by Douglas Messerli
Philip
Kan Gotanda Remember the I-Hotel and
Sean San José Presenting…The Monstress!
(based on stories by Lysley Tenorio) / A.C.T. (American Conservatory Theater)
at the Strand Theater, San Francisco /
the performance I attended, with Vance George, was at the Matinee on Sunday,
October 25, 2015
For much of the first half of the
20th century many Filipinos must have felt their relationship
to the US to be quite confusing, filled as it was with mixed messages. On the
one hand, as a country under possession of the US, the values and productions
of American culture were often introduced (and even imposed) upon the
Philippines island culture; and, as we have seen in Kidlat Tahimik’s film
(which I reviewed a few months ago on my World Cinema site) those US values often seemed highly appealing for the young.
For much of the century, since Filipino’s were seen as American nationals,
immigration to the US was relatively easy; and for many poor Filipinos it was
tempting to travel alone to the US with hopes of making enough money to return
to marry or to better support families some males left behind.
What they couldn’t have quite imagined
that in that land of fabled immigrant possibilities, labeled simply as Asians,
they would be forced into hard labor in the lettuce fields or in canneries, and
that the good life proffered by American urban communities such as San
Francisco or Los Angeles would rarely be available to them. As Asians they were
herded into specific sections of the San Francisco, mostly near the Chinese and
Japanese communities. For these mostly bachelor male immigrants work
opportunities were limited, and white women were strictly off limits, with
severe punishments for those who crossed the line. Many lived out their lives
without having come any closer to a true collaboration with their adopted
culture.
The two stories that are told in the two plays
of Monstress, adapted from a book of
tales by fiction writer Lysley Tenorio by Philip Kan Gotanda and Sean San José,
both tell of Filipino dreamers who believed they might be able to enter and
collaborate with the American Dream before realizing that they would be forced
to remain on the fringes, and even then might evicted from the communities they
had managed to establish. Both are tales in which the central characters are
very much in love, but are often confused about whom and what they love most.
And both demonstrate the fierce imagination and almost manic energy of Filipinos
in a new, often inexplicable world. Yet, these two plays are completely
different in tone. And the fact that both share the same actors and are
directed by the same director, San Francisco’s A.C.T.’s Artistic Director,
Carey Perloff, reveal the range of all of their abilities.
Of the two plays, the first, Remember the I-Hotel, by Gotanda, seems
to me the most profound. Based generally on true-life incidents of the 1920s
and 1930s, it concerns the relationship of two Filipino men, Vicente (Ogie
Zulueta), who has been working in San Francisco for some time, and Fortunado
(Jomar Tagatac), a migrant worker who comes to the city from the farms near
Stockton. The two, a bit like Flaubert’s Bouvard and Péchuchet, immediately
take to one another, with the smarter, far more handsome, and certainly better
dressed of the two, Vicente, taking the awkward rube under his wing and into
his bedroom, explaining to him how to dress, dance, behave, and, love—without
truly imagining that the two might soon also find love in one another. Vicente,
a bit like Los Angeles’ Hispanic zoot-suiters, wears only McIntosh suits (the
favored garment of nearly all well-dressed Filipino men of the day) and
frequents the taxi dance halls, like hundreds of other Filipino bachelors. His
hero is the boxer Speedy Dado (Diosdado Posadas),
like Vicente, a small, bantamweight man with well-developed muscles who was
undefeated until Newsboy Brown knocked him out in 1928. 
As Vicente quite literally (and in the
play’s remarkable choreography, quite brilliantly) spins and twists into the
seemingly dunce-like Nado’s heart, we suddenly observe the migrant farm-hand
come to life, whirling into new, Fred Astaire-inspired dance steps that Vicente
has never before imagined, and within the moments the two are dancing, each
trying to lead as males, while Vicente desperately seeks to learn Nado’s
original dance steps. Whether he learns anything or not hardly matters, he is
smitten by his new roommate, who the day after he propels—the word which, in
fact, might most define Vicente’s behavior—his newfound “cousin” into the world
of hotel bellboy-hood.
Suddenly drink and food, like magic, is
purloined from the leftovers of platters standing outside hotel doors, which,
upon their return home, the two share in what becomes a kind of drunken
celebration of their seeming potential: with gin (brought home by Vicente) and
champagne (found by the quick-learner Nado), they revel in a private party which gradually shifts to
a beautifully intimate moment as the drunken Nado gently kisses the almost
passed-out Vicente, who awakens to assertively kiss Nado back.
Clearly, given the next few scenes, wherein Vicente falls in love with
the sexually open hotel cleaning woman, Althea (Danielle Frimer) from Horeb,
Wisconsin (the antithesis one might imagine of his own cultural upbringing: she
prefers mustard to the hot peppery Filipino concoction he offers her), Vicente
is now clearly a sex-needy heterosexual or, maybe a man who has definitely not
come to terms with his own sexual desires. Unfortunately, the playwright doesn’t
overtly explore the dimensions of Vicente’s desires or delusions.
Propelling the story forward, Vicente and
Althea are determined to enter one of the hotel’s empty suites to demonstrate
their love. Jealous and feeling deserted—after a late night homosexual
encounter under a San Francisco bridge—Nado calls the police to report his
friend’s, ironically, equally “illicit” sexual activities.
Vicente is beaten into subjection, returned
to their shared International Hotel room a broken man. But we never discover
what those changes really mean between the betrayed and the betrayer. All we
know is that below, on the street somewhere in the future, a protest is playing
out, while the now dominate companion Nado is attempting to dress Vicente so
that they might leave the building in which they live as commanded by the
police. Are the protests against the inhabitants, we can only ask, demanding
their extrusion? In some ways, they might well be, given that the whole of San
Francisco aristocracy had long been demanding to turn their residence hotel
into a grand parking structure.
In fact, the noisy crowd below, so we discover
upon reading the program notes, are the voices of students and other activists
protesting the eviction of Nado, Vicente and dozens of others still living in
the International Hotel on Kearny Street in 1976. Presumably, the two have
lived together all these years in a kind of gauzy mist of friendship-domestic
partnership whose borders were never defined. All we know is that the once
dynamic dreamer, Vicente, is now an older, clearly defeated man who needs help
to be dressed the way to which he has grown accustomed, and his self-defeated
friend Nado has become a kind of older brother-mother-lover-friend, who keeps
Vicente alive by reminding him of his (in)glorious past.
Had only Gotanda had been able to better
delineate the facts of how things stand. It is almost that, in the playwright’s
attempt to present this specific couple as representatives of the collective
who were simultaneously being evicted, he has lost the story that matters most.
Yes, a whole community of aging Filipino bachelors, horribly maltreated by the
very society which they sought to embrace, was once more, in that year of 1976
when Diane Feinstein as San Francisco mayor, being displaced. What happened to
these specific dreamer-lovers, to Vicente and Nado? We want to know, but are
left panting for the story, while the larger and far vaguer larger story is
played out.
Certainly, Sean San José’s adaption of
Tenorio’s Mistress is, superficially,
far more upbeat. But, in fact, this campy tale of the Ed Wood-like Filipino
director, Checkers (San José, himself, playing the role) and his
monster-mistress, Reva (Melody Butiu, who played a beautiful torch singer in
the previous play) has numerous dark corners. Checkers is the wonderful creator
of Filipino films you’ve never seen about the Shrimp woman, the Dinosaur
monster, and various other ridiculously hokey monsters which have reached only
one theater in Manila, but have convinced their director that he is a genius.
It quickly becomes apparent that poor
Checkers, deluded as he is, can only love his zaftig wife through the mythologies which he has created for her,
and when his career goes sour, his love flags. Reva, on the other hand, wants
only to play in American-like movies such as those of Rock Hudson and Doris
Day, and, quite amazingly, her voice, had she ever been given a chance to
perform, is a bit like a Filipino version of Day’s lifting, slightly
jazz-inspired, rasp.
Fortunately, this play is told, in
Greek-chorus style, by a crazy trio of the brilliant Jomar Tagatac, Ogie Zuleta
(both performing as kind of mad gay queens) and their apparently fag-hag friend
Tala (Rinabeth Apostol), who, whenever the larger story flags, come to its
comic rescue.
Just prior to the Filipino cinematic
breakthroughs of Kidlat Tahimik’s filmmaking, filmmakers such as Eddie Romero
and the fictional Checkers of this work, depressed by the lack of reaction from
their fellow countrymen, sought American collaborators. In Monstress the disappointed true-believer Checkers is sought out by
the totally sleazy and self-deluded Russian-American film-channeler Gaz Gazman
(Nick Gabriel) who, having actually seen (something
very few, evidently, have actually done) Checkers’ early films, wants to use
them to complete his own zany version of double-headed-vampire-bat horror film.
Gazman, a greater Ed Wood than America’s very worst director, outwits the
Filipino dreamer Checkers by agreeing to take him and his wife, Reza, to
“Hollywood” for what appears to be a serious cut-and-clip session.
The only problem is that Gazman’s (a riff
presumably on a gassed up Gatsby) Hollywood lies not even just outside Los
Angeles (as it did in the original story) but, in San José’s version, is set up
in the environs of suburban San Francisco, San Matteo and Daly City, the
revelation of which brought great guffaws of knowing laughter from the San
Francisco audience.
When Gazman loses the actress he has
determined to incorporate into this international mess of a story after she
determines take a modeling job, he has no choice but to use Reza, the
great “monstress,” as he describes her, for his leading lady. Demoted to the
role of security guard, the dreaming Checkers gradually perceives that he has
not only been taken advantage of, but has lost his lovely monstress Reva who
has been hijacked by a dream of a dream of Hollywood stardom. Finally, the
camera has discovered her face, and she, truly believing in her notions of
romance, is ready to show it, leaving her shrimp-woman costumes to cinematic
history.
It hardly matters, as the chorus
twitters, what happens. This is bad satire as a Telenova romance. Will she or
will she not wake up and return to the Philippines? Will she become the great
actress, star of the worst movies ever made, she has always aspired to become?
I won’t tell. You’ll have to come to San Francisco’s beautifully new A.C.T.
Strand Theater to find out. Besides, I have to admit, I lost track of what was
going on by the last few moments of this somewhat mindless, but well performed
comic tidbit, which we all enthusiastically applauded.
Los Angeles, October 26, 2015
Los Angeles, October 26, 2015
