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DOGEATERS': FILIPINO LIFE SEEN THROUGH A POP CULTURE PRISM
By DON SHEWEY
New York Times
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WHEN the writer Jessica Hagedorn was first approached by the director Michael
Greif about adapting her novel "Dogeaters" for the theater, she was
dubious. "I could see it as a film," Ms. Hagedorn said recently. "But
for the stage? It's so big and busy and dense."
Those are all accurate words to describe the novel, which was nominated for
a National Book Award when it came out in 1990. A sprawling pastiche about contemporary
life in the Philippines, "Dogeaters" bounces between two different
narratives: the 1950's adolescence of Rio Gonzaga, a movie-obsessed girl from
an extended upper-middle-class family, and the scrappy existence of Joey Sands,
a poor young half-black male prostitute who witnesses the assassination of a
popular politician (a character not unlike Benigno Aquino) in 1982.
These stories are intertwined with snippets of recent Filipino history refracted
through radio melodramas, news reports and the Hollywood dreams that equally
infect waiters, porn stars, generals and beauty queens, including the former
first lady, Imelda Marcos herself. The result is a portrait of Filipino life
as a turbulent, exuberantly tacky post-colonial soap opera unraveling in the
shadow of the superpowers.
The challenges of turning the book into a play did not deter Mr. Greif, who
is best known for directing the musical "Rent." "I thought the
novel told a great story," he said recently, "and the effect of the
world of entertainment on this culture was so fascinating and alive and inherently
theatrical."
He commissioned Ms. Hagedorn to write the play and has shepherded it from its
1998 world premiere at the La Jolla Playhouse in California, where he was artistic
director at the time, through a series of developmental workshops to a full
production at the Joseph Papp Public Theater, where it opens tonight.
The New York staging of "Dogeaters" has a cultural significance beyond
that of most literary adaptations. Opening at one of Manhattan's most distingushed
theaters brings the play as close to mainstream American culture as any dramatic
work about Filipino life has ever gotten. To call it the Filipino equivalent
of "Fiddler on the Roof" may be a stretch, but its importance is certainly
comparable to that of David Henry Hwang's plays about Chinese- American culture
in the early 1980's.
And the stage production of "Dogeaters" marks the maturation of a
community of Filipino- American theater artists in New York City, which has
been ripening for several years. The cast of 15 includes nearly all the heavy
hitters of that increasingly tight- knit community: the veteran actors Ching
Valdes-Aran and Jojo Gonzalez; Mia Katigbak, the artistic director of the National
Asian-American Theater Company (which recently mounted an all-Asian production
of Lorca's "House of Bernarda Alba" directed by Chay Yew and starring
Ms. Valdes- Aran); Ralph B. Peña, the artistic director of the Ma-Yi
Theater Company, which is devoted to producing Filipino-American work; and Alec
Mapa, who appeared on Broadway in Mr. Hwang's "M. Butterfly" and at
the Public in "A Language of Their Own" by Mr. Yew.
"What a joy to bring these performers together," Mr. Greif said, "and
how easy it was because of their commitment to the material, and to Jessica."
Ms. Hagedorn, 51, is herself a highly regarded figure in the overlapping worlds
of downtown theater and Asian-American literature. A stylish and handsome woman,
she lives in the West Village with the artist John Woo, who designed the projections
for "Dogeaters," and their two daughters. Born and brought up in Manila,
she moved to San Francisco with her mother when she was 14. She began writing
poetry with the encouragement of Kenneth Rexroth and for 10 years led a rock
band called the Gangster Choir. When she came to New York in 1978 for a series
of readings with two writer friends, Ntozake Shange and Thulani Davis, Ms. Hagedorn
fell in love with the city and decided to stay. She has collaborated on multimedia
theater projects with Laurie Carlos, Robbie McCauley and Han Ong, and she wrote
the screenplay for Sue Lea Chang's film "Fresh Kill." In addition
to publishing two novels and two volumes of her own poetry and short prose,
she edited "Charlie Chan Is Dead," a groundbreaking anthology of Asian-American
writing.
"Jessica has been able to open a door into the mainstream that has allowed
a lot of people who have been forced to work subculturally to be seen,"
said the novelist and playwright Sarah Schulman, who travels in the same downtown
arts world as Ms. Hagedorn. "That's what makes this moment important historically.
No matter how `Dogeaters' is received, Filipino representation onstage will
be different forever."
The depiction of Filipino life that Ms. Hagedorn offers in "Dogeaters"
is not especially flattering. Even the title has offended many Filipinos. It
is a pejorative term, which dates back to the Philippine-American war —
the insurrection that began after the Spanish-American War ended — when
American soldiers used it to make fun of the natives. "There are certain
regions in the country where the indigenous people eat dogs," Ms. Hagedorn
explained recently, during a break in rehearsals. "It's just another source
of food. Cows and pigs are acceptable, but many Westerners are uncomfortable
with the idea of dog meat because they see the dog as a delightful pet that
shouldn't be on the table. It's a metaphor for a lot of things in the culture
that we feel ashamed of and don't want to share with the outside world. I like
challenging that and turning the whole thing around."
The complicated history of the Philippines is little known to most Americans,
even though the country was a United States territory from 1898 (when Spain
ceded its 300-year colonial rule in exchange for $20 million) until it was granted
independence in 1946. Most people would be surprised to learn that Filipinos
form the largest population of Asian- Americans — Chinese and Vietnamese
are second and third — or that the 7,017 islands that make up the Philippine
archipelago contain more than 70 distinct languages and cultures.
What is remarkable about her novel "Dogeaters" is that Ms. Hagedorn
encapsulates a huge amount of this historical material, but she does so by running
it through a variety of pop-culture filters (movies, music, radio plays, commercials).
And the characters speak a fluid mixture of English, Spanish and Tagalog. This
collage aspect has given the book considerable cachet as a postmodern literary
artifact. An Internet search for references to "Dogeaters" turns up
academic papers with titles like "Hybridity, Difference and Postmodern
Subjectivity in Diasporic Locations" and "Transversing Nationalism,
Gender and Sexuality in `Dog eaters.' "
For Ms. Hagedorn, the form of her novel wasn't just a literary strategy. "That's
what Manila is like for me," she said. "Manila is a collage, from
the very high to the very low, from the very pious to the incredibly depraved.
It's this wonderful tropical city that can't be easily described or defined.
So why should the novel be linear and regimented? It couldn't, if I was to properly
capture what I was trying to capture."
In 1997, with the help of a residency at the Sundance Theater Laboratory in
Utah, Ms. Hagedorn set about whittling her sprawling, nonlinear narrative into
a more focused theatrical form. When the play opened the next year at La Jolla
Playhouse, The Los Angeles Times review said, "She's halfway there."
In that production, Ms. Hagedorn attempted to maintain the novel's split time
frame, which many viewers found confusing. During subsequent workshops at the
Public Theater, leading up to the current production, she decided to set the
play entirely in 1982, keeping Rio's return to the Philippines for her grandmother's
funeral but cutting all the scenes from her childhood.
This was a tough choice for Ms. Hagedorn. Unlike the characters based on famous
Filipinos — Imelda Marcos, Senator Aquino, the action- star-turned-president
Joseph Estrada and a 1970's beauty-pageant winner who joined the rebel army
— Rio is very much an autobiographical figure.
"First, I thought of taking Rio out completely," Ms. Hagedorn said,
"because sometimes I find the conceit of the young writer too precious
and overdone. We tried that, and I immediately knew it wasn't what I wanted.
But I had to figure out a way to make her as active as anyone else. I had a
lot of talks with George Wolfe" — the Public Theater producer —
"and he kept asking me about the Rio character, `How does she earn the
right to summarize everything at the end?' "
In contrast to Rio, the black gay hustler Joey Sands is a wholly invented character
who would seem quite far from Ms. Hagedorn's experience. But two other gay characters
in the play — the high-strung bar owner and drag performer Perlita (played
by Mr. Mapa) and Chiquiting, Imelda Marcos's hairdresser (played by Mr. Peña)
— are based directly on two of her mother's closest friends.
"One was a manicurist," she recalled, "and the other guy was
our seamstress, whose name was Linda, but we called him Ding. I don't think
my father knew he was actually a man. He dressed in drag all the time. He wore
toreador pants, makeup and a long ponytail. He was great. He and my mother would
talk and forget I was there. And, my dear, the voice of Perlita is my mother.
`My blood pressure! My blood is boiling from screaming so much at that idiot!'
That's my mother. I never forgot that dialogue."
The play also has autobiographical resonance for Ms. Valdes-Aran, who plays
Imelda Marcos. When she was a young child, her father was a doctor who was a
close friend of Ferdinand Marcos, then a charismatic young congressman. "He
was my sister's baptismal godfather," she said in an interview. "He
and Imelda attended my sister's wedding in 1984. I knew all those people."
Having known Imelda Marcos doesn't make it easy to play her. "She's a real
person," Ms. Valdes- Aran said. "I don't want to play her as a caricature.
And at the same time she is a caricature. Finding the balance is most difficult
for me."
The peculiarly intimate juxtaposition of private and public life in the Philippines
becomes in "Dogeaters" a microcosm for the increasingly surreal world
of the present, Ms. Hagedorn suggested. "That's what I'm striving to show,
how reality and what I call the dreamtime — escapism — can actually
merge. You can lose yourself in this soap opera, but after a while the soap
opera starts to reflect what's really going on in your life. But what comes
first, your real drama or the fake drama? Are we living according to what we've
seen in the movies? Is that how we expect romance to occur because we've seen
it a million times in the movies? The Philippines is so steeped in love for
pop culture, fantasy life. It's probably one way to get through the day in a
hard life. They work hard and they dream hard and they love hard and they die
hard. There's this fixation with movie stars, pop stars, religious worship and
a sense of melodrama. It's very effusive. Other cultures may find it a bit much,
but I just love it. I love the bigness, the flamboyance."
She herself is a fan of complicated, multilayered theater pieces like the Robert
Wilson-Philip Glass opera "Einstein on the Beach" and Wallace Shawn's
"Designated Mourner." "I have no trouble with dense and busy
narratives that are not linear," she said. "I get lost in a world
that may be very new to me, perhaps, and strange, where I feel off balance,
and I like that. I'm just hoping that many people will take the journey with
me."
She has come to accept that her initial assessment of "Dogeaters"
was correct. "It is dense," she acknowledged. "It's not a minimal
story. There are many, many, many layers of the story: the effect of religion
and spirituality and faith. Violence, the love affair with violence. And carnality.
Deep spirituality and deep carnality. A sense of melancholy pervades. And there's
this entertainment facade, show biz, `Everything's all right, we're going to
smile through hell if we have to.' But I think there's a genuine joy, too, a
sense that no matter what, even if my stomach's growling, I'm going to dance.
That's what I want to leave people with at the end of the play. After all this,
people still know how to live."
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DOGEATERS: MEMORIES OF MANILA UNDER THE MARCOSES
By RANDY GENER
New York Times
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INAYON mo ang tingog mo!" my Lola Adela exclaimed, cautioning us to lower
our voices. Growing up a martial-law baby in the slums of 1970's Old Manila,
I had become somewhat inured to my grandma's frequent exhortations to watch
what we said in public. She warned us of unseen goons who roamed the streets
and countryside with concealed guns and a mandate to shoot on the spot any subversive
caught criticizing Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos.
Admonishing us not in the more common Tagalog dialect but in the Cebuano island
tongue she grew up with, my Lola, my grandma, would whisper to us tales of the
Nenita death squads, C.I.A.-trained soldiers secretly dispatched to the provinces
and various parts of the archipelago. Their mission: to strike fear in the hearts
of suspected Communists. Because these counterinsurgent thugs could appear out
of nowhere and vanish into the shadows after meting out their vigilante form
of justice, my Lola regarded them as more terrifying than ghouls.
That mood of danger and paranoia combined with a sense of the uncanny pervades
Jessica Hagedorn's "Dogeaters," the jazzy 1990 novel she has adapted
into a play of the same name, opening tonight at the Joseph Papp Public Theater.
It is one of the most authentic aspects of her fractal portrait of Manila during
the Marcos years.
As Ms. Hagedorn mused in her essay "Homesick": " `Soldiers in
disguise, patrol the countryside/ Jungle not far away.' So goes a song I once
wrote, pungent as the remembered taste of mangoes overripe as my imagination,
the memory of Manila the central character of the novel I am writing, the novel
that brings me back to this torrid zone, my landscape haunted by ghosts and
movie-lovers."
In her book "Dogeaters," Ms. Hagedorn — working within a literary
tradition that ranges from the national hero Jose Rizal (who wrote two novels
in the 19th century) to the 20th-century playwrights Juan Abad and Aurelio Tolentino,
the poet Jose F. Lacaba and the émigré novelist Carlos Bulosan
— describes how a collection of Filipinos came into political consciousness
amid a torrent of bloody events.
Her alter-ego, Rio Gonzaga, typifies the lost Filipino-American who embarks
on a journey of self-discovery to her homeland. Daisy Avila, a symbol of Roman
Catholic privileged youth who weeps when she is crowned Miss Young Philippines,
is caught between her upper-class father's opposition politics and the eye-for-
an-eye vengeance of the New People's Army rebel leader who impregnates her.
And there is Joey Sands, a disc jockey and gay hustler: the offspring of an
African-American serviceman whom he never knew and a Manila prostitute whose
name has been forgotten, Joey stands for every bastard Filipino who must scrape
to fill in the blank spaces of a lopsided history and slay the demons of a colonized
identity.
As Western consumerism exploded in the years after World War II, a second-hand
Filipino culture thrived, with mainstream television programs, films, radio
and theater slavishly imitating Hollywood styles and mores. Meanwhile, nationalists
posed tough questions about a 100- year colonial bond that was both brutal and
sentimental, tragic and serendipitous.
Although the Philippines had been granted its independence in 1946, the sprawling
American military installations at Clark Field and Subic Bay ensured the continuation
of its satellite relationship with the United States. Until 1992, when the Philippine
Senate refused to renew the agreement concerning the bases, the largest American
military presence in the South Pacific basin was in the Philippines.
Mixing real-life ghouls with phantoms from the past in her novel "Dogeaters,"
Ms. Hagedorn portrays a ruthlessly colonized culture in which the entire population
has been turned into raving movie fans and aspiring film stars. Much of the
story's action takes place in the capital, Manila, a city of dreams — and
a lair of vipers. Steeped in a profusion of cultural legacies from Hispanic
and American to Chinese, Malayan and Indian, it is an urban jungle where modern
and pre-modern views coexist. It is a cheek-by-jowl metropolis, overcrowded
with smiling faces, affluent compounds, seedy nightclubs, old churches, sex
shows, savory dishes, exotic smells, blaring pop songs and squatters. Manila
under Marcos could overwhelm you with the notion that the city's giddy flux
was all part of some portentous and sinister design, masterminded by the First
Family with the unstinting support of the United States government.
The year in which the play "Dog eaters" is set — 1982 —
marked the prelude to a grotesque circus that led to the demise of the Marcos
regime four years later. In 1981 Marcos had lifted martial law, the 1972 decree
that prolonged his rule for nearly nine years after he had nearly completed
the two terms guaranteed by the constitution. Rumored to be gravely ill, he
had rewritten the constitution to obtain unlimited power and tenure.
In August 1983, soldiers loyal to Marcos's chief of staff, Gen. Fabian Ver,
shot the opposition leader Benigno Aquino as he stepped off a plane at Manila
International Airport. Returning from exile in the United States, Ninoy, as
he was affectionately known, was a popular critic of the dictatorship and was
believed to be the only politician left capable of taking over the government.
His murder sparked mass protests and an awakening from a long slumber. Three
years after Aquino's death, Marcos held snap presidential elections that led
to the 1986 uprising known as the People Power Revolution. Ninoy's widow, Corazon
Aquino, was declared the new leader. The Marcoses fled to Hawaii and exile.
But between 1983 and 1986, the tide of anger and resentment against them had
noticeably shifted. In an echo of martial-law days, New People's Army fighters
increased their guerrilla activities and Marcos loyalists found themselves swept
up in a wave of anti-Marcos frenzy that involved marches, mass rallies and street
theater.
I remember seeing tanks rolling down the busy highways of Manila flanked by
rows of shielded military men. At times the troops were meant for show, but
during several student and labor protests chaos erupted after the soldiers began
firing at us. A visit to a bookstore in Manila's commercial district of Makati
was interrupted when we were suddenly told to leave because there were bombs
in the toilets.
At Ateneo de Manila, the Jesuit university I attended, activists taught us what
to do if firemen hosed us down during street protests or if we were caught in
bombardments of tear gas. A staff member on the university newspaper, I had
to report on several friends, Jesuit seminarians and poets, who mysteriously
disappeared during the confusion of a human barricade. They were, in the local
parlance, "salvaged."
Because direct confrontation usually resulted in arrests, the Marcos era stimulated
theatrical performances in which allegorical works involving folk and religious
forms were infused with revolutionary meaning. Presented every year during Advent,
the "Panunuluyan" ("Search for an Inn") turned the story
of the Nativity into a socialist play, which showed Joseph and Mary wandering
in a series of Filipino settings.
After 1983, though, Filipino performers moved into the streets. Based on the
Lenten Passion Play, the "Senakulo Ng Bayan" ("The Nation's Passion
Play") portrayed Jesus as a peasant worker, Annas as Imperial America,
Caiaphas as the Dictator and Herod as the Bureaucrat.
Training, performance and liberation workshops sprouted in the islands of Mindanao,
Luzon, Samar, Negros and Cebu, where my Lola Adela had grown up. Repertory ensembles
revived classics by Shakespeare, Brecht and Euripides, which were translated
and adapted to reflect progressive issues. University troupes, in particular,
presented nationalist-realist works that ridiculed the Marcoses and accused
the United States of exploitation. Radical texts that stood out during that
time included the 1984 "Oratorio Ng Bayan" ("The Nation's Oratorio")
and Chris Millado's 1985 "Buwan at Baril sa E major" ("Moon and
Gun in E major"), which recounted tales of political conversion in the
form of a classical music concert.
For sheer theatrical yuks, however, my favorite memory remains the group Peryante's
hilarious "Ilocula," performed both at the University of the Philippines
and in the streets. This 1983 musical satire skewered Marcos as a bloated dracula
from Ilocos Norte, his home province. Dressed as horror-movie vampires and folkloric
aswangs (monsters), his crony officials belted pro- American and anti-Communist
songs. Soon someone announced the arrival of "Madame Cula," queen
of the monsters and the wife of Ilocula, fresh from a shopping spree in Geneva:
"Our Lady of the Supernatural Center of the Philippines, the Philippine
International Voodoo Center." This scornful title referred to the breakneck
construction of a movie theater in 1981 for one of Imelda Marcos's grand schemes,
the First Manila International Film Festival, designed to promote the Philippines
as the Cannes of the East. Newly poured concrete had buried several workers
alive. Today it is said to be the most haunted building in Manila.
Ms. Hagedorn's book exposed the maruming pulitika (corrupt politics) that continues
to plague the Philippines 15 years after the ousting of Marcos. In January,
a military- backed popular revolt, tellingly called People Power II, brought
down the president and former film star Joseph Estrada. Once reviled and ridiculed,
Imelda Marcos now holds a seat in Congress. In Manila, modern politics intensifies
old feuds and family rivalries.
In her novel, Ms. Hagedorn captured that mixture of love, laughter and sadness
that stirs in every Filipino's heart. It's a mournful, obsessive ballad about
Filipino lives left in postcolonial disarray.