WALA LANG
“Witchcraft,” exclaimed the townspeople of Salem, Massachusetts on seeing how two girls “screamed, threw things about the room, uttered strange sounds, crawled under furniture, and contorted themselves into peculiar positions” and who “complained of being pinched and pricked with pins.” Hysteria spread when other young women began to show the same symptoms. Suspected witches were picked up, slammed into jail, tortured till they confessed, prosecuted, and tried.
Between February 1692 and May 1693, more than 200 men, women, and children (one aged five) were accused, of whom 30 were found guilty by a jury. Fourteen women and five men were hanged and one was crushed to death with the gradual addition of heavy stones to his chest; it took two days for him to die. Soon after, public and judicial opinion turned. The trials ceased and, in 1711, judgments were reversed. After the commemoration of the trials’ 300th anniversary, the Massachusetts legislature formally proclaimed (in 2011) all those found guilty as innocent.
Scholars have theorized that the mass hysteria was caused by the colonists’ anxiety over possible Indian attacks and/or jealousy, spite, greed, attention deficit among the accusers.
American playwright Arthur Miller (second husband of Marilyn Monroe BTW) wrote a celebrated play The Crucible, a partly fictionalized account of the Salem witch trials. He was known to have leftist sympathies and that was the time, in the early 1950s when, led by Senator Joseph McCarthy, the US Congress was obsessed with identifying and blacklisting communists. He was convicted by the US House of Representatives for contempt of Congress for refusing to name names.
In The Crucible, Miller is saying that McCarthyism is like the Salem witch trials where mass hysteria, false accusations, and hidden agenda condemn innocent people. It has also been viewed as a warning over the dangers of isolation, religious extremism, false accusations, and failures of due process and judicial administration.
The play was translated in abridged version to Filipino by Jerry Respeto, Ph.D. The translation is admirable, complete with Tagalisms and local slang. Were it not for the names (Proctor, Parris, Hathorne, Corey, etc.) and the drab Puritan costumes, one can easily place the action in an aswang-believing middle-class barangay.
Entitled Ang Pag-uusig, literally “The Prosecution,” the play is presented by Tanghalang Pilipino Foundation and the CCP. It premiered in 2017 and was presented again in 2018. The original production won six awards from the 10th Gawad Buhay Awards, including Outstanding Play, Outstanding Stage Direction, and Outstanding Translation/Adaptation. Now on its third run, the play opened the other week in the new CCP Black Box Theater, Tanghalang Ignacio Gimenez.
The translated play’s blurb interprets it as something that “dramatizes how the establishment is used as a tool of the powerful few, exerting its magnitude on the many, preventing any sense of community and collectivity from being formed” and “depicts a community ruled by a controlling, self-righteous elite, and the crucial choices each of its members must make in a time of crisis.” I got lost there, although parallels are obvious in connection with pre-Martial Law activists, PCGG, and suspected ill-gotten wealth holders, drug war and EJK, red-tagging.
A young girl lies in bed in some kind of seizure. It turns out that she was with a group of girls dancing naked in the woods. Accusations of witchcraft and conversations with the devil come quick and fast, with revelations along the way of adultery, jealousy, revenge, envy, greed, credulity, betrayal, officiousness, as well as faith, love, sacrifice, and forgiveness.
The acting is terrific, the main characters being senior members of the Tanghalang Pilipino Actors Company: Marco Viana (John Proctor), Lhorvie Nuevo (Elizabeth Proctor); Antonette Go (Abigail), and Jonathan Tadioan (Deputy Governor Danforth). It seemed to me though that the scenes written by Arthur Miller as arguments and rulings in a court of (misguided) justice are here more like halftime disputes in a basketball court. The setting is spare and effective, the lighting dramatic, and the ending no less than stage-shaking.
CCP artistic director and vice president Dennis Marasigan directed the previous presentations of the play. He has exceeded himself in this third run. A standing ovation for Marasigan, the actors and actresses, backstage personnel, and Tanghalang Pilipino.
Go see a matinee or evening performance, Ang Pag-uusig runs until March 12.
Comments are cordially invited, addressed to [email protected].