Tuesday, October 07, 2008 Girl power By Ritchie Landis Doner Quijano
GET ready all you theater aficionados and prepare yourselves to be culture shocked. Tis’ the season again when the fantastic, fabulous and flamboyant dramatist and playwright Crispin Ramos will unveil to the theater- hungry Cebuanos his latest opus.
This time let’s brace ourselves for an essential dose of shock value when Ramos will raise the curtain at the Bantawan Sugbu for Wynter’s Solstice, probably the most controversial work the dramatist has ever made.
That’s because it delves on incest, a reprehensible taboo. The play skillfully explores the tension and conflict of “an abhorrent and heinous act imaginable” according to Ramos.
The two-act full length play is a modern work in English and one of three plays Ramos wrote in the States (the other two being The Gardener and Philip, and Amadeo). It will run from Oct. 15, 16 and 17 at 7 p.m. to 9:30 p.m., and theadmission is free. Bantawan Sugbu is located along Visitacion St., an artery off the busy Osmena Blvd.
Ramos tasked Rhea Fantonial Bautista, a budding director and actress to take charge for direction. This is young Bautista’s third directorial work for Cebu Performing Company. Her first was the play Mansanas followed by There was a Soldier.
The play is set in a small cottage in Lilo-an and incorporates the church as the town center and the folklore of the lilo (whirlpool).
In the story, a mother dies tragically, suddenly leaving behind a husband and 16-year-old daughter who feels the loneliness of her father and so wants to be the source of all his comfort.
Giving life to the play is the dynamic duo of actress Jareliese Mauro as the character Wynter and actor Roy Olivares as Nico, father of Wynter. Nico in the play is a top-rank lawyer who’s incorrigible but honest, smart, scrupulously religious, idealistic, decent, honorable and a lonely man of 50 years.
The lawyer is deeply pained by the recent death of his wife and has suffered a heart attack as a consequence. As a lawyer, Nico is ethical and his reputation is untainted.
Wynter is a high school senior who’s got photographic memory in spite of her being just a girl. Since her mother died, she thinks she should take over everything.
It’s not the usual run-of-the mill kind of incest story. Here the daughter is the pursuer.
Once again another leap for Cebuano theater as Ramos continues to challenge his viewers.
He writes a compelling and persuasive play about incest and tells the story in a unique radically divergent approach by portraying the father as the victim and not the perpetrator.
