“Pagsambang Bayan” to be restaged
The guardians of the Marcos military regime did not see it coming. Theater, after all, was the least of their concerns, having been completely taken over, or so they thought, by the functionaries of the First Lady who plastered the landscape with “the true, the good and the beautiful”.
But when the Christian Mass was made into a play at the Wilfrido Ma. Guerrero Theater in UP Diliman in 1977, its antimartial law subtext was not lost on the audience. Considered as the oldest of all traditional dramas, the Mass was given new meaning in “Pagsambang Bayan,” now considered as one of the most popular protest plays of the 1970s. The play reinterprets Christ’s sacrifice, the parables of the New Testmanent and the priesthood itself, according to the problems of the peasants, workers and the rest of the impoverished masses in Philippine society.
“Pagsambang Bayan” was originally performed in English in Hongkong in 1976. It was directed by Leo Rimando (who passed away August 14, 2006). Rimando was a pillar of theater in UP Los Baños and Southern Tagalog, director of the premartial law group Panday Sining and founding chair of Bugkos, once the biggest federation of artists and cultural workers in the Philippines.
Behn Cervantes directed the Philippine performances of “Pagsambang Bayan” by the UP Repertory Company.
In a way that only theater could do, “Pagsambang Bayan,” shattered the silence of the public and its fear of the military regime. On its premiere night, the air was electric as applause thundered in the jampacked theater with cries of “Truth!,” “Justice!” and “Freedom!”
An international magazine, the Far Eastern Economic Review, featured it in an essay on the Philippines under a dictatorship. The Marcos government took notice and arrested Director Cervantes and the play’s musical director. The playwright, Bonifacio P. Ilagan, who had just been released from prison, had to make himself scarce again. When he surfaced, the military punished him by requiring him to report to Camp Crame twice a week.
Years later, when the Cory Aquino government took over, the play would be published in an anthology of plays of the CCP Center for Literature and featured in the Encyclopedia of Philippine Art as an example of theater made relevant by the crisis of society.
In 1981 and 1984, buoyed by the volatile situation, the UP Repertory Company responded to the clamor to restage “Pagsambang Bayan.” Today, the crisis is back – even as some say it never left – and the play, too, is back. The Tag-ani Performing Arts
Society is opening its 2009 season with another production of “Pagsambang Bayan” in February, on a grant by the National Commission for Culture and the Arts for its Ani ng Sining program . Cervantes directs his old favorite.
Interestingly, even before the Tag-ani production, an abridged version of the play is up for presentation by the St. Peter Vicariate of the Diocese of Novaliches in Quezon City on December 12, 2009 at the Robinson’s Cinema 2 in Fairview, QC.
