A father meets his daughter for the last time.
Journalist Mario clandestinely meets his daughter Marlen in an isolated forest. They have not met for a decade since Marlen joined the rebel movement. Both the government Armed Forces and the underground guerillas are after Marlen, now a high-ranking rebel leader. She opens her heart as she realizes she talks with her father for the last time.
My latest play meandered through many emotional pauses. There were moments when I had to stop to steady my emotions. What happens when a doting father meets his daughter for the last time? The feel is heavy.
director’s notes
The pauses brought me back to my normal sense of order. I gather my experiences to fuel truth and feeling in this play that seems so real as the air in the room I worked in. How more difficult it is to write a play now even as I move into my over-40 years of playwriting and directing. Not because I lack the technique but because the empathy of creating characters in a situation that feels so real is more deeply felt, etched.
The narrative demanded that a chronological storyline would not be as effective as the play moves through two generations of various miliues: conflicts, characters, and imagery required the mixture of myth and realism.
Like the dramaturgy I have evolved, the narrative moves through a collage of images and lines as I have used in past works. Postmodern methods compose an understanding of meanings and an expected response from an audience that comes closest to how we, in the real world, would make sense to our living.
The play overlaps actions and spaces, moves from one milieu to the next and back again, devises movements, combines the supernatural with the physical, and overlaps mediums.
No play is ever complete even if it has been performed as it goes through a shared consciousness that is constantly changing. Change, enhancements, and re-forming are the constants that declare that Theatre is a living thing. The audience is always that active part of this process.
MarLen defines IPAG’s innovations devised to incite deep emotional engagements. The play raises questions about the reason for conflict spurred by politics and ideology.
MarLen inspires a trip of tumultuous directions, written down and acted out, to rehearsals and performances to grip hold of one’s feel- ings and experience violence disintegrating Humanity and a nation.
“Phew! What a great performance and story!… Perfect ang cast, ang music, ang acting! Music, script, production design … A must-watch (experience)!“
Yvette Marie Sabellona, Creative Industry Council, Iligan