Ateneo Entablado’s Sa Tahanan ng Aking Ama both entertains and moves

The staging ran for two-and-a-half hours, but director Respeto’s pacing, and the headlong drama of the events, ensured that it held the audience’s attention to the bitter end. One could perhaps wish for some tightening, perhaps a lesser resort to the “comic” touches delegated to the servant roles, which, as an aside, may not sit well with a contemporary sensibility. But in fact, such flourishes are all part of the traditional Filipino family (melo)drama that is the essence of the play and is retained in the production.

Indeed, the refreshing thing about the play is how it both entertains and moves the audience as a straightforward—dare I say old-fashioned?—portrayal of a loving family torn apart by the stresses of wartime, in a realist manner both sentimentally appealing and psychologically true. No “modernist” delving into issues, even if tangentially present in the narrative, like class divergences (references to sacadas), unwanted pregnancies, or mental health. More controversial perhaps to current mindsets is the play’s milieu’s assumption of Japanese oppressors and American liberators, though the narrative does move to interrogate this by the introduction of a sympathetic Japanese officer and the most articulate character’s questions about US altruism. In fact, though, this is all part of the play’s realism: I know from my own parents how embedded such assumptions were in the times it depicts.

Whatever such qualms, the play’s focus is to bring alive the times and the deep, very wrenching conflicts within one family—and this, the production’s design and performances succeed in evoking. The shift in setting from ilustrado to quasi-refugee recalls the similar shift in similar-period works like the film Oro, Plata, Mata, and reflects, again, my own impressions from my parents’ accounts of their experiences. And in the family drama, the heart of the production are the performances of its actors. While necessarily there are differences in levels of nuance and polish between the more experienced and the younger members of the cast, by and large, the ensemble conveys the tragedy of people caught in conflicts not of their making, each one struggling to respond in the only way he or she sees.

Clearly the play sees the parents—in the show I caught, Jethro Tenorio and, even more, Katski Flores—as the fulcrum, the rocks around which the family tragedy swirls, and they deliver. But in fact, to a modern viewer, the center of what the whole drama is about—the nature of heroism—is embodied in the true protagonist, the “collaborator” Franco, and I must accord special applause to Vino Mabalot for his wonderfully painful portrayal of this key role. It is this performance that establishes this stage production as, indeed, a modern tragedy.