughter (Yatco) reveal tales about witches,” according to Jason Martin, head of publicity of Center Theater Group.
The shrill and elevated pitches of dialogue exchanges between a brother and a sister reveal their resentment, and at times, repressed anger and even judgment, to which the audience could relate, as their own family dynamics played out. It made this writer recall Philippine theater and its use of “allegory, indirection, allusion, metaphor; mime, shadow play, religious dramatization, folk drama, game, verbal joust – to explore the concentric circles of personal, communal, and national suffering and concerns,” as Doreen Fernandez noted in Essays on Philippine Theater.
The creative process of writing a play
Alvarez granted an exclusive interview with the Asian Journal revealing his insights about the human condition, his motivations in writing the play and the layers of personal creative expressions he had to go through, to achieve this completed piece of artwork, a play.
The characters are composites of what he heard from folks, “gossips, nothing confirmed,” he said, underscoring that the play is a product of his imagination, and after, rigorously subjected to a collaborative process of revision.
After writing, it would be gathering friends to read out loud, then more readings, a workshop to see if the characters work and allowing the collective to critique. “At first, Jenri (the café owner) was a much younger character, a father, in the first draft, then, he became a grandpa, an older presence, more rooted in the traditions,” Alvarez shared.
“How do you distinguish the witches in the community,” I asked, to which he said, “they tend to be spinsters, childless, and come from a lot of siblings. They tend to be stand-offish, want to be by themselves, isolated, secretive, reclusive, don’t speak very much and tend to listen.”
This play is set in the province of Palawan, where as recently as the end of January 2018, we (my husband Enrique and I) were fortunate to tour the island with a friend, DNG, who lives in the area. That evening, we passed through an unusual stretch of roads, and he shared that many stories abound of disappearances in this area. It felt eerie and that feeling was aggravated by unlit homes, quite early in the evening, while in contrast, homes past that road had lights.
“Aswang (witches) is not just bad. They are part of nature. Look at the animal kingdom, there are predators who are meant to prey on others. They exist for a reason, for population control. Half, I made up, half were handed to us. We cannot differentiate them from us. When you look at their eyes, they are not always casting spells. This is about a brother/sister, about sibling rivalry, sometimes the parents define that relationship by how they raise them, how that one sibling was preferred – it will have an impact for how we can be monstrous to another. They know you the best, they know how the parents treated you and they can adopt the treatment of parents as well,“ Alvarez continued.
He then described how aswangs are within us, a euphemism for “our dark selves, when a two-year-old throws a tantrum and becomes this monster, throwing a fit, of course, that child does not know how to express himself and has no powers of reasoning, but people throwing fits, they are well into their adulthood, they know better, but they are unconsciously mean.”
Are these habits, I asked? “Habits of behavior, “ he said. I complimented him on his daring and guts to move the dialogue to its unexpected endings, at times, making us fall down the cliffs. He articulated that his plays are not meant to be tragic or sad — they are sadly realistic. Perhaps he is describing a more complete realism in his plays, that a complex tragic life is really a series of losses and at the end, logically, it cannot become a happy ending, which would make the play an incomplete realism to some extent. But, one can choose a different ending, always, as even God pauses and allows man to exercise his free will, an ability to choose.
Courage to create
In “Ruby, Tragically Rotund,” another play he wrote, with a successful run at the Los Angeles Theater, he revealed that “the ending was so shocking and too much of a departure from what is expected by the audience, that some felt I misled the audience. In writing about a fat person, I am writing about the façade of a fat, jolly person, a false veneer often to hide the feelings of that fat person; it was a tragedy all along, that when you put on center stage, it is about various stages of being disrobed.” It felt like peeling an onion, and one cries while removing the skin, mustering some courage to dissect this ingredient.
I asked about his courage in creating “Bloodletting.” He said, “I don’t think of myself as courageous — I always just worry that the audience finds my work interesting, and I would rather they hate my play than find it mediocre. I tell stories I feel compelled to write about. It comes from the Pinoy culture, the American dream in various forms, marketed in a different fashion. Everyone in the Philippines has a relative who has moved to the U.S. and they know how difficult life can be, even with testimonies of people pursuing dreams, some may not get the dreams, still they come to the U.S., and they keep pursuing the dream. Like for instance today, I don’t know when I can do laundry and I have to do the interview – [I know] that not a lot of writers get this opportunity.”
“How do you push past doubts?” he was asked at a forum in Historic Filipinotown, to which he responded, “I am inspired by an idea, a concept, a creative spark, then, the usual doubts creep in. I just have to trust that the initial creative spark will find an audience which will find it appealing.”
In another interview, he elaborated on what he meant: “In ‘Fixed,’ I was exploring what do we consider honorable gay in the gay community? I don’t know what it is, I searched for it, as I want it to be less divided. People of color writers always write in relation to white characters. ‘Fixed’ did not do that, instead, I wrote about the sub-culture that people don’t know about. As Filipino gays, there are more overt lady boys (men wearing men’s shirt but tied at the waist) than male gay boys. It is an interesting blend of masculinity and feminity. well-groomed and with make-up. That slot was missing to me so I wrote about lady boys who run the massage parlor. One thinks she is trans – will she consider it? People want the labels at the expense of identity.”
Power of creative self-expression
I was interested in how he perceives our use of the power of creative self-expression. Alvarez boldly said, “I feel we restrict ourselves. In the same way, we may complain – a mainstream theater is not diverse in its offerings, I think that certain theaters which are meant to serve Asian Americans or the gay population can also be non-diverse in their offerings. We all need to step out of the ghetto mentality by believing that your voice is worthy of a wider audience. Trust that creative spark that made you create the piece in the first place. It can be so basic, say food, you are going to a potluck, bring what you think would appeal to a lot and you would not bring dinuguan, as it has intestines, tripe, but Latinos have menudo and Blacks have chittlings, there is a commonality there. The more specific a story you are telling with your culture, that story is the one that will appeal more universally.”
“What would you like to tell our folks?“ I asked.
Alvarez is concerned about emerging artists: “Support those who are coming up. At the end, we want more than one Apl.de.ap that is universally accepted as an artist, we must support so and so, as it is hard to be Asian Americans, as we are so diverse, so many viewpoints, and with not one single story that unifies us. So I am always trying to support five to six young folks that I meet and I tell them to keep me posted. There are new people coming up every day and they need our support.”
With that, I highly recommend you watch “Bloodletting,” written by a smart, brilliant, funny, playwright Boni Alvarez; directed by a smart, effective Jon Lawrence Rivera, another Fil-Am; and a cast of Filipino-Americans and set in Palawan, Philippines. I dare say it is an authentic Filipino-American play, but with a universal appeal to non-Filipino audiences and dialogue is in English.
Both these theater folks, Lianza and Alvarez, residing in Leyte and Los Angeles, display a very high personal commitment to their chosen field of artistry, theater and operate with ethics of will to tell their truth and in doing so, help in healing communities.
Let us support Bloodletting at Kirk Douglas Theater, to be shown for 11 days and just maybe, we may find the answers to lingering issues about family relationships or even decide to undertake our own journeys towards wholesomeness.
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Prosy Abarquez-Delacruz, J.D. writes a weekly column for Asian Journal, called “Rhizomes.” She has been writing for AJ Press for 10 years. She also contributes to Balikbayan Magazine. Her training and experiences are in science, food technology, law and community volunteerism for 4 decades. She holds a B.S. degree from the University of the Philippines, a law degree from Whittier College School of Law in California and a certificate on 21st Century Leadership from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. She has been a participant in NVM Writing Workshops taught by Prof. Peter Bacho for 4 years and Prof. Russell Leong. She has travelled to France, Holland, Belgium, Japan, Costa Rica, Mexico and over 22 national parks in the US, in her pursuit of love for nature and the arts.
