While the premise of ‘3 Upuan’ is relatively simple, three siblings reunite at their father’s deathbed in a hospital, and as they reconnect, their lives begin to unfurl. But what is incredible about the play, written and directed by Guelan Verela-Luarca is that the unfurling spans the vast expanse of time and really goes deep into the existential questions the characters must face when one is confronted by how brief life can be. It doesn’t help that the three characters are intelligent, articulate individuals, children of college professors. The eldest, Jers, is a professor himself; Jack is an artist; and Jai, the youngest, is a journalist. When faced with their mortality – and the mortality of their loved ones – they dodge and evade the hard conversations before they get deep into it, and then would sometimes go into a soliloquy, trying to grasp the abstract nature of death and grief out loud for the audience to hear.
This is the fourth staging of the play in just a year, first performed last September in the dressing room of Hyundai Hall of Areté, followed by another run in February also at Arete, and then in August at Archivo 1984 in Makati. For this Sc. : Scene Change production, it is held once again at the Areté, but at the museum lobby, surrounded by an exhibition of kite paintings.
There’s only about 50 chairs set on a space formed as a thrust stage, with the three actors seated on three chairs before a large projector screen. And the intimacy of the setup places the audience front and center in an immense exploration of philosophy, language, time, and grief.
With the audience seated so close, and only three chairs and a video projection as props, the three actors have nowhere to hide. The play runs for roughly 100 minutes without intermission so it’s you and them and the journey they take you through these characters’ inner world and their wealth of emotions on this very challenging time. But Paolo O’Hara as Jers, Jasmine Curtis-Smith as Jai, and Cris Pasturan as Jack are more than capable of taking on that challenge.
While each actor in their own right brings to life all the nuances and layers of their characters, what’s incredible is how believable and tangible their relationship is as siblings. There’s a shorthand in their gestures and their subtle chuckles that indicate a shared history, an ongoing dynamic that really sells the story to the audience. As they face the impending passing of their father, and later, deal with the aftermath of that loss and all that it entails, what remains is the love between the siblings that needs to process that pain.
Complicating all of this is the fact that Jai lives abroad. She returns home to find Jack unable to paint again, no longer able to afford his child support payments for his daughter, and has strained his relationship with his Kuya Jers. Jai has her own life in New York that appears to be crumbling and, interspersed are Jers’ lectures in class about language, philosophy, and anthropology.
From here, the work goes further than the story of the siblings, memory, philosophy, and language breaks the barriers of time that allows Jai and other characters to breach the metaphysical and allows us a peek into the siblings’ past, present, and future through soliloquy, a changing of the arrangements of chairs, and a gorgeous video projection.
Of the many amazing works by Guelan Varela-Luarca, 3 Upon stands out as my favourite – both in writing and direction – and the heaviness of the play’s narrative is matched by the intellectual density of its themes and scope that he manages to make comprehensible by framing it into the dynamic of these three characters. The intimacy, the song choices, the sparseness of the staging, and the way the actors have been primed to really act and feel like a family allows us to take all of what Varela-Luarca offers in the writing and allows us to chew on it. This is a triumph of theater. ‘3 Upuan’ captures the dense existential ruminations of three people in the face of their mortality and makes it an emotional journey without the need for spectacle. It’s performed wonderfully and I was tears through the last half of the show.
My Rating:
