Tag Archives: theater adaptations

kultura

Tinarantadong Asintado FTW!

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.

click here for the rest of it!

kultura

brecht notwithstanding

The risk any theater adaptation takes is the fact of intertextuality. One person will enter the theater with no knowledge whatsoever of the theatrical context(s) of the play she is about to see. That person may be seated next to a theater scholar, adept in drama theories and well read on dramatic texts. At the back row are audience members who are just there for the ride, with no real interest in theater, but are there because one of the lead actors is good looking – or they’re related to him.

Unlike the spectatorship of cinema, where formulas become the standard of enjoyment or non-enjoyment, in theater many other things inform appreciation. There is the drama as written text, the text as executed onstage, and every other process that exists in between: the actors’ performances, the sounds of the stage, production design, extraneous elements of (in)formality and propriety, the communal audience experience, audience expectation.

Here lies the success and the failure of any theater adaptation such as Tanghalang Pilipino’s Madonna Brava ng Mindanao. Based on German playwright Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and her children (written 1939, staged 1941), Don Pagusara’s adaptation had way too much going against it: Brecht’s original defined the epic drama, spanning at it does 12 years, and using as it does a 30-year war as context.  (more…)