brought Angela to Love Loss and What I Wore, the local staging of a Nora Ephron and Delia Ephron original. mixed reviews in the US, but an interesting enough text owing to this third world Pinay’s class consciousness. and Bituin Escalante and Menchu Lauchengco-Yulo are equally brilliant in it. go see it, bring your mothers and girlfriends. will only run until Jan 22! :) saw it last year, and did this review. 

Five women in all black outfits, mostly in the same shape save for Bituin Escalante, all the same age bracket save for Jay Valencia-Glorioso, enter the stage and sit on bar stools. The central figure talks of age as Gingy (played by Glorioso) — the one monologue that’s a thread through the others, the one whose life of dresses is intertwined with memories of family and marriage and children, found and lost loves.

The four other women take on roles that are familiar though definitely not about everyone in Third World Philippines. Love, Loss, and What I Wore (written by Nora Ephron and Delia Ephron, directed by Michael Williams and Cathy Azanza-Dy) is after all about womanhood in America – letthat be clear. And as with Vagina Monologues (by Eve Ensler) which claimed universality via the, uh, vagina in the beginning, at some point it is the differences among women that monologues like these make more glaring, race and class serving as stark and painful reminders of a failure at sisterhood. This is not a digression, as it is a matter of fact: the women here are not the same as us, nor can these experiences be ours in terms of context, especially given fashion (and our lack of it).

Which is not to say either that Love, Loss, and What I Wore ceases to be a fun experience for a Pinay in poor Pinas. In fact, once you get over the fact of its strangeness (descriptions of clothes that we do not know of in this country), it becomes a reminiscence of sorts for you, who lives as a middle class Filipino girl and must know how high heels feel, how those nice leather boots are but a dream, how the bra is the enemy, as are the darn purses you cannot seem to afford. These female voices work for you because you know all of these to be true, even as you are in this context.

the rest is up at gmanewsonline.