Step into the IBG-KAL theater early for a Nanay Bangis showing, and a kariton strung with clothes and boxes immediately greets you. Though large and looming, it does not wish to intimidate.
On the contrary, seeing it feels too intimate—like a snapshot of the lives that the cart’s contents will make easier. The play carries this intimacy all throughout its duration, unafraid to let its actors look the audience in the eye while in song or speech. Make no mistake, though: Nanay Bangis does not want you to get too attached.
Adapted from Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children, Dulaang UP’s Nanay Bangis tests a mother’s capability for wartime survival along with her cart business and her children. Set against the backdrop of the 1971 to 1981 conflict between the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) and the Philippine Army–this play is brutally honest about violence and death. Pairing this honesty with quick-witted and unmistakably Filipino dialogue, the play’s events begin to feel eerily familiar.
Now that Nanay Bangis is shifted to the Moro struggle in the Philippines (as opposed to Brecht’s Thirty Years War setting), adapter Rody Vera points out in a talkback session the need to recognize the underlying themes of the Muslim-Christian conflict beyond the religious. Conflict makes business inseparable from war, as Vera describes, and this much is true in the borderline capitalistic Nanay Bangis.
From duster dresses to Rebisco biscuits, Nanay Bangis’ cart business is at the country’s service. In a time when the agricultural industry struggled and resources hardly came by, buying products from Nanay Bangis meant you were getting a bargain.
The more prolonged the war is, then, the better. Where one would celebrate the Tripoli Agreement seemingly ending the war, Nanay Bangis huffs in anger. Where one would mourn the war continuing after this agreement fails, she rejoices. As long as war ravages the country, people will look for the good deals that Nanay Bangis’ kariton can offer. So many losses hit the country, but these are her gains.
Nanay Bangis does not just live with this attitude; she must also fiercely hold on to it. When other characters challenge her faulty thinking, she is ready to launch blunt and brusque arguments in her defense. A heated exchange between Nanay Bangis and supporting character Brother Mike comes to mind: they debate how transactional life now seems to her, and she defends herself with solemnity, not just her usual sass. If life is transactional, she will gladly bet on her business.
Nanay Bangis is stubborn and not very likable, but it is important for the audience to understand that a woman in war does not aim to be liked. She aims to be spared.
The play underlines such messages by borrowing from Brecht’s epic theater methods, so do not be surprised if the actors break character and burst into song or narration. Though done cheekily, this is how the play makes a statement: this play is fictional but its events have happened in real life to real people, and that fact alone is a reason for reflection.
Bringing this idea of social awareness to life, let alone taking center stage for it, sounds like a hefty task. Nanay Bangis’ actor Geraldine Villamil does not seem to be fazed, though. She is expectedly sassy and spirited, but she also shines in scenes requiring quieter and unrestrained vulnerability. In Villamil’s hands, Nanay Bangis becomes both the heart and the spirit of the play.
Eldest son and eventual soldier Elvis (Ethan King) is just as much a star, effectively and refreshingly brash without being too in-your-face. Even as a narrator, King’s delivery is suave and hard-hitting, but he is also a commanding center in more humorous narrations. Naïve middle child Kesong Puti (Raymond Aguilar) is often the butt of the play’s jokes, but is sometimes too obvious of a target that his own punchlines miss the mark.
Youngest Christine (Khay Eva) is a personal favorite, poignant in her girlish yearnings for beauty and marriage. It is this poignancy, along with her heroics in the latter part of the play, that drives home the message that much strength can be found in femininity. Still, the play is straightforward in showing just how quickly and cruelly war can play with this strength.
Eva and Villamil create a complex dynamic between Christine and Nanay Bangis, tragically rooted in their understanding of each other in ways that only mother and daughter can. For better or for worse, affection between them is often implicit. Christine does not always find support for her desires, but her mother’s hands are nevertheless quick to heal and hold her in times of trauma.
Though they meet sparingly, Nanay Bangis also finds a friend in the promiscuous tattoo-bearing, boots-wearing Ynez (Air Paz). Imperfect but unquestionably solid even in trying times, these female dynamics give the audience much to take away about love.
Rounding off Nanay Bangis’ party of unconventional companions are Pedrong Tabako (Ronah Rostata-de la Pena) and Brother Mike (Jigger Sementilla). One is packed with bravado and the other with too-earnest Bible-verse-spewing tendencies, but both are worthy challengers of the characters’ and the audience’s beliefs on the period’s socio-political climate. It helps, too, that their respective actors skillfully know when to be frank and when to be funny with their deliveries.
If Nanay Bangis aims to shape a realistic and reflective audience, it does not just succeed with its cast. Its musical numbers also pack a punch with their head-bob-worthy beats, but their piercing lyrics do not get drowned out either. Awit ng Kabatian at Sabwatan is a standout with Ynez’s soulful musings on betrayal, while Pedrong Tabako’s Kanta ng Mabubuting Taong Minalas also impresses with equally gritty guitar and lyrics about the misfortunes that become inescapable given the period’s social situation.
All of the play’s musical numbers are performances, both in the traditional sense of the word and in epic theater’s terms: Ynez gets a disco ball and a rosy spotlight, and the entire cast joins Pedrong Tabako in a jamming session. These are all dramatic, but in this play, dramatics are necessary. Dramatics are a reminder that real life is happening beyond a theater’s four walls.
Among such performances, though, the play’s opening song is the most compelling. As the cast chants, “Mga bangkay iwan niyo na,” they drum on empty plastic pails and glass Coca-Cola bottles–recycled evidence of a life once lived. When the song is reprised for the closing number and Nanay Bangis’ children come back on stage despite already succumbing to their respective fates at that point, the play now shows that losses will just keep coming cyclically during a war.
It is clear now that Nanay Bangis is a story of remains: what war leaves behind and what survivors, in turn, must let go of.
Regrettably enough, the Moros know all too well what it is like to lose and let go. Whether it be lives, land, or the liberty to live as they please without pressure from invaders, the Moros’ struggle was exacerbated by the Martial Law imposed by Ferdinand Marcos Sr. In Nanay Bangis, Pedrong Tabako gives this history a voice in a faceoff with the more Marcos Sr.-tolerant Brother Mike: the dictator wants to silence the Moros, but the Moros only want to be independent.
Why, then, would Nanay Bangis celebrate the wartime conditions that are the subject of debate even by the play’s own characters? She herself does not hide it: war means business, and business means survival for herself and her children. When war hits, the picture-perfect ideal of moral character comes at a price too high for the common working-class woman. When war hits, the more affordable choice may just be Nanay Bangis’ capitalistic attitude.
War forces a grin-and-bear-it mindset upon a woman, and Nanay Bangis surely masters her wry, war-weathered flicker of a smile–just because she has to, not because there is anything to be happy about. At its core, the play expresses itself through the continuous movement among actors, the raucous laughs that penetrate even solemn scenes; nothing and no one stops moving.
Nanay Bangis emerges now as an ode to the women who have learned to keep up with the cycle of war (and perhaps have even outpaced it).
