The Wily Filipino

Jeannie Barroga's Banyan.

Jeannie Barroga's new play Banyan begins, quite promisingly, with the sight of Ona's (aka Dorothy, played with a kind of wide-eyed scariness by Victoria Mejia) red Converse shoes, her iPod, and, perhaps most important for the opening scene, the sound of shredding paper over the fading notes of "Somewhere over the Rainbow."

The ambient sound -- along with, at times, the distracting chirps of birds -- is important, because in a sense it's all background noise. There is hardly a moment of stillness in the entire play; the actors spend their time on stage drowning each other out, as if the constant, logorrheal flow of language (and there are indeed bodily fluids aplenty, including one long, ill-advised, piss) could smooth over the growing noise around them. Or, better yet, as if their constant chatter -- the first scene, for instance, revels in what I can only call Wall Street staccato -- could somehow ward off the evil spirits that lie in wait. It doesn't work. The aswang gets you anyway, and will suck out your life essence until you're -- oh, I can't resist a Munchkin reference here -- morally, ethically, spiritually, physically, positively, absolutely, undeniably, and reliably... dead.

Playwright Jeannie Barroga explains that Banyan is a response to 9/11, by way of a Pinay Wizard of Oz. In this respect, Banyan, like the tree that gives the play its title, is something of a sprawling mess. This is not meant to be negative, though it does point to something of a problem with the narrative.

With all these balls being juggled, it would inevitably be difficult to keep them all in the air, and this is where the play becomes hard to follow, both tonally and thematically. Francis Tanglao-Aguas' able direction keeps the cast's feet firmly planted on the ground, but Barroga's writing teeters quite close to farce at many points (which seems to contradict almost everyone's high-minded seriousness in the program notes). Add to this stew a couple of indecisive corporate execs, a trio of quarrelling soldiers, and yes, a blood-sucking, hump-hungry, succubus-like creature -- with almost all the actors playing double, if not triple roles -- and you get, as written above, a sometimes confusing tangle of tree roots. (Vicki Zabarte, as the aswang, actually does triple duty as the Wicked Boss Witch and, in a scene-stealing performance, a shrill Philippine Airlines flight attendant.) Towards the end, the "dream" bleeds more and more into "reality," making the sense of disorientation -- also felt at least by this member of the audience -- even more acute.

[Special mention must also be made here of Jose Saenz, who, I swear to god, must be the hardest-working Filipino American in show business, at least in these parts. (I think I see him on campus almost every week, and, it seems, in just about every other theater production in San Francisco.) His unctuous CIA agent / mysterious black-clad assistant strikes just the right note; to watch him unexpectedly channel the Cowardly Lion (at least that was how I interpreted it) is one of the play's better touches.

The set design, by Michael Mehler, is exemplary in its relative economy: the exposed office piping standing in for roots and branches, the shredded paper strewn everywhere as both corporate debris and oppressive rainforest moss. There are no windows in this New York office for its imprisoned employees; the walls are perversely covered by glossy Philippine tourism posters of beaches and blue skies. The banyan tree trunk itself looks like a transparent cloth canopy that could be both Enterprise Transporter or butterfly cage; either way, it works really well.]

But there's a good reason for what I described above as "a sprawling mess" (and again, it's not necessarily meant to be a negative): the fragmentary nature of Banyan's scenes, as well as the palpable feeling that things are about to go out of control (notably Michael Dorado, who plays his custodian / soldier role in perfectly calibrated, but slightly unhinged mode), are clearly in keeping with the setting, i.e., the dizzying experience of a company going down the tubes, the dislocation of an impenetrable Philippine jungle, and the breakneck use of language in a last-ditch attempt to anchor one's self. (One of the more amusing subplots in the play is how Barroga employs the cliche of the Filipino American "going back home" to the Philippines to "rediscover" her roots -- and ends up getting kidnapped by, in essence, the lion, the scarecrow and the tin (wo)man.)

"Maybe some of us need myths," Ona says at some point. This play is, perhaps, Jeannie Barroga's ambitious and fascinating attempt to make some overarching sense of the chaos of the last five years, a way of re-articulating the war on terrorism and the Philippines and the fiscal malfeasance of Enron into a grander and more spiritually resonant narrative. Banyan, then, could be seen as a shotgun marriage of Hollywood mythos and Filipino alamat -- perhaps echoing that originary, violent moment of the American incursion into the Philippines, at the barrel of a gun. Barroga's play gestures to something bigger than Oz; as Dorothy insists at the end of the 1939 film, it wasn't a dream -- a dream jungle, if you will -- but a place. (And you, and you, and you, and you, were there.) Ona's whirlwind journey may be in her head, but real corruption, and a very real war, is still happening in a real, truly live place.

Banyan, presented by the Asian American Theater Company, is playing from November 3-20 -- Wednesdays to Saturdays at 8, and on Sundays at 7 -- at New Langton Arts on 1246 Folsom Street (and 8th) in San Francisco. (Tickets, for only $15, can be purchased here.)

Posted by the wily filipino at November 4, 2005 02:10 AM