This is probably off-topic, but the play IS an adaptation of a classic Filipino film, so it isnt' too off topic, at least I hope not.
Anyways...
Insiang comes home
Noel Vera
"Insiang," Lino Brocka's 1976 film about a young girl raped by her mother's lover, is arguably his masterpiece--an intimate chamber drama that slips like a butcher knife under the skin, slicing away fatty illusion and encrusted complacency. It's a visionary exploration of the squalor of Tondo communities, of little plywood shanties trembling under the shadow of a mountain of garbage--
The film was Brocka's first to be shown internationally; more, it was the first Filipino film to go to the Cannes Film Festival, where it was screened at the prestigious Director's Fortnight. Its reputation has grown since; the film has consistently placed high, if not at the very top, of every listing of the best Filipino films ever made. Audiences and critics alike sat up and took notice of Brocka when he made "Tinimbang Ka Ngunit Kulang" (You Were Weighed and Found Wanting) in 1974; they applauded his "Maynila sa Kuko ng Liwanag" (Manila in the Claws of Neon) in 1975. "Insiang " confirmed what Filipinos already knew--that Brocka was not just one of the best filmmakers in the country, but among the best in the world.
What few remember or even realize was that before "Insiang" was a film it was a script by Mario O'Hara, a close collaborator of Brocka; and that it wasn't even a film but a TV script, for an episode of the drama series "Hilda," back in 1973. A few years later Brocka was pitching projects to neophyte producer Ruby Tiong Tan (one of his proposals was a screen adaptation of Agapito Joaquin's one-act play "Bubungang Lata" (Tin Roof), which O'Hara turned into a film in 1998), and Ms. Tan agreed to "Insiang." O'Hara wasn't available to adapt his teleplay (he was directing his second feature film, the historical epic "Tatlong Taong Walang Diyos" (Three Years Without God, 1976)), so Lamberto Antonio filled in instead--according to O'Hara there were few changes. The film was shot on location in fourteen days, on a budget of P600,000 pesos (roughly three million pesos today).
The rest, as they say, is history.
It's now 2002, some twenty-six years later, and Tanghalang Pilipino has chosen as part of its 16th season to perform "Insiang" on the theater stage; the question foremost on everyone's mind--it was certainly on mine--is "why?" The film has achieved legendary status in the history of Philippine cinema. It remains indelible in people's minds as the definitive work of Filipino social-realism--in fact, after "Insiang," practically every other film on the topic, including Brocka's own "Jaguar" (1979) which was partly set in Tondo, seem almost redundant in comparison. Why remake what many consider a near-perfect work? In terms of structure, of sustained dramatic tension, of economy of means achieving maximum effect, the film stands above almost any other Filipino films (only one other approaches its elegance and intensity--Mike de Leon's masterwork, "Kisapmata" (Blink of an Eye, 1982)).
The difference between film and play is apparent from the opening scene: Brocka's film begins inside a slaughterhouse, with Conrado Baltazar's magnificent cinematography capturing the stench of offal; we're given a close-up of a knife plunging into a pig's throat, the blood fountaining out the hole. It's Brocka's idea of hell on earth, of violence institutionalized, mechanized, running like an assembly line at full capacity (which it is). This, Brocka is telling us, is Tondo, nor are we out of it.
The play opens on the slum-area set where the story takes place; instead of Brocka's blood-and-offal stink, we smell--detergent soap? Director Chris Millado in an interview talks of O'Hara telling him that slum dwellers, or 'squatters' as we like to call them, are not automatically prostitutes or drug addicts or thieves; that they make every effort to keep themselves and their surroundings clean; that some actually go to college, or hold white-collar jobs at offices, that a rough sort of law and order prevails. If this is hell, it's not a hell comprehensible through first impressions, a hell where the truth is as immediately apparent as in Brocka's film.
The play partly answers an age-old criticism of the film: when it was first screened in Cannes, the one negative comment was that Koronel was too beautiful to live in a slum; Brocka replied "but she IS from the slums." Good answer, but no one pointed out afterwards that Koronel didn't stay there; she quickly left and became a famous movie star. Actually, a woman who looks like Koronel would be noticed in a Tondo slum; she would quickly become someone's mistress or girlfriend, and rise up the social ladder accordingly. The slums of Pasay, where O'Hara had originally set the film, are full of prostitutes, bargirls, transvestites, what-have-you; girls, even girls as beautiful as Koronel, are a dime a dozen there. Brocka set the film in Tondo's slums and nearby Smoky Mountain because he wanted the visual impact of Koronel's beauty against Tondo's spectacular squalor.
Which may also indicate a basic difference between Brocka's and O'Hara's approach, at least with respect to this story: Brocka didn't seem to mind going after a good effect, even at the cost of some distortion of the truth; O'Hara, apparently, isn't as flashy--the truth's the truth, plain and simple.
It might seem strange to talk about simple truth when the play itself isn't so simple. Where Brocka presents the story in straightforward realist terms--as I've pointed out, his film set the standard for realism--O'Hara's play goes off into fanciful tangents: dramatic pauses, nostalgic flashbacks, what-have-you. O'Hara even introduces a new character, Toyang (the hilarious and moving Mae Paner), who functions much as The Common Man did in Robert Bolt's "A Man For All Seasons" (yes, that old chestnut, the narrator/commentator who scatters nuggets of wisdom like droppings throughout the play). O'Hara, however, pulls off a neat joke: Toyang is considered crazy because she talks to no one in particular, when in fact she's really talking to us. "Who" she asks indignantly, taking us in with a sweep of her arms "is crazy now? I've got all you people listening to me!"
It's a conceit worthy of the mindbending fiction of Philip K. Dick: to everyone around her, Toyang is a loon; to herself and us, she possesses the power to warp time and space according to her will. "Quiet!" she shrieks, and all fall silent as she explains the use of music in radio dramas as a transitional device; "stop!" she commands and the world pauses while she points out that the specific chord just played is a popular one in radio, used to emphasize dramatic moments. It's a distancing device, yes; it gives the audience regular doses of humor and the occasional breathing space. It's also a chance for O'Hara to display his broad knowledge of radio--the medium where he began his performing career some thirty years ago, and for which he feels too much affection to abandon entirely. Eventually during the course of the play, you realize that Toyang's asides also serve to show to us, through a process of deconstruction and analysis, that the story of "Insiang" itself is not so very different from a radio soap opera--one playing out live among the very same squatters who sit and listen to the radio so avidly every day.
"Insiang" sets out to be truthful and ultimately--with narrator, pauses, flashbacks and all--it succeeds, I think. When Toyang, for example, asks Insiang if she's a virgin, she halts Insiang in mid-speech to present her to us. "Look at that face--clear, unworried, the face of someone without secrets; Insiang is the one true innocent in this corrupt community." Later Toyang asks Dado, lover of Insiang's mother, why he came to Manila; he replies that he got a girl pregnant. Toyang freezes his face: "it's full of wrinkles, as if he had to think carefully before he gave his answer. This is the face of a man with something to hide." After the rape, Toyang pauses to look at Insiang's face one more time; the difference is telling. "She doesn't blink! Her eyes look straight ahead, and don't blink. This face frightens me!" A magnifying glass distorts light, to allow closer inspection of images; "Insiang" distends time, to allow us deeper insight into characters already made familiar by the film.
