Biography of Nick Joaquín (1917-2004)
Scott Fitzgerald,
Nicomedes "Nick" Joaquín
The 1996 Ramón Magsaysay Award for Journalism, Literature and Creative
Communication Arts
BIOGRAPHY of Nick Joaquín
Resil B. Mojares
He was the greatest Filipino writer of his generation. Over six decades and a half, he
produced a body of work unmatched in richness and range by any of his
contemporaries. Living a life wholly devoted to the craft of conjuring a world through
words, he was the writer’s writer. In the passion with which he embraced his
country’s manifold being, he was his people’s writer as well.
Nick Joaquín was born in the old district of Pacò in Manila, Philippines, on
September 15, 1917, the feast day of Saint Nicomedes, a protomartyr of Rome, after
whom he took his baptismal name. He was born to a home deeply Catholic,
educated, and prosperous. His father, Leocadio Joaquín, was a person of some
prominence. Leocadio was a procurador (attorney) in the Court of First Instance of
Laguna, where he met and married his first wife, at the time of the Philippine
Revolution. He shortly joined the insurrection, had the rank of colonel, and was
wounded in action. When the hostilities ceased and the country came under
American rule, he built a successful practice in law. Around 1906, after the death of
his first wife, he married Salomé Márquez, Nick’s mother. A friend of General Emilio
Aguinaldo, Leocadio was a popular lawyer in Manila and the Southern Tagalog
provinces. He was unsuccessful however when he made a bid for a seat in the
Philippine Assembly representing Laguna.
Nick Joaquín’s mother was a pretty, well-read woman of her time who had studied in
a teacher-training institute during the Spanish period. Though still in her teens when
the United States took possession of the Philippines, she was among the first to be
trained by the Americans in English, a language she taught in a Manila public school
before she left teaching after her marriage.
Leocadio and Salomé built a genteel, privileged home where Spanish was spoken,
the family went to church regularly, had outings in the family’s huge European car
(one of the first Renaults in the city), and the children were tutored in Spanish and
piano. Salomé (“who sings beautiful melodies and writes with an exquisite hand,”
recalls a family member) encouraged in her children an interest in the arts. There
were ten children in the family, eight boys and two girls, with Nick as the fifth child.
The Joaquín home on Herrán Street in Pacò was a large section of a two-story
residential-commercial building —the first such building in Pacò— that Leocadio had
built and from which the family drew a handsome income from rentals. In this home
the young Nick had “an extremely happy childhood.”
Leocadio Joaquín, however, lost the family fortune in an investment in a pioneering
oil exploration project somewhere in the Visayas in the late 1920s. The family had to
move out of Herrán to a rented house in Pásay. Leocadio’s death not long after,
when Nick was only around twelve years old, was a turning point in the life of the
family.
Reticent about his private life, Nick Joaquín revealed little about his father. In the
manner of fathers of his time, Leocadio must have been a presence both distant and
dominant. He was already an accomplished man when Nick was born. One has a
glimpse of him in the character of the proud Doctor Chávez in Joaquín’s short story
“After the Picnic,” the father who lives by a strict patriarchal code and yet is all at
once remote, vulnerable, and sympathetic. In an early poem, Joaquín vaguely alluded
to what in his father was somehow beyond reach (“the patriot life and the failed
politician buried with the first wife”). Yet he mourned the void his father’s death left:
“One froze at the graveside in December’s cold, / childhood stashed with the bier.
Oh, afterwards / was no time to be young, until one was old.”
The young Joaquín dropped out of school. He had attended Pacò Elementary School
and had three years of secondary education in Mapa High School but was too
intellectually restless to be confined in a classroom. Among other changes, he was
unable to pursue the religious vocation that his strictly Catholic family had
envisioned to be his future. Joaquín himself confessed that he always had the
vocation for the religious life and would have entered a seminary if it were not for his
father’s death.
After he left school, Joaquín worked as a mozo (boy apprentice) in a bakery in Pásay
and then as a printer’s devil in the composing department of the Tribune, of the TVT
(Tribune-Vanguardia-Taliba) publishing company, which had its offices on F. Torres
Street in Manila’s Santa Cruz district. This got him started on what would be a
lifelong association with the world of print.
Through this time he pursued a passion for reading. Sarah K. Joaquín, Nick’s sister-
in-law, recounts that in his teens Nick had a “rabid and insane love for books.” He
would hold a book with one hand and read while polishing with a coconut husk the
floor with his feet. He would walk down a street, on an errand to buy the family’s
meal, with a dinner pail in one hand and an open book in the other.
Both his parents had encouraged his interest in books. When he was around ten, his
father got him a borrower’s card at the National Library (then in the basement of the
Legislative Building in Luneta) and there he discovered Bambi and Heidi and the
novels of Stevenson, Dumas, and Dickens (David Copperfield was his great favorite).
He explored his father’s library and the bookstores of Carriedo in downtown Manila.
He was voracious, reading practically everything that caught his fancy, from the
poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay and Vachel Lindsay to the stories of Anton
Chekhov, to the novels of Dostoyevsky, D. H. Lawrence, and Willa Cather. He read
American magazines (Saturday Evening Post, Cosmopolitan, Harper’s Magazine) and
discovered the fiction of Booth Tarkington, Somerset Maugham, F.
and Ernest Hemingway.
Joaquín’s choice of early readings was not exceptional. Joaquín and other writers of
his generation who were schooled in the American era discovered Dostoyevsky and
Hemingway before they did such Tagalog writers as Lope K. Santos and Rosauro
Almario. Yet, it can be said that Joaquín never really lost his sense of where he was.
He read Manila’s English-language newspapers and magazines for what Filipinos
themselves were writing. (He had read the José Rizal novels in the Charles
Derbyshire translation before he was thirteen, Joaquín said.) He always had a strong
sense of place, a virtue that was to become a hallmark of his body of work. “When I
started writing in the late 1930s,” he would recall many years later, “I was aware
enough of my milieu to know that it was missing from our writing in English. The
Manila I had been born into and had grown up in had yet to appear in our English
fiction, although that fiction was mostly written in Manila and about Manila.”
His first short story dealt with the vaudeville of Manila, “The Sorrows of Vaudeville,”
and was published in Sunday Tribune Magazine in 1937. (The editors changed its title
to “Behind Tinsel and Grease.”) Earlier, in 1934, he published his first poem in
English, a piece about Don Quixote. The story is told that when this poem appeared
in the Tribune, Serafín Lanot, the Tribune’s poetry editor, liked the poem very much
and went to congratulate the poet when he came to collect his fee, but the shy and
elusive Joaquín ran away.
Very early, Joaquín was set on crafting his own voice. Writing in 1985 on his early
years as a writer, he said that it appeared to him in the 1930s that both an American
language and an American education had distanced Filipino writers in English from
their immediate surroundings. “These young writers could only see what the
American language saw.” It was “modern” to snub anything that wore the name of
tradition and, for the boys and girls who trooped to the American-instituted schools,
Philippine history began with Commodore Dewey and the Battle of Manila Bay. “The
result was a fiction so strictly contemporary that both the authors and their
characters seemed to be, as I put it once, ‘without grandfathers.’” He recalled: “I
realize now that what impelled me to start writing was a desire to bring in the
perspective, to bring in the grandfathers, to manifest roots.”
This was Nick Joaquín recalling in 1985 what it was like in the 1930s. Back then, the
young Joaquín was just beginning to find his way into a literary life. He was gaining
notice as a promising writer, publishing between 1934 and 1941 a few stories and
over a dozen poems in the Herald Mid-Week Magazine and the Sunday Tribune
Magazine. The literary scene was vibrant in the Commonwealth years, as writers and
critics debated the role and direction of Philippine writing and formed feuding
groups such as the Philippine Writers League and the Veronicans. Joaquín stood at
the periphery of this scene. He probably had little time to be too reflective. He was
already trying to fend for himself while quite young. He was also growing into a
world that was marching toward the cataclysm of a world war.
The period of the Japanese occupation was a difficult time for the Joaquíns who, at
this time, had moved from Pásay to a house on Arlegui Street in the historic San
Miguel district of Manila, where Malacañang Palace is located. Like other residents in
the enemy-occupied city, Joaquín scavenged for work to help support the family. The
Japanese had closed down the Tribune and other publications at the onset of the
occupation. Joaquín worked as a port stevedore, factory watchman, rig driver, road
worker, and buy-and-sell salesman. Seeing corpses on the street, working for a wage
in rice, demeaned by fear and poverty, Joaquín detested the war. He later said in an
interview that the experience of the war so drained both his body and spirit that
when it was over, he was filled with the desire to leave the country and go
somewhere far. He dreamed of pursuing a religious vocation by going to a
monastery in Spain or somewhere in Europe, “somewhere where you could clean
up.”
Through the war years, he continued writing when and where he could. He finished
“The Woman Who Felt Like Lazarus,” a story about an aging vaudeville star, and the
essay “La Naval de Manila.” Both appeared in the wartime English-language journal
Philippine Review in 1943. A monthly published by the Manila Sinbun-sya and edited
by Vicente Albano Pacis and Francisco Icasiano, the Review also published
Joaquín’s story “It Was Later Than We Thought” (1943) and his translation of Rizal’s
Mi Ultimo Adios (1944). Readers were beginning to take notice. He cultivated a
persona inaccessible and mysterious. When he was asked to fill up a biographical
form for the Review, he simply wrote down: “25 years old, salesman.”
“La Naval de Manila” tells of a Manila religious celebration built on the tradition that
the Blessed Virgin had miraculously intervened in the Spanish victory over a Dutch
invasion fleet in 1646. Already it sets forth a major theme Joaquín would develop in
the years ahead: that the Filipino nation was formed in the matrix of Spanish
colonialism and that it was important for Filipinos to appreciate their Spanish past.
He wrote: “The content of our national destiny is ours to create, but the basic form,
the temper, the physiognomy, Spain created for us.” The article triggered an angry
response in a subsequent issue of the Review from Federico Mañgahas, then a
leading intellectual, who testily inquired why the Review was “building up” this
young writer who would have readers believe that precolonial Philippine society was
just a primeval “drift of totem-and-taboo tribes” and that Catholic saints can be the
country’s unifying national symbols. Joaquín declined to reply but he had raised an
issue that would continue to be debated after the war.
After the Americans liberated Manila in February–April 1945, Joaquín worked as a
stage manager for his sister-in-law’s acting troupe and dreamed of getting away. In
the meantime, he continued writing and publishing. He obviously did not sleepwalk
through the years of the war but was writing out stories in his head. In heady years
right after the war, he published in rapid succession such stories as “Summer
Solstice,” “May Day Eve,” and “Guardia de Honor.” These stories have become Nick
Joaquín’s signature stories and classics in Philippine writing in English.
The opportunity to leave the country came in 1947 when he was accepted as a novice
at Saint Albert’s College, a Dominican monastery in Hong Kong. The story is told that
the Dominicans in Manila were so impressed by his “La Naval de Manila” that they
offered him a scholarship to Saint Albert’s and had the Dominican-run University of
Santo Tomás award him an honorary Associate in Arts certificate so he would
qualify. His stay at Saint Albert’s schooled him in Latin and the classics. He enjoyed
the pleasant diversions of the scenic port city and the occasional company of his
brother Porfirio (Ping) who was in Hong Kong on a stint as a jazz musician. It
seemed, however, that he was too restless for life in a monastery. He stayed less
than two years and returned to Manila.
Back in the Philippines in 1950, he joined the country’s leading magazine,
Philippines Free Press, working as a proofreader, copywriter, and then member of
the staff. At this time, Free Press was so widely circulated across the country and so
dominant a medium for political reportage and creative writing, it was called “the
Bible of the Filipinos.” Practically all middle-class homes in the country had a copy
of the magazine.
Joaquín’s Free Press years established him as a leading public figure in Philippine
letters. In its pages appeared the stories and essays that made him known to a wide
national audience. The publication of Prose and Poems (1952), a collection of short
stories, poems, a novella, and a play, cemented his reputation as an original voice in
Philippine literature. He mined a lode of local experience that no one had quite dealt
with in the way he did. He summoned ancient rites and legends, evoked a Filipino
Christianity at once mystical and profane, and dramatized generational conflicts in a
modern society that had not quite come to terms with its past. His was a vision that
ranged through a large expanse of history in an English so full-bodied and a style
sensuous and sure.
In 1955, his first play, A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino: An Elegy in Three Scenes,
was premiered on stage at the Aurora Gardens in Intramuros, Manila, by the
Barangay Theater Guild. He had written the play sometime around 1950 upon the
urgings of Sarah Joaquín, who was active in Manila’s theater circles. Though it had
been published in Weekly Women’s Magazine and Prose and Poems in 1952 and had
been aired on radio, the play was not staged until 1955. It proved to be an immense
success. It was made into an English-language movie by the highly respected
Filipino filmmaker Lamberto V. Avellana in 1965, translated into Tagalog, adapted in
other forms, and staged hundreds of times. No Filipino play in English has been as
popular.
Using the flashback device of a narrator who recalls the sad fate of a prewar family
as he stands in the ruins of postwar Manila, the play sets itself not only in the divide
of war but that of past and present in Philippine society. Tracing the disintegration of
an old and proud family in the transition from past to present, Nick Joaquín explored
what had been abiding themes in his writing across the years.
He did not see the premiere of the play since, in 1955, Joaquín left the country on a
Rockefeller Foundation creative writing fellowship. The prestigious award took him
to Spain, the United States, and (with a Eugene F. Saxton Fellowship from the
publishers of Harper’s Magazine) Mexico. In this sojourn, which lasted more than two
years, he worked on his first novel, The Woman Who Had Two Navels (1961), a short
and early version of which had appeared in Prose and Poems. The Woman Who Had
Two Navels is a many-layered and less-than-perfect novel that teases out universal
antinomies of truth and falsehood, illusion and reality, past and present, and locates
them in the context of the Filipino search for identity. Though Joaquín had been
criticized for a romantic “nostalgia for the past,” this novel and his other works,
including Portrait, showed that he looked at the past always with the consciousness
of the need for engaging the present world in its own terms.
Joaquín enjoyed his travels. He traveled all over Spain, lived in Madrid and Mallorca,
visited France, stayed a year in Manhattan, went on an American cross-country trip
on a Greyhound bus, crossed the border to Laredo, and had fun exploring Mexico.
Spain and Mexico fascinated him (“my kind of country,” he says). He would, in the
years that followed, take trips to Cuba, Japan, China, Taiwan, and Australia. Yet he
was clearly in his element in his homeland and in Manila, the city that has been his
imagination’s favorite haunt.
From the time he rejoined Free Press in 1957 until he left it in 1970 (during which
time he rose to be the magazine’s literary editor and associate editor), Joaquin was
as prominent in his persona as Quijano de Manila (a pseudonym he adopted for his
journalistic writings when he joined the Free Press in 1950) as he was the creative
artist Nick Joaquín. He churned out an average of fifty feature articles a year during
this period. He wrote with eloquence and verve on the most democratic range of
subjects, from the arts and popular culture to history and current politics. He was a
widely read chronicler of the times, original and provocative in his insights and
energetic and compassionate in his embrace of local realities.
One of his contemporaries remarked: “Nick Joaquín the journalist has brought to the
craft the sensibility and style of the literary artist, the perceptions of an astute
student of the Filipino psyche, and the integrity and idealism of the man of
conscience, and the result has been a class of journalism that is dramatic, insightful,
memorable, and eminently readable.”
He raised journalistic reportage to an art form. In his crime stories—for example,
“The House on Zapote Street” (1961) and “The Boy Who Wanted to Become Society’”
(1961)—he deployed his narrative skills in producing gripping psychological thrillers
rich in scene, incident, and character. More important, he turned what would
otherwise be ordinary crime reports (e.g., a crime of passion in an unremarkable
Makati suburban home or the poor boy who gets caught up in a teenage gang war)
into priceless vignettes of Philippine social history.
As Free Press literary editor, he virtually presided over the country’s literary scene.
Free Press was the standard in Philippine writing in English because of its wide
circulation and Joaquín’s editorship. Its weekly publication of short stories and
poems was avidly followed. Joaquin was generous in encouraging young writers and
exerted an influence on writers not only in English but in the Philippine languages. In
a Filipino generation that had seen outstanding fictionists (N. V. M. González, F.
Sionil José, and others), he was fondly spoken of as primus inter pares.
Since he joined the Free Press, he had been a full-time writer. The only other “job” he
took was an appointment to the Board of Censors for Motion Pictures, from 1961 to
1972, under both presidents Diosdado Macapagal and Ferdinand Marcos. He took the
post because, in large part, he loved the movies and practically did no cutting or
banning of films, believing in the intelligence and good sense of moviegoers. He
described this stint: “I was non-censoring.”
Philippine society was going through a period of deepening social crisis. The high
hopes engendered during the popular rule of Ramón Magsaysay began to dissipate
after Magsaysay’s death in 1957, as corruption, factional politics, and economic
crisis buffeted the administrations of presidents Carlos García, Diosdado Macapagal,
and Ferdinand Marcos. The Vietnam War politicized the Filipino intelligentsia, the
economy floundered, a new Communist Party was established in 1969, and a new
wave of militant nationalism swept through such institutions as universities and the
media.
In the highly charged days leading up to the declaration of martial law on September
21, 1972, Joaquin maintained his independence as an autonomous voice in
Philippine media. He wrote articles that were current, stayed close to the events, and
were deeply fired by liberal sentiments. In a time polarized by ideological conflict, he
continued to speak in his own voice and not in those of others. This independence
had always been a signal virtue of his writing career.
In the 1930s, when he started writing, he was already a writer apart. At a time when
the United States was viewed as “the very measure of all goodness,” and “history”
and “civilization” in the Philippines seemed to have begun with the advent of
America, Joaquin invoked a deeper past. At a time when to be contemporary was to
be “secular,” Joaquín evoked the country’s Christian tradition. At a time when
“proletarian literature” was the “correct” line for young writers to follow, Joaquín
was the skeptic who felt it was one more instance of local literary hierarchs’
“parroting the Americans, among whom ‘proletarian’ was then the latest buzzword.”
He wrote: “I can see now that my start as a writer was a swimming against the
current, a going against the grain.”
He had always been a writer engaged but apart. Part of the explanation resided in his
character. Engaged in a public profession, with a very public name, he was a very
private person. His reclusive character was formed early. In a rare, affectionate piece
his sister-in-law Sarah Joaquín wrote about him in Philippine Review in 1943, she
spoke of the young Nick as a modest and unassuming young man who was ill at
ease with public praise and shied away from being interviewed or photographed (“he
hadn’t had any taken for fifteen years”). Even then he lived his days according to
certain well-loved rites. He loved going out on long walks (“a tall, thin fellow, a little
slouched, walking in Intramuros, almost always hurriedly”), simply dressed, shoes
worn out from a great deal of walking (which helped him cogitate), observing the
street life of the city, making the rounds of churches. “He is the most religious fellow
I know,” Sarah wrote. “Except when his work interferes, he receives Holy
Communion everyday.” He was generous with friends and devoted to the family with
whom, even in his teens, he shared what little money he earned.
A person of habit, he scribbled about himself many decades ago:
I have no hobbies, no degrees; belong to no party, club, or association;
and I like long walks; any kind of guinataan; Dickens and Booth Tarking-
ton; the old Garbo pictures; anything with Fred Astaire… the Opus Dei
according to the Dominican rite… Jimmy Durante and Cole Porter tunes…
the Marx brothers; the Brothers Karamazov; Carmen Miranda; Paul’s
Epistles and Mark’s; Piedmont cigarettes… my mother’s cooking…
playing tres-siete; praying the Rosary and the Officium Parvum… I don’t
like fish, sports, and having to dress up.
Though he cut the image of one gregarious with his loud, booming voice; his love for
San Miguel beer (a product that turned him into an icon for Filipino beer drinkers);
and his joy in belting out Cole Porter and Frank Sinatra songs in intimate gatherings
in his favorite Manila cafés, he stuck close to the company of a few friends and hated
making formal appearances in public. He grudgingly gave interviews and revealed
such scant detail about his personal life that there are many gaps and contradictions
in his published biographies. He was not above making mischief on unwitting
interviewers by inventing stories about himself. He refused to give the exact date of
his birth (May 4 and September 15 in 1917 have been cited) because, he said, he
hated having people come around to celebrate his birthday.
He had zealously carved out private space in his home where he wrote reams in
longhand or on a typewriter. Though he gave strangers the impression of someone
careless and even dissolute, Joaquín was a very disciplined writer. He woke up early
to read the newspapers, took breakfast, and, from 9:00 a.m. to 12:00 noon, retired to
his library on the second floor of his house where no one was allowed to disturb him.
In his clean and spare study, with books on shelves lining the walls and, in the
center, a chair and a table with a manual typewriter, Nick did his work. From 1:00 to
3:00 p.m., he took a siesta and, often, his second bath of the day, and then from
around 4:00 p.m. onward, he was out of the house to go to the editorial office or
explore his favorite haunts in Manila.
The turbulent days of political activism, as the 1960s came to a close, did not leave
this very private person unaffected. In 1970, he joined a labor union organized by the
workers of Free Press and agreed to be its president. This was the first union to be
organized in the sixty-two-year-old publishing company that was widely regarded as
a beacon of libertarian ideas. Organized at a time when Manila was seething with civil
unrest, the appearance of the union sparked a bitter fight in the company. When
management cracked down on the union, Joaquín resigned. With Free Press editor-
writers Gregorio C. Brillantes and José F. Lacaba, artist Danilo Dalena, and close to
thirty personnel of the administrative and printing departments, Joaquín launched
the weekly Asia-Philippines Leader in 1971 and served as its editor-in-chief. In the
pages of the magazine he wrote a regular column, “This Week’s Jottings,” where he
continued his trenchant commentaries on the Philippine scene.
Martial law closed down Philippine media, including Free Press and Asia-Philippines
Leader. The Marcos government subsequently allowed the publication of a few
favored periodicals controlled by the Marcoses and their cronies. Joaquín refused to
contribute. Among many intellectuals, silence became a form of protest. Joaquín’s
irrepressible pen, however, could not be stilled. “I was never silent during martial
law,” Joaquín declared in an interview in 1980. “I’ve never been silent.” He continued
to write, worked independently, and contributed to both the underground and
aboveground alternative press, the small newspapers and news sheets that came to
be referred to as the “mosquito press” during the martial-law period.
Ironically, there was probably no other time when there was as much publishing of
Joaquín writings as in the 1970s. These publications showcased his boundless
creativity and versatility. In 1977, the National Book Store started issuing popular
compilations of his Free Press human-interest features and crime stories (Reportage
on Lovers, Reportage on Crime) as well as articles on local icons of popular culture
(Nora Aunor and Other Profiles, Ronnie Poe and Other Silhouettes, Amalia Fuentes
and Other Etchings, Doveglion and Other Cameos, Gloria Díaz and Other
Delineations, Joseph Estrada and Other Sketches). Such was his readership that,
between 1979 and 1983, more collections of his journalistic articles were issued:
Reportage on the Marcoses, Reportage on Politics, Language of the Street and Other
Essays, and Manila: Sin City and Other Chronicles. A selection of his speeches and
articles appeared in Discourses of the Devil’s Advocate and Other Controversies
(1983). It is not disingenuous to say that such burst of publishing may have been
fueled by a certain nostalgia for the colorful, rough-and-tumble years before martial
law imposed an order of repression and dull conformism.
Mr. & Ms. Publishing published Nick Joaquín’s Almanac for Manileños (1979), a
coffee-table book that turns the form of the old almanac into “a weather chart, a
sanctoral, a zodiac guide, and a mini-encyclopedia on the world of the Manileño.”
Almanac is a romp for a writer whose knowledge of the country’s capital city —from
churches to brothels, politicians and criminals, fashions high and low, past and
present— has not been matched by anyone. In 1978–1979, the same publisher also
commissioned Joaquin’s children’s stories and modernized fairy tales and put them
out as independent titles as well as in an anthology, Pop Stories for Groovy Kids.
Some of these stories also appeared in a volume entitled Joaquinesquerie: Myth á la
Mod (1983). He had been asked to write just one story in the beginning, but he so
enjoyed doing it that more followed (“it’s like eating peanuts”). That this writer of
metaphysical thrillers also had a deft hand writing for young readers is shown in his
essays on Manila for young Manileños, Manila, My Manila (1990), and his retelling of
the biography of José Rizal, Rizal in Saga: A Life for Student Fans (1996).
He translated Spanish works into English, something he had done intermittently for
years. His most important in this field was The Complete Poems and Plays of José
Rizal (1976). Nick also returned to theater. He adapted the stories “Three
Generations” and “Summer Solstice” as the plays Fathers and Sons (1977) and
Tatarín (1978), respectively. In 1976, he wrote The Beatas, the story of a seventeenth-
century Filipino beguinage, a religious community of lay women, repressed by a
male-dominated, colonial order. The subversive message of the play, in the particular
context of martial rule, lent itself to a staging in Tagalog translation in the highly
political campus of the University of the Philippines in 1978. These plays later
appeared in the volume, Tropical Baroque: Four Manileño Theatricals, published in
Manila in 1979 and in Australia in 1982.
In 1972, the University of Queensland Press in Australia published a new edition of
his fiction under the title, Tropical Gothic. An important feature of this edition was
the inclusion of three novellas that originally appeared in Free Press, “Cándido’s
Apocalypse,” “Doña Jerónima,” and “The Order of Melkizedek.” These novellas are
powerful, historically resonant narratives that probably best represent the
inventiveness and depth of Joaquín as fictionist. They are among the most
outstanding pieces of Philippine fiction that have been written.
He went back to writing poetry, something he had not done since 1965. El Camino
Real and Other Rimes appeared in 1983 and Collected Verse, the author’s choice of
thirty-three poems, was published in 1987. Ranging from light verse to long narrative
pieces, these poems —robust, confident, expansive, elegant— are markers in the
development of Philippine poetry. They demonstrate, says the poet-critic Gémino H.
Abad, a level of achievement in which the Filipino is no longer writing in English but
has indeed “wrought from English, having as it were colonized that language.”
That the Filipino writer wrote in English was a virtue that seemed self-evident when
Joaquin started his career in the 1930s. English was the language of government, the
schools, and the leading publications. It was, for young Filipinos, the language of
modernity and the future. In the late 1960s, however, the use of the English language
in such fields as education, literature, and publishing came under serious question
as a Marxist-inspired nationalism sought to establish a radical, popular basis for the
national culture. Those who wrote in English either switched languages or felt called
upon to defend their use of a foreign tongue. Arguing out of his favorite thesis that
the Filipino is enriched by his creative appropriation of new technologies, Joaquin
extolled the fresh values of temper and sensibility that English had brought into the
national literature. As for his own writings, Joaquin’s response to the issue was
more blunt: “Whether it is in Tagalog or English, because I am Filipino, every single
line I write is in Filipino.” In a more jocular vein, he had written about how the local
milieu was irrevocably present in his works: “I tell my readers that the best
compliment they can pay me is to say that they smell adobo and lechón when they
read me. I was smelling adobo and lechon when I wrote me.”
In 1976, Nick Joaquín was named National Artist of the Philippines in the field of
literature, the highest recognition given by the state for an artist in the country.
Conferred in Manila on March 27, 1976, the award praised his works as “beacons in
the racial landscape” and the author for his “rare excellence and significant
contribution to literature.”
Joaquín had reservations about accepting an award conceived by the Marcos
government as part of First Lady Imelda Marcos’s high-profile program of arts
promotion in the country, but he decided to accept it on the advice of family and
friends. He also felt the award would give him leverage to ask Malacañang Palace to
release from prison José F. Lacaba, a close friend of his and one of the country’s
best writers, who was imprisoned for his involvement in the anti-Marcos resistance.
Lacaba was released in 1976.
Joaquín kept his distance from power, studiously resisting invitations to attend state
functions in Malacañang Palace. At a ceremony on Mount Makiling, Laguna, attended
by Mrs. Marcos, who had built on the fabled mountain site a National Arts Center,
Joaquín delivered a speech in which he provocatively spoke of freedom and the
artist. He was never again invited to address formal cultural occasions for the rest of
the Marcos regime. He was too unpredictable to suit the pious pretensions of the
martial-law government.
The fact that government had conferred on him the honor of National Artist did not
prevent him from criticizing government. In 1982, he put himself at the forefront of a
public demonstration to protest government’s closure of the oppositionist
newspaper We Forum and the arrest and detention of its publisher and editors. The
newspaper had just published a series of articles exposing Ferdinand Marcos’s fake
war medals.
The street appearance was not characteristic of the man. It was in the field of writing
that he engaged power. Joaquin was the provocateur who delighted in debunking
what was politically and intellectually fashionable. One such “fashion” was the
interest in the “ethnic” and “indigenous” during the Marcos era. A legitimate
expression of post-Vietnam Filipino nationalism, the return to the “native” was
appropriated by state nationalism during the martial-law period. In the attempt to
clothe with legitimacy Marcos’s “experiment” in Philippine-style democracy (and
authoritarianism) and blunt both the insurgent opposition to his rule and Western
criticism of human-rights violations, the Marcos government appealed to
“nationalism” based on an indigenous and Asian heritage. In the intellectual field,
this found expression in many intersecting ways: the glorification of barangay
democracy; the promotion of Tagalog as the national language and the downgrading
of English writing; the “Filipinization” of scholarly disciplines; the romancing of the
1971 discovery of the allegedly Stone-Age Tasadays; and the state-sponsored
Tadhanà project started in 1975, in which a group of Filipino historians wrote a “new
history” of the Philippines under the name of Ferdinand Marcos.
Addressing this trend, Nick Joaquín wrote articles attacking nativism and the
glorification of the indigenous and the ethnic. Describing the Filipino as a “work in
progress” whose national identity is the dynamic product of the various cultural
influences in his history (in particular, he stresses, the Spanish-Christian
experience), he debunked the idea of a “pure” native culture and lamented the
denigration of Western influence. A vigorous polemicist, he taunted the “new”
nationalists with statements such as “Asia, before 1521, was conspicuous by its
absence in Philippine culture” or “Those who want Philippine culture to be what it
was 400 years ago are afflicted with the Dorian Gray illusion: the illusion that
innocence can be frozen or that a personality can be kept from showing the effects
on it of time, space, nature, society, the outside world.”
The terrain had changed but Joaquín was fighting a battle he had started to wage as
early as the 1930s. Then he was reacting to an intellectual establishment that,
infatuated with America, wanted to wean itself from the past much too quickly. Now
he was responding to leaders and intellectuals who, desiring to break away from the
West, were invoking a golden past he felt was not there. In the years of the Japanese
occupation, he was writing against the grain when he wrote the seminal essay “La
Naval de Manila.” Then he was responding (whether deliberately or not) to the trend,
encouraged by the “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere,” for Filipinos to return
to their “Asian” and “Malayan” roots. Now, in the 1970s, he was interrogating the
scapegoating of the West and the romancing of “Asianness.”
Polemical rather than academic, he simplified the terms of the debate, drew dividing
lines much too sharply, and couched arguments in hyperbolic terms. He was
impatient with the either/or rhetoric of indigenists and nationalists. “Why isn’t it
enough to be just Filipino?” Quoting James Joyce, he declared of his own work:
“This country and this people shaped me; I shall express myself as I am.” He was, as
always, the writer apart but passionately engaged.
In A Question of Heroes: Essays in Criticism on Ten Key Figures of Philippine
History (1977) and Culture and History: Occasional Notes on the Process of
Philippine Becoming (1988), he showed himself an insightful historian and vigorous
cultural critic. Addressing a general public rather than specialists, he said that it was
his aim to “open up fresh viewpoints on the national process” by asking “those
pesky questions which, though they seem so obvious, have somehow never been
asked about our history and culture.”
In Question of Heroes, a series of articles on Filipino heroes that first appeared in the
Free Press in the 1960s, he demystified the heroes associated with the birth of the
nation in the late nineteenth century. He humanized them, thickened their lives with
sharp and telling detail, and situated them in the living context of their times. The
result was not just a critical reevaluation of historical figures but a coherent picture
of a nation in formation. Culture and History offered a more varied fare of fifteen
essays that developed Joaquin’s ideas on what he called “the process of Filipino
becoming.” Underlying these ideas was an evolutionary and optimistic confidence in
the Filipino capacity to invent himself out of the constraints and opportunities of his
historical experience. Attacking the syndrome of shame over the colonial past and
guilt over being “neither East nor West,” Joaquín celebrated hybridity. Attacking
nativism and other forms of exclusionism, he said (quoting Oswald Spengler),
“Historic is that which is, or has been, effective,” and he gloried in what the Filipino
has and will become.
There are conceptual gaps in Joaquín’s view of Philippine history. He tended to be
too dismissive of precolonial culture (even as it figured in his own fiction),
overstressed the transformative role of technology, and was perhaps too apologetic
of the Spanish and Christian influence in Philippine culture. There was no denying,
however, the intelligent passion with which he embraced his people’s culture and
history. Few in his time played as effective a role in the public discourse on the
national culture.
The shaking loose of the structure of the martial-law regime after the assassination
of Benigno Aquino Jr. in 1983, and the eventual collapse of the regime in the “People
Power Revolution” of 1986, saw Nick Joaquín right in the public stream as the
country’s premier chronicler of current history. A book that he started writing before
martial law was declared in 1972, The Aquinos of Tarlac: An Essay on History as
Three Generations, appeared in 1983. His chronicle of the People Power Revolution,
The Quartet of the Tiger Moon, was published in 1986.
Twenty-two years after The Woman Who Had Two Navels, Joaquín came out with his
second novel, Cave and Shadows (1983). He jokingly remarked at its appearance:
“Now, I’ll be known as the man who has two novels.” Fervid and dense, Cave and
Shadows was Joaquín’s “objective correlative” to the Crisis of ’72. Set in Manila in
the steamy month of August 1972, just before the declaration of martial law, the
novel weaves a plot around the discovery of a woman’s naked body in a cave in the
suburbs of Manila. The search for answers to the mystery of the woman’s death
becomes a metaphysical thriller in which past and present collide and reality is
unhinged as a social order breaks down in division and revolution.
A deep fount of creative energy, Joaquín was a much sought-after biographer. From
1979 to 2000, he authored more than a dozen book-length biographies of prominent
Filipinos, from artists and educators to business people and politicians. These
include the biographies of diplomat Carlos Rómulo, senators Manuel Manahan and
Salvador Laurel, technocrat Rafaél Salas, businessmen Jaime Ongpín and D. M.
Guevara, artist Leonor Orosa Goquingco, educator Nicanor Reyes, civic leader
Estefania Aldaba-Lim, and Jaime Cardinal Sin. He also wrote local and institutional
histories—such as San Miguel de Manila: Memoirs of a Regal Parish (1990) and Hers,
This Grove: The Story of Philippine Women’s University (1996)—and authored or
edited diverse other volumes.
He was criticized for “writing too much,” producing commissioned biographies of
uneven quality, and forsaking creative writing for journalism. While his Aquinos of
Tarlac was a masterful interweaving of the life of a family and that of a nation, May
Langit Din Ang Mahirap (1998), his biography of former Manila Mayor Alfredo Lim,
seemed like a hurried, paste-up job. While his talent could be quite profligate, there
was no mistaking the genuineness of his appetite for local life and drive to convert
this to memorable form.
Nick Joaquín’s stature in his country is demonstrated by the numerous prizes he
received for his literary and journalistic writings. His contributions to Philippine
culture were acknowledged by the City of Manila with an Araw ng Maynila Award
(1963), a Patnubay ng Sining at Kalinangan Award (1964), and a Diwa ng Lahi Award
(1979). The national government conferred on him its highest cultural honors, the
Republic Cultural Heritage Award (1961) and the title of National Artist of the
Philippines (1976).
In 1996, he received the Ramón Magsaysay Award for Journalism, Literature, and
Creative Communication Arts, the highest honor for a writer in Asia. The citation
honored him for “exploring the mysteries of the Filipino body and soul in sixty
inspired years as a writer.” Accepting the award on August 31, 1996, Joaquin did not
look back on past achievements but relished the moment, saying that indeed the
good wine has been reserved for last and “the best is yet to be.” This from a man
who was about to turn eighty when he received the award.
In his 1996 Ramón Magsaysay Award lecture, Joaquín addressed what, he said, had
troubled his critics as his “Jekyll/Hyde” personality as journalist and litterateur. He
had never been the hothouse artist, he declared, and had always felt there was no
subject not worthy of his attention. The practice of journalism nourished his populist
sympathies. “Journalism trained me never, never to feel superior to whatever I was
reporting, and always, always to respect an assignment, whether it was a basketball
game, or a political campaign, or a fashion show, or a murder case, or a movie-star
interview.” Journalism exercised his powers of storytelling. “Good reportage is
telling it as it is but at the same time telling it new, telling it surprising, telling it
significant.”
Though he largely played his life and career “by ear,” Joaquín relished how he had
moved in the right directions. On the one hand, he could trace himself back to the
times when Plato and Cervantes or the Arabian Nights and the Letters of Saint Paul
were all “literature” and there were no fine distinctions as to which mode of writing
was belle and not belle enough. On the other hand, he had foreshadowed current
trends that had broken down the generic boundaries of fiction and nonfiction or
“journalism” and “literature.”
With the mischievous glee of one who enjoyed what he was doing, he said that such
Joaquín reportage as “House on Zapote Street” and “The Boy Who Wanted to
Become ‘Society’” antedated the American “New Journalism” that writers such as
Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, and Gore Vidal made famous. Moreover, the fiction
that he wrote—from “May Day Eve” and “The Mass of St. Sylvester” to “Doña
Jerónima” and “Cándido’s Apocalypse”—bodied forth “magic realism” long before
the Latin American novelists made it fashionable.
While Nick Joaquín wrote in English, was published abroad, and had some of his
works translated into foreign languages, he did not quite receive the high attention
he deserved outside the Philippines. This was something probably of no great
moment to Joaquín himself. He was firmly rooted in place and in active dialogue with
his Filipino audience. This speaking to and about his people had always framed his
writing life. Though he spoke from a specific location—writing in English out of
Manila (he had not lived for any significant amount of time outside the capital)—his
voice carried far among Filipinos.
In the Philippines, Nick Joaquín was a keeper of tradition and a maker of memory. He
grew up in what he called an “Age of Innocence” in Philippine history, an era when
Filipinos, seduced by the promise of America and modernity, distanced themselves
from their Spanish colonial past and slipped into a kind of amnesia. He saw—having
grown up in a home where his father told stories about the revolution and his mother
encouraged a love for Spanish poetry—that it was his calling “to bring in the
perspective, to bring in the grandfathers, to manifest roots.” In his writings, he
traced a landscape haunted by the past—pagan rites in the shadows of the Christian
church, legends of a woman in the cave, strange prophets roaming the countryside,
grandfathers who seem like ghosts who have strayed into the present. He conjured a
society stranded in the present and not quite whole because it had not come to
terms with its past.
The problem of identity was central in Joaquín’s works. In an impressive body of
literary, historical, and journalistic writings, Joaquín was a significant participant in
the public discourse on “Filipino identity.” What marked the positions he took was
his refusal of easy orthodoxies. An outsider to government, the political parties, and
the universities, he kept his space to be an independent thinker on the issues
confronting the nation. From the 1930s to until his death, he was consistent in his
role as the critic of what passed for the politically “correct” of the day. In this
manner, he opened up spaces for the Filipino to imagine himself in novel ways and
act on this basis.
Nick Joaquín lived through eight decades of Philippine history and witnessed the
slow, uneven, and often violent transformation of the nation—the American idyll of
the prewar years, the violence and degradation of an enemy occupation, the
Communist insurgency and the hard choices it confronted the Filipino with, the dark
years of martial rule, the waxing and waning of hopes for a better nation. It is history
that tempts many with despair. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Nick
Joaquín, the writer, was that his was always the voice of a deep, inclusive, and
compassionate optimism in the Filipino.
He had always—as Joaquín himself would say, quoting one of his favorite literary
lines—raged, raged against the dying of the light. This was true not only of what he
had written but how he had lived his life. When many of his contemporaries had long
faded into the background, Joaquín continued to speak of his craft with the verve of
a young writer. Well into his eighties, with close to sixty book titles to his name, he
was working on more. He also continued to practice journalism. He wrote the regular
columns “Small Beer” and “Jottings” for the Philippine Daily Inquirer and the
Sunday Inquirer Magazine from 1988 to 1990; served as editor of Philippine Graphic
magazine and publisher of its sister publication, Mirror Weekly, in 1990; and
continued to contribute to various publications until his final days. When asked once
if he ever intended to retire, Joaquín was said to have responded, with typical
mischief, “I’m not retiring and I’m not resigned.”
NICK Joaquín lived in the city and country of his affections and continued to write
until his death in April 2004 at the age of eighty-six.
*******
Culled from the Ramón Magsaysay Award Foundation website.
Philippine novelist, poet, playwright, and essayist writing in English, the National
Artist for Literature. Joaquin is widely considered the best postwar author in his
country. He has written largely about the Spanish colonial period and the diverse
heritage of the Filipino people. Often he deals with the coexistence of 'primitive' and
'civilized' dimensions inside the human psyche. In his short story 'The Summer
Solstice,' set in the 1850s, Joaquin portrayed the collision between instincts and
refined culture. Doña Lupeng first rejects ancient beliefs, but under the spell of the
moon, she becomes possessed by the spirit of the Tadtarin cult - she does not want
to be loved and respected anymore but adored as the embodiment of the matriarchal
powers.
"He lifted his dripping face and touched his bruised lips to her toes; lifted his hands
and grasped the white foot and kissed it savagely - kissed the step, the sole, the frail
ankle - while she bit her lips and clutched in pain at the windowsill, her body
distended and wracked by horrible shivers, her head flung back and her loose hair
streaming out of the window - streaming fluid and black in the white night where the
huge moon glowed like a sun and the dry air flamed into lightning and the pure heat
burned with the immense intense fever of noon." (from 'The Summer Solstice' in
Tropical Gothic, 1972)
Nick Joaquin was born in Paco on Calle Herran, as the the son of Leocadio Y.
Joaquin, a lawyer and a colonel of the Philippine Revolution, and Salome Marquez, a
schoolteacher. After three years of secondary education at the Mapa High School,
Joaquin dropped out of school to work on Manila’s waterfront and in odd jobs. On
his spare time he read widely at the National Library and on his father's library.
English had became the official medium of instruction in 1898 after the Spanish-
American war. Especially through the work of short story writers English became the
most developed literary genre and virtually all Spanish literature ceased.
Starting as a proofreader at the Philippines Free Press, Joaquin rose to contributing
editor and essayist under the pen name 'Quijano de Manila' (Manila Old Timer). After
World War II Joaquin worked as a journalist, gaining fame as a reporter for the Free
Press. In 1970 he left the Philippines Free Press and went on to edit Asia-Philippine
Leader. During the reign of Ferdinand Marcos, who had won presidency in 1965,
corruption started to fuel opposition to his administration. When martial law was
declared in 1972 Joaquin was subsequently suspended. He then became the editor
of the Philippine Graphic magazine and publisher of the Women’s Weekly.
Joaquin started to write short stories, poems, and essays in 1934. One year later his
first work appeared in the Tribune in 1935. In 1947 his essay on the defeat of a Dutch
fleet by the Spaniards off the Philippines in 1646 earned him a scholarship to study
in Hong Kong at the Albert College, founded by the Dominicans. Joaquin's studies
for priesthood explains part the Christian setting of his stories and constant
attention to the practices and superstitions of his characters. However, he left the
seminary in 1950, finding it impossible for him to adjust to rigid rules. Prose and
Poems (1952) was followed by the Barangay Theatre Guild's production of his play, A
Portrait of the Artist as Filipino. The title refers to James Joyce's famous book, not
without ironic tone. A Portrait is considered the most important Filipino play in
English. In it Joaquin focused on a family conflict, in which old cultural models are
reconciled with modern values. The descendants of the declining Don Lorenzo
refuse to sell the masterpiece which he has painted for them. With Stevan Javellana,
N.V.M. Gonzalez, Celso Al. Carunungan, and Kerima Polotan Tuvera he influenced
the development of the Philippine novel and short story. He writing also build a
bridge from modern literature to the religious themes of Spanish heritage and
primitive beliefs. When the young Guido in 'The Summer Solstice' had returned from
Europe to his home, he tells Doña Lupeng: "Ah, I also learned to open my eyes over
there - to see the holiness and the mystery of what is vulgar."
The prize-novel The Woman Who Had Two Navels (1961) examined the pressures of
the past upon the present. Monson, the ex-revolutionary, hides in Hong Kong, afraid
to face the trials of postwar independence. Again Joaquin dealt with the tensions
between illusion and reality. The novel won the first Harry Stonehill Award, an yearly
grant. The Aquinos of Tarlac (1983) was a biography of the assassinated presidential
candidate Benigno Aquino. He led the opposition to President Ferdinand Marcos and
was shot dead in the airport when he returned from exile. Three years after his death
his widow Corazon Aquino became President of the Philippines. Cave and Shadows
(1983) occurs in the period of martial law under Marcos.
For his work Joaquin received several awards. His essay 'La Naval de Manila' (1943)
won in a contest sponsored by the Dominicans; 'Guardia de Honor' was declared the
best story of the year in 1949, he received in 1963 the Araw ng Maynila Award, and in
1966 he was conferred the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Literature, Broadcast and
Journalism. In 1976 Joaquin was declared a National Artist. He is the most
anthologized of all Philippine authors.
A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS FILIPINO
Plot summary and thematic description
Set in the Filipino world of pre-World War II Intramuros of Old Manila in October
1941,[4] the play explores the many aspects of Philippine high society by telling the
story of the Marasigan sisters, Candida and Paula, and their father, the painter Don
Lorenzo Marasigan. Due to an artistic drought on Don Lorenzo's part, the family has
to make ends meet by relying on the financial support provided by their brother
Manolo and sister Pepang, who were urging them to sell the house.[6] Later on, they
also had to take a male boarder, in the person of Tony Javier.[8] Don Lorenzo, who
refused to sell, donate, or even exhibit his self-portrait in public, was only content in
staying inside his room, a stubbornness that already took a period of one year.[4] The
painting has attracted the attention and curiosity of journalists such as a family
friend named Bitoy Camacho, and other obnoxious visitors pretending as art
critics.[4] When one of the daughters, Paula, elopes with Tony, a journey of personal
liberation is set in motion, which ends with a restoration of family relations which
had been strained due to the neediness of the artist's family.[8] She also felt regret
after destroying the portrait.[8]
The theme focuses on family conflict and the amalgamation of old Filipino identity
and cultural character with the arrival of contemporary and Western ideals.[6]
Historical setting and background
Before the Second World War, many Filipino intellectuals and artists – including
painters, as personified by Don Lorenzo Marasigan – searched for cultural
enlightenment from Spain, the first imposer of colonialism and authority in the
Philippines. This group of Filipinos was acquainted with the Spanish language and
customs. After the liberation of the Philippines from its Spanish colonizer, the United
States became the replacement model for cultural enhancement, where English
language and materialism became a part – as personified by the boarder Tony Javier
– thus marginalizing native tongues and culture within the process. During this
period, the Philippines was also plagued by the looming war, frequent blackouts, and
untrustworthy characters of the existing nightlife in Old Manila.[
A CurtainUp Review
Portrait of the Artist as a Filipino
By David Lipfert
Known as the Philippine national play, Nick Joaquin's Portrait of the Artist as Filipino
from 1952 is currently onstage at Vineyard's Dimson Theatre. The play's immense
popularity in its homeland is due as much to the author's loving look at the multiple
cultural components of Philippine high society as to the reassuring ending for the
Marasigan family conflict, which is the main plot.
Candida and Paula, Don Leonardo's two unmarried daughters, are barely able to
maintain the sprawling family house except through the contributions from their
"successful" brother and sister Pepang and Manolo. By taking in male boarder Tony,
they survive in the face of their father's artistic drought. The daughters resist the
temptation to sell father's self-portrait, which could fetch a small fortune, and ignore
their siblings' coercion to dispose of the family house. Personal liberation begins
when Paula briefly elopes with Tony, destroys the painting and the two daughters
apologize to their father for their ill treatment of him. Imminent war, practice
blackouts and sleazy figures from Manila nightlife make a colorful context.
Just as Philippine society was an amalgam of foreign influences, Mr. Joaquin's plot
unites rigid family mores and implacable siblings (Federico Garcia Lorca) with a
Shakespearean nobility. Akin to the arrival of a god to whisk an unfortunate mortal
out of harm's way, unexpected salvation comes in the form of the Senator's advice to
stand pat against the world.
In the pre-war period, intellectuals and many artists, such as the painter Don
Leonardo Marasigan, looked to the first colonial power Spain for cultural models.
Typical of these circles, the Marasigan family peppers their conversation with
Spanish words. They also used to host a weekly tertulia, a typically Spanish four-
person discussion group where literary and other topics held sway. When the U.S.
liberated Spain of its outlying colonies (Philippines, Cuba and Puerto Rico) about a
century ago, English became the power language and new models of material
success became ascendant. The journalists visiting Don Leonardo's house in the
first scene can think only about how much the painting might be worth, not about the
theme taken from Virgil's Aeneid. Native culture and Tagalog language were
marginalized, just like the boarder Tony Javier, and the elite traveled abroad to either
Europe or America to set themselves apart.
Director Jorge W. Ledesma opted for a confusing presentation of this worthy text. He
divided each major role among up to three actors-possibly an interesting treatment
for a well-known classic but inappropriate to make a case for the play, which many
people will be seeing for the first time. His stated aim is to utilize his cast of 19
Filipino and American actors to reflect the multicultural forces shaping Filipino
society, but succeeds only in obscuring Mr. Joaquin's already eloquent treatment of
this very theme. Playing up Mr. Joaquin's many humorous touches would be a
needed contrast for the seriousness of the sisters. Finally, better blocking would
enliven Donald Eastman's simple setting.
Apart from the play, the major interest is in the cast. Kitty Chen gives just the right
touch of cynicism as the photographer Cora. Millie Chow and Eileen Rivera are ideal
as the dance hall girls Violet and Susan. Sharing the role of the boarder Tony Javier,
Ron Domingo and Louie Leonardo make this con artist likeable. Peggy Yates is
memorable as the sophisticated and well-travelled society girl Elisa Monte.
Christianne Myers designed costumes that were heavy on early 1940's nostalgia, but
she burdened Candida and Paula with inconvenient trains on their white dresses.
Such costuming is appropriate for the occasional vignettes behind a rear scrim but
are unfortunate when moving about on stage.
The audience gave this Ma-Yi Theatre Ensemble production a warm reception.
Running time is about two and a half hours with one intermission.