This Asian ‘Lear’ gets caught in no man’s land
Dulaang UP moves Shakespeare’s ‘King Lear’ from its original setting to a strange, confusing place.
Dulaang UP moves Shakespeare’s ‘King Lear’ from its original setting to a strange, confusing place.
Dulaang Unibersidad ng Pilipinas (DUP) is currently staging Shakespeare’s “King Lear” in English and Filipino, using Nicolas Pichay’s translation. Joel Lamangan and Leo Rialp play the titular character, in
Lamangan: ‘Ngayong isina-Pilipino itong ‘Lear,’ mas mararamdaman [ng manonood] ang sakit ng isang magulang’
It was at the Ateneo de Manila, with its Jesuitical emphasis on the humanities and theater as character formation, that Leo Rialp, director and actor for the stage, screen and TV, developed a love for theater.
“August: Osage County,” the Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning play by actor-writer Tracy Letts, is set in Pawhuska, Oklahoma, a speck of a town of less than 4,000 people somewhere in the Great American Plains. The state is just north of Texas, so it’s perfectly acceptable to assume that they must speak in a sort of Southern accent there.
The poignantly silent or subdued moments in Dulaang UP’s “Collection” are what hit you like a fist to the stomach, or make that sense of disquiet creep under your skin. Probably because they are few and far between, amidst endless scenes of bragging auctioneers, swaggering fashionistas, the raving show-biz crowd and half-a-dozen big players who just want to outshout everyone else.
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