BACK in the day when my uncle Elmer still lived in the neighborhood, he would accidentally leave seedy tabloids in the parking lot. These I would “accidentally” pick up and, from the paper’s raunchy covers graced by the likes of scantily clad sirens, I would, again, “accidentally” jump to the entertainment section and read the comics, titled “Buhul-buhol na Init” (Tangled Heat).
I was 10 years old.
That time I thought the people in the neighborhood minding their own businesses might suspect what’s up with this boy perusing what was obviously a filthy newspaper. “Ahahaha!” I would laugh out loud, so that they wouldn’t harbor on the thought and it would appear as though I were just reading a fable. “This is so funny!”
This, as I was afraid the neighbors might tell my mother, because that time when I was just beginning to discover the sexual tingling inside me was also the time most fraught with hurt.
That time I would “experiment” smooching my playmates on the lips. That time I would get a hard-on over pinup calendar girls and kiss-and-tell autobiographies. That time I would be caught touching myself under the bed covers just when I was about to climax. That time I wondered whether it was the all-knowing and omnipresent God telling my mother. Or maybe I was just terrible at timing, because I was getting caught with such a depressing regularity.
If you managed to get away from so much ribbing, what was deemed a “misbehavior” would be met with corporal punishment. However, it’s unlike being ostracized and treated with a cold shoulder. Rather than a direct confrontation, your parents would sit you down and beat around the bush. Compare this with the people you’ve done it with who would rather shove the memories of a raunchy evening to the back of their heads. They would be unwilling to talk about that evening either because that was a difficult conversation or because that was a long time ago.
Glenn Sevilla Mas and Ed Locsin’s Games People Play, an opus centered at heartbreak, coming of age and coming out, brought these awkward conversations out to the fore and nailed it there. Mas and Locsin’s opus is twin-billed with Si Maria Isabella at ang Guryon ng mga Tala at the recent Children’s Play for Adults theatrical. The latter is the latest brainchild of Hero Blueberry & West and Bit by Bit Co., which also produced a seminal theatrical adaptation, Maxie the Musical: Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros, in 2013.
Games People Play stages what happens when fairy tales and bedtime stories actually become “bedtime stories.” In it, Luna, Diego and Julio are soulmates whose narratives and checkered back stories are pushed forward in the “games” they play. These games form part of the rites of passage, beginning from their being innocuous childhood best of friends to when they begin to lust over each other’s precociously seductive bodies.
The virtuous girl Luna grew up in a home where she existed from one bedtime to the next, invisible to her oblivious drunkard father and overly religious mother, who talks endlessly to her dead “santo friends”.
Preceded by Diego’s sexual advance, the utter neglect and her stumbling one night upon a peepshow of her parents petting and canoodling stoked her sexual curiosity. She was forced to perform a balancing act between desire and all the virtue and fear of God her Lolita body could hold.
Diego wants the same attention from her catatonic mother, whom he finds mooning by the window day in and day out, as if stuck psychedelically in an emotional past, as if waiting for Diego’s father to come back. It is a youth pockmarked with grit and gray and where being turned down for premature sex was the first heartbreak.
Julio, on the other hand, was an obvious pansy. Time was he covered up how he rummaged her mother’s closet of ermine dresses and lipstick by saying he was sweating out in the sun by playing basketball with Diego. It was in a household where being gay was condemned and the marching order was to develop muscles and break his neck like a man.
The play is awash with sexual innuendoes and sinister lighting so as adult thespians Thea Yrastorza (Luna), JC Santos (Diego) and Abner de Lina (Julio) assumed otherwise juvenile roles when they play house. The technique works in a way always suggestive of something about to happen and demands the audience to stifle their coughs when that finally occurs.
One day they would play hide-and-seek against the benighted backdrop of cardboard mockups of a remote castle and a church and the woods in an eventide. The next day, Luna would act to suggest she’s pleasuring herself in solitude, while Julio pleasures Diego. In the intimate and personal black-box setting that is the “Power Mac” spotlight, the ritual is an obligation of solidarity, at once raw, straight from the shoulders and shows how theater transcends film, devoid of any subterfuge to mask a flawed and ill-equipped 11-year-old fondling and caressing with the sleight of a fancy camera angle.
The silence that wrapped the audience was punctured by a sound effect of lip-smacking. Perhaps the need to talk was to escape the agony of being point-blank grilled and the feel of being put on the spot, the way you blather words without meaning to extinguish an already-excruciating silence.
Just being there watching young adults break down their unadulterated innocence and titillate oneself was to partake in an act deemed “sinful”.
The “unfortunate” turn of events gradually give way to when these childhood friends have grown older. Now strangers to each other, they meet for the first time.
Sighs were heaved; heads snapped to attention; onstage there was at once the need to talk about something. But about what? And how? Diego ventures upon the games they played. But, again, awkwardness ensues.
What brought them together now sets them apart. The actors show their characters apparently refuse to talk about the past, if only because childhood was just a phase.
And that was a long time ago.
