Monstress
Two One
Acts Based on Stories by Lysley Tenorio:
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Remember the I-Hotel by
Philip Kan Gotanda
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Presenting … The Monstress! By Sean San Jose
 |
| Ogie Zulueta (Vicente) & Jomar Tagatac (Fortunado) |
Commissioned
by the American Conservatory Theatre, two one act plays probing stories of 20th
Century, Filipino immigrants to the San Francisco Bay Area premiere in the new
Strand Theatre with mixed results. Using
a common set, cast, and director, the two plays explore the dreams, the harsh
realities, and the search for love of new arrivals separated by four decades in
their entries from the Philippines. One
play engages with characters that show depth and nuance as well as both fun and
dark sides. The other only brushes the surface
of character development, presenting stereotyped and one-dimensional persona
that result in audience apathy toward the story and the people involved. Unfortunately, the less successful one-act is
the second presented and leaves the audience members in a subdued, rather blah
state as they exit.
Based on
real events that occurred in August 1977 in San Francisco, Philip Kan Gotanda’s
Remembering the I-Hotel opens as two gentlemen are
struggling with the painful and shaky moves of old age to dress in coat and tie.
Outside the three, gigantic, beveled windows
against a back wall, loud demonstrations can be heard and flashing red lights
seen. One man, the stooped Vicente, is
clearly confused and disoriented as his companion, Fortunado, gently and even
lovingly assists him as a policeman barks at the door that they must leave at
once from the now-condemned building. A
flashback to the 1930s recalls how these two met as virile young men at a S.F. Manilatown
social club for Filipino workers (10-cents a dance to pair up with local
girls). Fortunado has arrived in America
with no connections or money but is soon befriended by Vicente, who anoints him
“my cousin who worked three years for the mayor of Seattle” and (with that
quickly conceived story) gets him a job as a bellboy at a local, fancy
hotel.
Jomar
Tagatac (Fortunado) and Ogie Zulueta (Vicente) bring jovial and joking banter
to their broken English parlance, and they prance around at times like two playful
puppies as they spar while getting to know each other. Watching Fortunado trying to teach Vicente to
dance is hilarious as arms and bodies fly in a whirlwind battle to decide who
is going to be the ‘man’ and who, the ‘woman.’
The return favor of Vicente’s futile attempts to show Fortunado how to
box brings its own set of laughs and pleasure.
But these two also display a sense caring and mutual protection that is
genuine, touching, and somewhat surprising to come from two twenty-something
guys. There is a visible bond that
develops as they share stories and food in their I-Hotel room and a baring of
souls as Vicente levels that immigrant life is “hard … you get lonely … you get
scared.” The relationship of the two
also moves into new territory, one forbidden and not discussed in the 1930s (including
by them). This singular development will
impact both their lives in major, long-lasting ways.
Althea
(Danielle Frimer), a maid aspiring to be a journalist, joins our twosome as an
increasingly close friend and cohort.
Althea is intellectually curious and determined in her questioning,
willing to take cultural risks, and flippantly flirty all at the same
time. She tries soy sauce but prefers
mustard; and she could care less about being seen dancing with a “brown
monkey,” as Filipinos are called on the rough streets of San Francisco. But such racist attitudes cannot be ignored
forever and bring dire consequences to yet another, forbidden relationship that
develops among this threesome.
As the
three work at the hotel and are joined by other bellboys and maids, poetry in
motion and sound develops through Philip Kan Gotanda’s well-chosen scripting and
Carey Perloff’s imaginative direction.
Passing hotel staff morph seamlessly into choreographed motions of
bodies and suitcases, bodies and luggage carrier, and then right back into
bell-hopping and folding sheets (directed in movement by Stephen
Buescher). The play takes on added
depths of beauty and meaning aided by the sultry, rich, and sexy voice of
Melody Butiu who periodically serenades the story’s action on a nearby raised
stage. The actors’ dialogues are
punctuated by passing commentary and asides of otherwise silent, on-stage
observers of the story who note emotions and thoughts we might otherwise not
see. And all is set effectively by Nina
Ball within a replicated Manilatown social club of the 1930s that easily
converts into hotels of both poor immigrants and the visiting hoity-toity.
The
totality of Remember the I-Hotel is moving and memorable. While it might warrant one more round of
editing in spots to tighten the flow a bit, the play is a wonderful accounting
of an important part of San Francisco and Filipino history as well as a stark
reminder of how soon ago certain loves were dangerous to pursue.
As much
as there is a depth to the first half of this evening of the two premieres,
there is an overall shallowness to the second half. Sean San Jose’s Presenting … The Monstress also sets out to tell a forgotten
history of the Bay Area and its Filipino migrant population, in this case about
movie making in the 1970s. The play’s
author undertakes himself the role of Checkers, a maker of Philippine B-class,
monster movies that star his girlfriend Reva (Melody Butiu) in such envied
roles as a giant squid in which she growls, screams, and flails all limbs but
never gets to show her face. His latest
movie has been relegated to one midnight screening per week in his native
hometown, playing, as his producer laments, only to “peasants and prostitutes.”
Checkers is about to give up his dream of
movie fame when along comes a smooth-talking, all-smiling Gaz Gazman (Nick
Gabriel) knocking on his door in blue glasses and wild Hawaiian shirt and
offering to bring the couple to California for a joint, movie-making wild
scheme. Landing not at a hoped-for
Hollywood movie lot but rather in a basement studio of sorts in Colma (where
the dead of San Francisco out number the living of the town itself), the couple
is duped but is still full of eager hopes for international exposure.
All of
this is told in this play about a film being made about a film being made. Rinabeth Apostol join our stars of the first
act, Jomar Tagatac and Ogie Zulueta, as young filmmakers who want to document
the story of failed, small-time makers of cultish, Filipino monster
movies. The three are somewhat like a
weak Greek chorus and are part of this play’s big problem. The two men are flaming queens who play into
every negative stereotype of Bay Area, gay Asians while the woman is a kind of
Asian Valley Girl. What purpose these
bizarre portrayals serve the overall play never becomes clear. As the three prance around shrieking in
over-acted voice and motions in the background, Checkers, Gaz, and Reva
continue their story in the fore; but that story also does not develop far or
fast enough beyond its initial set-up.
The two male roles move nowhere in becoming any more than second-rate filmmakers
with predicable, macho attitudes. Reva
does become the heart of the story as an immigrant who sees possibilities in
how to make the best of a bad situation, and Ms. Butiu is somewhat successful
in drawing us into caring about her and what happens to her life. But even her story becomes convoluted and
unresolved in the way it evolves and ends, leaving us as audience with hardly
any reason or energy to award applause to an able, but misdirected cast who
have been handed a too-weak script with large holes in it.
So
disappointing and frankly boring is this second play that the power of the
first is almost lost. Fortunately, with
a day’s passing and some reflection, the Remembering
the I-Hotel half of Monstress can be remembered and savored even as the evening’s
entirety at A.C.T.’s Strand itself was an overall disappointment.
Rating, Remembering the I-Hotel: 4 E
Rating, Presenting … The Monstress!: 2 E
Monstress continues at American Conservatory
Theatre’s Strand, 1127 Market Street through November 22, 2015. Tickets are available online at http://www.act-sf.org or by calling the box
office at 415 749-2228.
Photos by Kevin Berne
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