"Teatro Porvenir" is a full-length play which won second prize at the Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature last year.
It is about theater and revolution: how moro-moro theater artists in Tondo created a secret society which ended three hundred years of colonial rule. These artists included Aurelio Tolentino (for whom the theater venue is named), Macario Sakay and the brothers Ciriaco, Procopio and Andres Bonifacio. The play is a product of a long, exciting research sparked by a footnote in Agoncillo's Revolt of the Masses, where a Tondo neighbor recalled that the Bonifacio brothers had a moro-moro theater group called Teatro Porvenir (in English, Theater of the Future).
This play is, of course, not a work of strict historiography but I made sure my scene imaginings, however wild, would conform to chronology from 1892 to 1907 (I can't help it — my minor courses in UP were History and Anthropology). 1907 is the year Sakay was executed by the American Colonial government, which makes this year his death-by-hanging centennial.
The play will be directed by Dennis Marasigan. In a staged-reading, you will see costumed actors acting on stage while still carrying and reading their scripts. According to Dennis, this is a legitimate performance style even on Broadway — Al Pacino and Marissa Tomei, for example, recently read "Salome." In my play, some of the elaborate action — and I have a lot due to moro-moro march and battle scenes transposed as historical events — will be read by a stage manager.
Please come and watch the staged-reading of my play, "Teatro Porvenir" on Friday, July 6, 2007 at 7 p.m. at Tanghalang Aurelio Tolentino (CCP Little Theater). Entrance fee is on a "Pay-what-you-can" basis.
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