By ELIZABETH LOLARGA
WHO’S afraid of the tikbalang, the half-human, half-horse in Philippine mythology?
It is said that this creature moves with incredible speed and gets married when the weather is playing tricks — that is, when the sun is out and rain is falling at the same time.
Versatile writer Gilda Cordero Fernando has moved with ease from fiction to essay and children’s literature even though when she was a child her father, a rational physician, forbade the help from telling her stories about Philippine mythology creatures like the tikbalang, kapre (a tree demon with human characteristics), or aswang (a vampire-like being).
Perennial curiosity seeker, she has made these elementals the subject of research for some of her illustrated GCF Books and the basis for her theater production, Luna: An Aswang Romance.
Her “Magic Cicle,” a story for kids and adults serialized in a broadsheet and in the works as a book, is the basis of Rody Vera’s play Umaaraw, Umuulan Kinakasal ang Tikbalang.
The Dulaang UP production, directed by Jose Estrella at Teatro Hermogenes Ilagan, Faculty Center, University of the Philippines Diliman, Quezon City, has seasoned actors like Bodgie Pascual teaming up with theater arts students. No uneven distribution of acting chops there.
Less than two hours long with no intermission, the play has been drawing a crowd of youth, especially children from private schools who may be encountering creatures from the Philippine underworld for the first time.
Cordero Fernando said these private school-educated kids are the targets she wants for the play because they’ve become unfamiliar with their heritage. Those from public schools may still have retained their belief in otherworldly creatures.
In the darkened theater, it is not unusual to hear a child pipe up, “I’m scared!” when another forest creature appears for the first time.
If hobbits and a slithery character like Gollum in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series and the fantasy adventures of Harry Potter have fired up their imaginations, what more with our very own tikbalang and company who are equally colorful and endowed with supernatural powers?
Children’s stories often take a didactic tone, that old “what’s the moral of the story?” asked of kids. Umaaraw Umuulan… is no exemption, but Cordero Fernando ensured her story wouldn’t hammer in the environmental message too strenuously.
She said: “If it comes out silly, I don’t care. Iyun ’yon (That’s it).”
Estrella knows whom to tap as artistic collaborators. Her choices synchronize with Cordero Fernando’s taste for the outré and shabby chic: Leeroy New for costume design, Don Salubayba for the visuals, especially the shadow play portion with the march of forest beings that had youngsters in the audience awestruck and yelping “Wow!”
New is known for whimsical sculptures found in public parks and lately, a body armor designed for pop star Lady Gaga in the video of her single “Marry the Night.”
The youngsters can see themselves in the character of Jepoy (Fitz Bitana), a boy who’d rather be lured to an enchanted forest by his loyal mutt Galis (Opaline Santos) than stay home to help his mother Barang (Skysx Labastilla) with the laundry. Jepoy is touted as the offspring of a kapre father and an aswang mother.
Little by little, his third eye opens. He realizes, through encounters with a Spanish pidgin-speaking dwarf (ably played on her knees by Karenina Haniel), the tres Marias, Makiling (Charlene Elechi), Sinukuan (Therese Carlos) and Cacao (Jo Ann Teh), all statuesque green muses who guard the mountains and rivers, the genteel, generously proportioned Donya Geronima who tinkles as she walks majestically in a cape of plastic spoons and forks ingeniously put together, and talking flora and fauna (pineapple, cat, snake, rat and cockroach puppets), that the underworld is the opposite of the world he knows.
While material riches are ranked high in the “civilized” world despite collateral costs like deforestation and pollution, in the enchanted world what is important is oneness with nature or not taking more than what one needs.
Like the boy in the musical Camelot, Jepoy is tasked by the dying kapre to be the messenger to spread the word that humans must learn to respect nature, rein in their green, be tolerant and accepting of those different from themselves and learn this before what’s left of the good earth is dissipated.
Who would have thought that sassy Cordero Fernando’s silliness can entertainingly drive home serious points like those? To Vera and Estrella go the laurels for carrying out a serious vision couched in a seemingly silly plot in a modest space, with an even more modest budget.
The remaining play dates of Umaaraw Umuulan Kinakasal ang Tikbalang are -Dec 4 and Dec. 7-11. Show times are at 7 p.m., Wednesdays-Fridays and 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays.