A highly memorable theater treat during the weekend was Dolly de Leon essaying the role of an OFW at the Samsung Theater for Performing Arts.
Request Sa Radyo is a Filipino adaptation of German playwright Franz Xaver Kroetz’s Wunschkonzert (Request Program). Indeed, it is groundbreaking as you won’t hear speaking lines throughout its one-hour visualized staging.
The stage where one used to watch orchestra concerts was transformed into an intimate venue to reveal a living room superbly designed by Clint Ramos with intimate lighting design by Elizabeth Mak.
Having decided to watch only at the last minute, one got lucky to get the last back row seat for the show of Dolly De Leon but promptly received regrets for the 6 p.m. show of Lea Salonga. It was sold out.
Nevertheless, it was a big treat because one has never seen the star of Triangle of Sadness on the theater stage having missed all her past Dulaang UP engagements.
One was content with her token appearances on film (A Very Good Girl) and a few cameo roles in teleseryes (Dirty Linen).
But an hour of only one award-winning actor on the stage with no speaking lines was a theater treat of a lifetime.
As it turned out, the show was a virtual Theater of Silence reminiscent of Andrea Bocelli’s concert venue called Teatro del Silenzio in the Tuscan hills of Italy.
Only the occasional coughing of audiences breaks the silence as actions unfold on stage.
And it was only Dolly de Leon as the New York-based OFW unraveling her life in a one-woman show.
In her entrance, De Leon’s character is seen going back to her city abode after the day’s work. There is total silence in her room even as the sound of cars and wailing of ambulance in the streets of New York are heard in the background.
She checks the left over in the kitchen and throws up when her tongue felt something that tastes like rotten food. She cooks rice and the day’s viand (soup consisting of vegetables and frozen meat).
The rest are solitary rituals of a woman alone in a foreign country.
In this setting, she has no one to interact with except the radio reaching out to Filipino listeners. The popular music from the homeland feel like balm to her weary spirit. In another music quite fast in tempo, she gyrates, does rock and roll movements and soon she is back to her old self realizing she is alone and gripped by loneliness.
Alone in this apartment, she does her rituals, relieving herself in the bathroom, checking updates in her cell phone and most of the time, she must have been gripped by thoughts of loved ones in her homeland.
Later, she swallows one pill father another. She is ready to call it a night but something seems to bother her.
What amazes is the way her character reflects various moods and the spontaneous ease with which she comes to terms with her solitary life. On her face, you see snatches of joy, glimpses of nostalgia and signs of weariness slowly getting into her being.
One has not gotten around to describing De Leon’s portrait of the Filipino as OFW in Request Sa Radyo.
One found the perfect description in the FB post of award-winning actor, director and playwright Guelan Luarca: “Dolly de Leon’s greatest success is the intense discipline of ‘cutting out the 90%’, to quote Stanislavsky to distill loneliness to its most aching point of precision. The exhaustion, the fatigue, the grasping for color and flavor, just anything to survive the day. She was so specifically committed to her own narrative which we were not privy to. In being hyper-specific, she became all of us, she became me in Brooklyn, in Manhattan. The sense of ‘thisness’ that, I know, is the hardest thing to achieve as an actor, but looks like the most effortless thing when your part of the audience. Thank you, Dolly. You are so generous with your pain. Request sa Radyo gutted me. De Leon’s ’s loneliness is murderously poignant.”
When a sudden blackout hits the stage and lights come back, you see the solitary actress all alone the stage and basking at the applause and the standing ovation.
Request Sa Radyo is a product of perfect theater collaboration from superb director Bobby Garcia to actors, lighting and sound designers and yes, the marketing group.
Hear it from Request Sa Radyo acting director Jamie Wilson: “The beauty of being in the entertainment industry is that you get to be a part of the magic happening behind the scenes, and somehow manage to create moments like this.”
(Request sa Radyo was presented by Ayala Land, Inc., John B. Echauz & Joanna Silayan-Echauz, Bobby Garcia, and Clint Ramos, with BPI as the official bank partner. Additional support is provided by Ayala Corporation, AC Health, Philippine Airlines as the official carrier, and Seda Hotels as the official residence.)
