Oh the audacity of theater.
I keep thinking that, over and over, immersed in Request sa Radyo for a good hour or so, held hostage by the silence—this play has no dialogue—my eyes and mind on overdrive glued to that set of an apartment and its solitary occupant. I could feel her alone-ness as she moves in that space so self-contained, with a kitchen, a desk/dining table, a commode with a gadget, the tablet, on it, a sofa-turned-into bed, the toilet, the vanity mirror. So complete, so isolated, so desolate.
It is sheer boldness and daring on the part of director Bobby Garcia, production designer Clint Ramos—two artists based abroad, who have brought honor to the country through the years—to produce this theater/performance art the likes of which today’s Metro Manila audience hasn’t seen. Even if the local theater scene has sprung back to life—with a vengeance—after the pandemic, Request sa Radyo nonetheless is an out-of-the-box experience. Wordless, it demands of the audience its full attention in a seat gallery where any commotion, especially coughing, could create distraction. Quite embarrassing really to even clear one’s throat.
Is the Manila audience ready for this in the day of Tiktok spectacle and noise, I asked myself. It turned out, it is.
This is thanks, in great part, not only to the fierce visioning of Garcia and Ramos (co-producer is Chris Monani of Samsung Performing Arts Theater), but also to the gripping performances of Lea Salonga and Dolly de Leon—separate nights, keep in mind—two olympians who brought the country gold if only theater had a world Olympics.
“Truth is, Request sa Radyo was always a risk,” Garcia told me in private message. “Nothing like it had really been done on that scale. But that’s what made it so exciting. And I have always believed that Manila audiences are constantly looking for new and unique experiences.”
Related story:
Clint Ramos and Request sa Radyo: On Lea Salonga, Dolly de Leon, loneliness and social connection
It was a feat to cast Lea and Dolly to do the same role, separate performances, separate nights. Two distinct delineations of a single character. If you see Lea, you must see Dolly, and vice versa. On two separate nights, if you will. It is as if two different characters unfold before us—they are two different performances, each unique onto itself.
“The goal was to make their performances unique to themselves,” Garcia affirmed our experience. “They never watched each other in rehearsals, and always rehearsed separately, so I could work with them on their own versions of the character.”
Request sa Radyo is an adaptation of the play, Request Concert, by German playwright Franz Xaver Kroetz, which was written in 1971 and staged in the early ‘70s, about the lonely life of a middle-aged woman in her apartment. It is reported that the author himself gave the nod to Garcia and Ramos to tweak that lone character into the Filipino caregiver. In the modern era has emerged the Filipino as the caregiver to the world, the self-sacrificing individual who leaves family and home to look after someone else’s family and home abroad, just to earn a decent living.
Request sa Radyo limns the routine, isolated existence of this middle-aged woman in her tiny apartment where she comes home to after a tough day. For 75 minutes, the audience seated around the apartment watches the woman go about her evening, from the time she enters it to the time she goes to bed, and finally, the end.
Her life is clockwork precision, and it’s lonely. In an earlier interview with TheDiarist.ph, Ramos spoke about how loneliness and isolation have become a more pronounced malady after the pandemic, which afflicts people regardless of gender and age. It reminds me of a short chat I had with another passenger, while we were in transit at the airport. He was French, lugging a huge bag containing his stage paraphernalia; he worked as a clown. And he said how during a performance, the louder the audience’s laughter, the stronger the chill it sent down his spine, because the louder the laugh the stronger the loneliness bottled up inside the spectator.
That loneliness comes to mind as I watch Request—75 minutes, no words, the actor stripping down to her core, and it’s up to the spectator to espy her emotion—or absence of it. Ramos’ design makes everything more stark because the apartment is so realistic, from the rice cooker in the kitchen to the water closet in the toilet, its detailed completeness attempting to mask the emptiness the character must feel. She comes home to that apartment, alone, after the day’s toil, with only a radio program to keep her company. It plays music requested by kababayan listeners—OPM songs from “the motherland.” How very Pinoy—music as the binder and leveler of mood and social existence. The only time she disrupts her after-work routine of cooking/cleaning/drawing is when she walks to and from that tablet that plays the radio program, to fix the volume.
The moment she sets foot in the apartment and leaves behind that door the hustle and bustle of the city, she sheds off her thick layers of clothing, and starts the evening routine that passes for living.
Lea portrays the woman’s robotic existence, detached and placid, a woman resigned, if not indifferent, to her humdrum existence. Her obsessive compulsiveness—the way she folds the used plastic bag with such precision, for instance, and how very Pinoy—is her enough proof of life.
Dolly, the instant she tastes the stale stuff in the rice cooker, betrays a layer of resentment, if not anger at her fate. This woman has tension, perhaps a defiance so futile.
You will be watching two different characters if you go to separate nights. Two different definitions of the same character, by two genuine artists.
But it is hearing the songs from the “motherland” that connects the character, even only tenuously, to the world that doesn’t bestow her privilege anyway.
Request sa Radyo is theater as immersive art, in the hands of Lea and Dolly, and Garcia and Ramos. It draws you in initially as mere spectator, until you experience it.
You must experience Request sa Radyo, on two different nights if possible, because this theater experience might not come again to Metro Manila (not soon anyway).
Request sa Radyo runs until Oct. 20, 2024, Samsung Performing Arts Theater, Circuit, Makati.