The title alone of French playwright Jean Genet’s “The Maids” prompts a consideration of this particular staging’s venue location: in a building that straddles a sort of unofficial boundary—the red light district of Makati and a high-end, private residential area.
Power, economics, status, sex and their boundaries, the audience soon finds out, are explored in this tale of two sisters who work in the titular occupation for the unnamed Madame.
Staged by Musicartes with support from Theater Actors Guild, this English production (translated by Bernard Frechtman) is directed by Anton Juan. Male actors are cast as the sisters. Juan is Solange and Topper Fabregas is Claire. In a fun bit of stunt casting, different actors, both male and female, portray Madame in each show.
Sharp contrast
The male casting for the two leads is as what the playwright has always intended it to be. The most recent professional staging with an all-male cast was by Philippine Educational Theater Association in 2001 at resto-bar Republic of Malate, using Rody Vera’s Tagalog translation with direction by Indian director Rustom Bharucha. In the cast were Phil Noble (Clara/Claire), Melvin Lee (Soledad/Solange) and Bart Guingona (Madame).
Juan had performed as Claire in the ’60s in a staged reading at Café Los Indios Bravos (also in Malate) with Joey Gosiengfiao (Solange) and Behn Cervantes (Madame). He directed the play in 1970 with Ernie Abella (Solange), Chiqui Xerez-Burgos (Claire) and Noel Macrae (Madame).
This time around, Juan is a solid, steady, deliberate, dangerous Solange. Fabregas plays Claire with a desperate, crazed delivery that becomes sharply contrasted when she transforms into the stolid servant in front of Madame.
Gender expression
The boundaries of gender expression (body characteristics, behavior, clothing) are explored. Both actors wear men’s clothing and women’s garments designed by John Herrera and Mitoy Santa Ana, slipping in and out of “masculine” and “feminine” line deliveries.
Juan’s soft, thick voice foils well with Fabregas’ inspired, dexterous turn as a twitchy, screechy woman on the verge of a breakdown or breakthrough or both.
Jenny Jamora plays Madame as a campy cartoon character caricature, blending well into the staging’s sinister strangeness—an atmosphere complemented by Joseph Mathieu’s lighting design and Juan’s sound design.
Humor emerges throughout their maneuverings, and all three actors’ performances are fun to watch. Their performances graze the boundaries of camp, melodrama and ham but never step overboard—a tight and delicate calibration that creates a heady and exciting energy, driving the action headlong into its inexorable tragic conclusion.
Deliberate slyness
As the play unfolds, the audience finds out that whenever Madame is away, the sisters imitate her and perform dramatized (or real?) versions of themselves, acting out variations of a scene where they attempt to kill their employer.
At this revelation, the deliberate slyness of the venue becomes apparent. Staged in-the-round at Musicartes’ rehearsal studio, one wall’s floor-to-ceiling mirror is left uncovered: A single pane separates illusion from delusion.
The mirror also doubles the space, an expansion of the siblings’ imaginations/machinations; but it also frames the space, a mute wall constricting their existence. Precisely because it is only an illusion of expanded space, it is forever a reminder of how restricted their lives actually are.
Despite and because of their flights of fancy, they both are acutely aware of exactly where they are. “Limits, boundaries … frontiers are not convention but law,” says Solange.
Brutal intimacy
But they oh-so-badly want to break out. Or do they? The mirror reminds audiences of the siblings’ acts of repetitive copying. They rehearse the belabored murder attempt every chance they get—always a simulation, never the actualization.
Meanwhile, they seem to be breaking each other: Incestuous sadomasochism surfaces whenever they play-act/interact (there is screaming, spitting, insulting, slapping, whipping). With a dominatrix’s arsenal of latex and rubber gloves, flowers and fur, their games mirror the prolonged masturbation of their lives without the benefit of a climax.
Juan dominates Fabregas’ smooth, submissive neck alternately with kisses and strangling (erotic asphyxiation?). Without a TV or computer monitor’s glass pane to separate audiences from these intimate acts of brutality and brutal acts of intimacy, the effect is startling, suspenseful, frightening, visceral. (Depending on your location in the seating areas, the mirror doubles these efforts, both distancing and amplifying the suffocations.)
Imbalance of power
And, as it turns out, their “rehearsals” are not in a recursive circle; the repetitions build up and spiral out (and down). Play-acting shifts to power play, as Claire has apparently written incriminating letters to the police, causing Madame’s lover to be arrested.
When he is freed on bail, the balance of power, the sisters realize, swings only one way—despite their attempts at inversion/perversion of roles.
The oppressed are always trapped. The dominant always get off free. Consider that this production comes at the heels of the recently enacted Sen. Jinggoy Estrada-authored Republic Act 10361, also known as Batas Kasambahay (Domestic Workers Act), vis-à-vis the current headlines of Janet Napoles’ daughter’s extravagant lifestyle that revels in (as yet) unexplained wealth.
Now who says theater doesn’t mirror the roles we play/act/perform in real life?
“I’m sick of seeing my image thrown back at me by a mirror,” wails Claire. Defeated, they retreat to their familiar play-acting and enact one last, defiant performance: Solange’s ultimate act of sadism as she stands complicit to Claire’s ultimate act of masochism.
“The Maids” has remaining performances Saturday and Sunday at Mirror Studio Theatre, 5th flr, SJG Centre Building, 8463 Kalayaan Ave., Makati City. Actors portraying Madame: Aug. 17 (Saturday) 8 p.m., Gwyn Guanzon; Aug. 18 (Sunday) 3 p.m., Liza Diño; and 8 p.m., Gwyn Guanzon. Tel. no. 0917-5343223 or 8958098.
