In the pre-Holy Week stretch, Katski Flores (in Tanghalang Ateneo’s “Alpha Kappa Omega”) wasn’t the only actress bringing the house down with a brief but explosive featured performance.

Karen Romualdez gave a similar ephemeral, force-of-nature turn, in a one-weekend-only thesis production of Sophie Treadwell’s “Machinal,” now “Makinal” for UP Dulaang Laboratoryo through the prolific Eljay Castro Deldoc’s adaptation.

In her singular scene early in the play as the female protagonist’s mother, Romualdez sharply laid out a life of frustration and resentment through an expert blend of anger and comedy, her toxic, nonstop verbal barrage calling to mind Mona Lisa’s titanic performance in the classic Lino Brocka film “Insiang.”

This was the decibel level adopted by the rest of the production, a kind of assault-on-all-senses that furthered its depiction of wretched womanhood and female repression. This unrest was expressionistic, sure, but it could also get literally distracting and overwhelming.

So, for instance, you had Rachel Jacob as the female protagonist—her capable, if unexciting take on a difficult and potentially unexciting role sometimes getting drowned in the action, and all but swallowed whole by her onstage mother in that key scene.

Jacob fared better in her scenes with Jack Yabut, appropriately slimy as the supervisor who lusts after and marries her character; and with Vincent Pajara, bringing an electric freshness as the young man who leads her down an adulterous path.

Vibrant energy

But what really stuck with you to the end was Nour Hooshmand’s direction—how she injected this production with vibrant (if occasionally uneven) energy, how her command of feeling and sense of theatrical style allowed this play about people living like machines an ebb-and-flow that still sustained the viewer’s attention.

Much of what was stylish and theatrical about “Makinal” came from Steven Tansiongco’s projections—whether they be a play of cubist graphics on otherwise plain wall posts or a splatter of blood on white cloth, the red seemingly washing over the stage. Splashy as his designs were, they never overwhelmed the text; they even heightened the grim, immersive atmosphere.

Atmosphere was also what the thesis production of John Logan’s “Red” at the Ateneo de Manila University earlier this week got right.

Perfect setting

The production, the directing thesis of Avery Nazareno, had, for starters, the inadvertent perfect setting—the university’s old Black Box Theater, which was believably designed by Ohm David and Leo Rialp to look like a skeletal studio, with its easels and paint cans and unfinished overall appearance.

The play, which imagines the painter Mark Rothko’s time working on the Seagram Murals in the late 1950s, was locally premiered in 2013 by The Necessary Theatre, in a “first-rate treatment [anchored by] the crackerjack tandem of Bart Guingona [as Rothko] and Joaquin Valdes as his (fictional) apprentice,” as former Inquirer Theater editor Gibbs Cadiz wrote in his year-end roundup that year.

Nazareno’s “Red” not only survived comparison with that production; in some way, it even bettered it.

Sure, this new production lacked a worthy opponent for Rothko to verbally spar with: André Miguel’s portrayal of the apprentice, Ken, came across as too insolent and detached for any serious painter to even take seriously.

But it also had a sense of intellectual calm and rigor about it that wasn’t very evident in the 2013 staging. (That one felt consumed by high emotion and sometimes bordered on the polemical, not that those qualities diminished the experience in any way.)

Nazareno’s “Red” knew to take its time—to land appropriate pauses and allow the hyper-intellectual conversations room to breathe. You weren’t just watching a pair of brains at work; you were also doing the thinking alongside them.

The great injustice of this production was that very few people saw Rialp in the role of Rothko. Because his was a performance for the books—intelligently layered, commanding in its sobriety, a believable balance of wisdom and self-doubt that must plague many an aging artist. Rialp himself is a painter in real life, which must partly explain the effortlessness of his characterization; to see and hear him in the role was like watching a master at work—the cadences, and especially the comedy, down pat.

In hindsight, a lot of this production’s success had to do with Rialp’s professional touch. But it’s also important to remember that “Red” was first and foremost a student thesis. Like “Makinal,” it was mounted with a limited budget, raw skill and only the guidance of their respective program’s professors.

That both challenging plays were honestly more satisfying experiences than some of the full-blown, professional productions we’ve had this year should be reason enough to earn those involved in them top marks. —CONTRIBUTED