Reviews 2013
Reviews 2013
✭✭✩✩✩
by Nina Lee Aquino, directed by Nigel Shawn Williams
Factory Theatre, Factory Theatre Mainspace, Toronto
January 31-February 24, 2013
“If All You Have is Vowels, Exchange Your Tiles”
Every Letter Counts is one of those Canadian plays that appear every year that makes you wonder how it ever made it to a fully-staged production. Ken Gass announced the play as part of the Factory Theatre’s 2012/13 season before the furore caused when the Factory Board of Directors fired him as Artistic Director. Iris Turcotte, who guided so many mediocre plays to the stage for CanStage, is listed as the dramaturge. The play was workshopped many times. Was no one able to overcome their inherent Canadian niceness to tell author Nina Lee Aquino, “Sorry, this just isn’t good enough”?
It isn’t nice to give a playwright false hopes or an unrealistic appraisal. It isn’t nice for designers to try to bring life to a play that has none. And it certainly isn’t nice for an audience to have to sit through such an obviously flawed piece of theatre.
Aquino’s play is an attempt to explore an unusual family connection. She is the niece of Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino (1932-83), a Senator of the Philippines who formed the opposition to the government of President Ferdinand Marcos. After Marcos imposed martial law, he was arrested and imprisoned for seven years. He was permitted to travel to the U.S. for medical treatment, a situation that led to a self-imposed exile. He was assassinated at the Manilla International Airport upon his return to the Philippines in 1983.
Nina Lee Aquino knew her uncle, completely unaware of his politics, for the space of four days when she was six years old. The play is framed as an attempt by Aquino to come to terms with her loss. In her programme notes, Aquino says, “I had to ask myself... in the short amount of time that I spent with Ninoy, at six years old, could I have said something to keep him from going back to the Philippines? And if he did stay, would I have altered the fate of all the Aquinos – including me?” Not to diminish Nina Lee Aquino’s sense of self-importance or the reality of her loss, the answers to these two questions are simple – no to the first question, yes to the second. The answers are so simple and self-evident that Aquino patently has nothing to build her play around.
The play begins with Nina Lee Aquino visiting the Aquino Museum in Manila for the first time. This visit sets off flashbacks to her four days with Ninoy (Jon de Leon) when he visited her father Cecilio (Anthony Malarky) in Texas. It also sets off flashbacks to the life of Ninoy from his opposition to Marcos (Earl Pastko), his detention, his, exile, his return and even to his afterlife.
Besides its shaky premise, the first problem with the play is that the only way Aquino has of bringing out the past seems to be through a question and answer format, where she asks the questions and Ninoy or her father answers. She tries to vary this tedious catechetic style by making herself present at historic meetings between Ninoy and Marcos that she could not have witnessed while taking Ninoy’s side against his foe.
The second problem is that Nina Lee Aquino playing herself under her nickname “Bunny”, does absolutely nothing to distinguish her adult self who is visiting the museum from her six-year-old self playing with Ninoy. This crucial failure of acting means that it is often impossible to tell what is supposed to be occurring. Who is peering in on Ninoy and Marcos in the Philippines – the six-year-old or the adult? Who is having notions about making Ninoy stay away from the Philippines – the six-year-old or the adult? This flaw makes the times shifts in the play, despite dates and times projected onto the set, a complete muddle.
The third problem is that knowing so little about the real Ninoy, Aquino is only able to show us the saint and martyr, not the man. He teaches her to play Scrabble (hence the title), but this image seems little more than an excuse for Ninoy to propound pseudo-profundities. Words are important. You can’t choose your letter; you have to play the rack that fate gives you. You can’t play a word on its own; Scrabble shows that all things are connected. Forgetting that the play begins with a chess metaphor with Marcos as King and Imelda as Queen, and then switches to Scrabble, one aspect of Scrabble that Aquino conveniently ignores is that in Scrabble, unlike life, you can exchange all your tiles if you don’t like them.
Aquino does show us Ninoy’s lighter side when he sings his favourite song, Sinatra’s “My Way”, but she then clouds the issue by mentioning the strange string of “My Way” killings in Filipino karaoke bars between 2000 and 2010 that have nothing to do with Ninoy or her story.
What gives Aquino’s confused play the little coherence it has is the excellent design by Anna Treusch. She has created an attractive set of two wood panelled walls at right angles covered with squares created by the mouldings. Projection designer Cameron Davis uses back projection to turn these squares into Scrabble tiles and also uses front projection create the exhibits at the Aquino Museum and to reinforce various themes in the play such as a colourful cascade of Imelda Marcos’s shoes.
Although director Nigel Shawn Williams apparently can do nothing to alter Aquino’s acting style, he does draw god performances from Jon de Leon, whose acting, more than Aquino’s text, makes him seem like a rounded character. Malarky does his best with the unnecessary role of Bunny’s father, there only to register that his brother has achieved more than he ever will. Pastko gives an eerie performance of Marcos as a type of vampire.
Aquino is so caught up in trying to assess her guilt as a six-year-old for not asking Ninoy stay away from the Philippines that she neglects to mention that his death led to the People Power Revolution that overthrew the Marcos dictatorship in 1986 or that Ninoy’s wife Corazon Aquino would become Marcos’ successor or that Ninoy’s grandson Benigno Aquino III is currently President of the Philippines. So much for giving us a perspective on the events.
The lesson to be learned from Every Letter Counts is that sincerity and good intentions count for little in creating a good play. Workshopping a play only produces a good result if all the people involved are willing to be honest about the material and its treatment. Fear of not being nice to a hard-working colleague only brings forth plays like this that are 75 minutes of boredom mixed with embarrassment.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Earl Pastko, Nina Lee Aquino and Jon de Leon. ©2013 Nir Bareket.
For tickets, visit www.factorytheatre.ca.
2013-02-03
Every Letter Counts