Faces of Injustice - An unassuming school productions of a play written by Paul Dumol: Ang Paglilitis Kay Mang Serapio.

Entering Miriam’s theatre room is like squeezing into a balikbayan box. There is hardly enough leg room for the audience around the stage which in itself is boxy. The confined space brought into the experience an intimacy and intensity rarely found in theatre productions. It took the audience so deep into the scenes so that spectators became part of the grimy, vicious mob that tried Mang Serapio for the crime of keeping a child. Moreover, the walls of patched carton boxed viewers in so that we could not escape from sympathizing with the main character. Compared to Tanghalang Ateneo’s set, Banaag’s was less scrupulous so that the setting became figurative and somehow irrelevant to the play’s message. Tanghalang Ateneo’s set, on the other hand, was exactly how I imagined the area of the less fortunate to be: piles and stacks of old newspaper and cobwebbed bottles in every corner. Onstage, from where the actors announced to us the proceedings of the trial instead of us learning with them, the surroundings of the urban poor was literally established.

Even the music reinforced the garbage dump site concept of Tanghalang Ateneo’s set. Eclectic music came out of rhythms from clanging and banging on tin cans and glass bottles by the actors themselves. It was loud and had the makings of a rock band letting loose. It was a far cry from the haunting violin solo of Miriam’s one-woman orchestra, who could deftly turn a touching scene into a heart-pounding, Psycho remake in a split second. Again, Banaag ignored the script’s squatters area premise, which was predominant in Tanghalang Ateneo’s play.

The only evidence of the story’s urban poor setting in Miriam’s play was in their tattered and grubby uniform shirts, of which the original color, I am sure, was white. It was the only clue they provided, apart from the script, as to Mang Serapio’s environment. Still, Tanghalang Ateneo’s choice of prostitutes, pimps and regular tramps to play gave the more lucid picture of life in the dark alleys and underground businesses. While Banaag took the entire beggar population as a unit, Tanghalang Ateneo defined them into those who relied on sympathy for income, and those who rely on lust.

The line between Banaag’s and  Tanghalang Ateneo’s interpretations of Ang Paglilitis Kay Mang Serapio is a line between the figurative and the literal, the symbolic and allegorical. Banaag sketchily portrayed the injustices of the authority and majority against the individual who dares to dream. There can be so many interpretations of their minimalistic set because they did not provide names, no specifics. Injustice here can take so many faces –government, society, media- so that the question was not the who and the what. What was presented was the idea, a generalization of the world’s accumulated biases and crushed hopes. It dared not localize poverty and fiery misery to the poor, nor immaturity and cruelty to gang leaders. Symbols are what everything became, from the set to the characters. The idea of injustice pierced through the fogged up portrait of a syndicate of tramps, so that without such distractions, the message of how rigid social paradigms can use an individual’s tiny flicker of a dream against him, came out intensely, focused and cuts right through one’s consciousness. Tanghalang Ateneo’s presentation, on the other hand, was an unambiguous interpretation of society’s cruelty to itself. They named the judges, authorities on imposition of uniform misery, as commerce and media by pasting logos of representative establishments (i.e. Inquirer, Nestea) on their vests. The inquisitors were prostitutes. The allusions to television and their behavior as if they were on television, showed how such devastation of one’s life has become a public spectacle and how lowlifes would love to be seen on such a show. All of these elements provided a factual spectacle, but could also have been. If audiences were not focused, it could have easily become a dark parody of tramps, prostitutes, and the absurdity of their laws. Audiences could have missed the whole point.