The discussions and criticisms around the Virgin Labfest are, in many cases, confined to appraisals of individual work. Audiences, myself included, often fall into this trap out of laziness: it is a simpler and shorter task to assess art through pre-existing checklists or through binaries of good and bad. It is much more difficult to articulate our awe and discomfort.

Yet to view works in isolation rather than in the gestalt is to leave with only half of the story. Programmed as a set of three, Virgin Labfest demands that each one-act play be seen as part of an accumulation. How does each staging complement and subtract from one another? What tensions arise from form, narrative, tone, and chronology? What feelings, images, and stories are we introduced to and left with?  Critics, if they choose to take on the task, are asked to see a bigger picture and relay their alternative ways of seeing the work to audience members.

It is valuable to challenge the dominant paradigms by which we criticize the Virgin Labfest because theater, like any other discipline, exists not in a vacuum but in constant conversation with its surroundings — with other plays, with the sociopolitical situation, with other artistic and cultural work, with the past and future. During a time when artists are afraid to be labeled apolitical and politics is used as a tool for marketing or for silencing work instead of strengthening it, the works in Set B of Virgin Labfest 18 have the courage to challenge the virtuosity of the artistic process and the artist often venerated for their creations.

From three vantage points, each play exhumes the difficult conversations so few confess to having and lays out such mess onstage for the world to parse and scrutinize, forcing the audience to confront the ethics of the art they consume casually while attempting to hold the artists accountable for the fascistic tendencies they conceal behind righteous facades. 

Even in its failures in form and execution, in the subjects it skims or evades altogether, the triptych assembled by festival directors Marco Viaña and Tess Jamias holds value because its ambitions lead to tougher, more prescient questions: What happens when artists and their work become false idols? What do we do when cultural work is shaped not by stories and truth but by egos and greed? What past are we asking the audience to reconnect to and what future are we asking them to imagine through theater?

Set B resists the trappings of ambiguity and through this, the triptych encourages curiosities instead of killing them, opens up discussions instead of closing them, and allows the audience to not merely interpret but also reject the stagings. It is the festival’s most generous set — a moving image displaying the precarity of our landscape and the persistence of cycles that trap art-making in the country; one that leaves viewers with images and ideas that remain difficult to shake off.

Tuloy ang Palabas (written by Layeta Bucoy, directed by Tuxqs Rutaquio)

The insidious forces in Layeta Bucoy’s Tuloy ang Palabas never appear onstage. But their iron grip on the throats of its protagonists — the aging actress Solita (Shamaine Buencamino) and her niece coerced into performing named Adeling (Rissey Reyes-Robinson) — are strong enough that they suffocate, even in their absence. It is the first time in three years that the gobernadorcillo has chosen local talents to perform for their festival, and what lies on the line isn’t just the livelihoods of the two women, but the continuation of their artistic legacy.

At the hands of director Tuxqs Rutaquio, Bucoy’s script becomes a wellspring of violence between two women from different generations — a battle between local and colonial, tradition and modernity, routine and adaptation, poverty and prosperity. Bucoy and Rutaquio capture the glamor that artists have to maintain despite their material insufficiency – a façade that exists within the play’s 19^th century setting that continues up to this day, shattered only recently by the pandemic. The browns of Julio Garcia’s production design — from the aged bamboo walls to the beige dresses — emphasize their desolate condition. Wooden tables are topped with rotting food from neighbors. Utensils are hidden in cupboards that are falling apart. Mirrors are dirty, barely reflecting their faces. Their house is far from habitable. This stifling environment clouds every aspect of their decision-making.

The instability of artistic life, the persona of the “starving artist,” has been valorized to the point of cliché. Yet what use is theater if the people are barely living — some even dying — in its creation? Rutaquio and Bucoy mine how artists cling to their craft as a survival mechanism and it helps that the two actors delve deep into the psyche of their respective characters. Reyes-Robinson is kinetic, feral, and disturbingly beautiful, her face evolving in curiosity and yearning. On the other hand, Buencamino is stoic and resistant, clinging onto every ounce of dignity she still has left. At times, their dynamic is reminiscent of the one in Marsha Norman’s ‘night, Mother, the gun replaced only by a rusty knife.

Widening the contrast in how the two externalize their desperation will only strengthen the work. But where Tuloy ang Palabas winds up has already been determined from the production’s first image. Like in the Book of Jonah, avoidance only brings Solita closer to destiny. The final moment is one of this year’s most harrowing, a combination of pills too difficult to dry-swallow.

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Dominador Gonzales: National Artist (written by Dingdong Novenario, directed by George De Jésus)

Do not be fooled by the baklaan and the humor; Dominador Gonzales: National Artist is a tango between two devils — one disguised as the titular National Artist-to-be (an excellent Joel Saracho) and the other as his fallen “mentee” Oliver (the unmatched physical comedian Riki Benedicto). Seeking a way out of the corporate hellscape, Oliver proposes a collaboration between the two. But when Dominador rejects the proposal — partly due to Oliver’s lack of talent, partly recognizing his parasitic tendencies — the two engage in a war of words. Labels and accusations are spewed left and right, with each defending their ego and self-righteousness. As they mentally spar, the househelp Edward (a charming yet underutilized AJ Sison) joyfully plays his mobile game, oblivious to their discussions, an artistic decision that emphasizes the solipsism of the characters.

Instead of handling the central issues of sexual violence with empathy, it goes for the opposite and purposefully has its protagonists mishandle sensitive discussions. There is little care in their conversations about the #MeToo movement, the allegations of grooming, the aftermath of cancel culture, the implications of their political allegiances and silences. In this approach, Dominador Gonzales: National Artist demonstrates the distance between the private lives and public personas of the artists we look up to, and between the generation creating the art and viewing the work. How can we ask for accountability from people we barely know? How do we know if their benevolence is true or is merely part of yet another performance?

Perversion and hypocrisy seem central to Novenario’s writing. At times, it is excessive and unnecessary. When Oliver, desperate to bring down his mentor, asks Edward if he is being groomed, he unwittingly begins violating him under the guise of playful teasing. The scene is discomforting, infuriating, and all the more disturbing in Edward’s unawareness. But to linger on these lapses is to push aside how Dominador Gonzales: National Artist paints in broad strokes the moral cushion artistic excellence provides. It is a comedy that becomes increasingly horrific in the days after its viewing.

Awards past and present line the walls behind them, a constant reminder that the characters, including Dominador himself, cannot possibly live up to the expectations placed on a national symbol. But by choosing shallow engagement over deeper conversations, it also blunts the potential of the work to be a criticism of idolatry. It is why the final confrontation between the two is flaccid, the escalation never having any true consequence nor any true reversal of power dynamics. George De Jésus imparts too little directorial flair to amplify the internal contradictions of its characters, and the audience is given images that leave instead of linger; a form of theater that could easily be a radio drama. This is no condemnation of either man; only a reminder that art seems meaningless in the face of death and loneliness.

Awit ng Dalagang Marmol (written by Andrew Estacio, directed by Nazer Salcedo)

The first five minutes of Andrew Estacio’s Awit ng Dalagang Marmol are without a doubt the most painful of the festival — filled with the kind of worn-out tableaus and symbolisms that even the laziest of theater practitioners know to avoid. But when Adrienne Vergara enters from the audience area, spewing notes about lighting and acting, one will exhale a sigh of relief. Structured as a play within a play, Awit ng Dalagang Marmol follows a theater troupe just two weeks away from the opening night of their new theater production centered around Jocelynang Baliwag, whose rehearsal process is disrupted by the late arrival of an internationally qualified dramaturg.

Awit ng Dalagang Marmol is, in many ways, a meta-textual peek into and criticism of Virgin Labfest itself. At first, innocent suggestions are accepted. But as opening night draws closer, higher stakes turn rehearsals into a battle for creative ownership. It creates comedy out of the inability to say no and draws tension from rejection sensitivity, particularly through Vergara’s persona as a director, whose passive aggressiveness and one-liners cut through the drama, exposing in her hypocrisy the minute ways directors can be fascistic in their attempt to wrangle creative control.

Much of the success of Awit ng Dalagang Marmol must be credited to the collaboration between Estacio, Salcedo, and dramaturg Steven Clark Peralta. The didactic nature of the work may turn some off, especially as the dramaturg (Kath Castillo) rattles off facts in rapid succession. But part of the fun is looking at the reactions of the ensemble in the face of new information — fascination, bewilderment, outright disdain. In an artistic process that calls itself collaborative, how can artists maintain a voice? How can they challenge ideas without rejecting them? What do we do when the work is radically transformed by facts? What happens when the answers to these questions get in the way of telling the truth of the story?

Political theater is always a tug-of-war between historical accuracy and taking artistic liberties in service of effect. But here, Salcedo directs fictional scenes that demonstrate the sloppiness of the rehearsal process at arriving at that balance. Scenes are acted with failed seriousness and are responded with self-congratulations. It challenges the notion of the rehearsal space as a place of perfection and offers instead an alternative picture — one which centers exploration, encourages failure, and demonstrates how artists negotiate endings.

The most radical is the way it introduces the value of the dramaturg not as a walking Encarta but as a creative collaborator that functions as a conduit of truth. So when she confesses that the play is being used as a cultural smokescreen, the air in the room changes. When faced with the reality that art is complicit to the systems that need dismantling, how are artists supposed to respond?

The final moment asks the festival’s most important question: if theater cannot be in service of truth, is there still a point in doing any of it? The decision to end the production and the set with an elderly Pepita Tiongson (Peewee O’Hara), singing “Jocelynang Baliwag” under a single spotlight, music sheets and historical documents raining down slowly over her, is haunting not only because of its affect but also its message: to choose truth, even in a time of peril. To always choose truth. – Rappler.com

Virgin Labfest Set B will be on June 14 and 24 at 2 pm and June 18 and 23 at 8 pm.