FOREWORD

Sugbuanon theatre is the theatre of the people in the provincesof Central Visayas and Mindanao where the native speech is thelanguage of Sugbu (Cebu) province. It comprises a vast field ofcreative endeavor. It includes, first of all, the Sugbuanon playwrights—those who have held that a play’s only excuse for being is to enter-tain, as well as those. who believe that a play should not merely enter-tain but record and communicate the values and moral ideals of anation. It comprehends plays written in Sugbuanon, in Spanish,and in English, ranging from the scriptless folk theatricals—likethe balz'taw, the duplo, and the kulz'lisi—of unremembered date andorigin, to the lavishly mounted zarzuelas of the city stage in thetwenties, the sophisticated plays of school and seminary, and thepopular productions of radio, movie screen, and television of con-temporary times. Also within its scope is the performance of urbanand rural artists of the fine arts and performing arts, as well as theactivity of workers in the more practical arts of management andproduction. Sugbuanon theatre includes, above all, the audience—-that innumerable multitude in the city theaters and around open-air stages on city street corners and at barrio fiestas—for whosepleasure the creative energies of the theatre artists have been en-gaged. It includes playgoers who ask only that a play be “maanin-dot,” nice, and others who expect a play to arouse them to greatintensities of thought and feeling. An exposition of the entire spec-trum of Sugbuanon theatre would thus be an exposition, not simplyof theatrical forms and trends, but ultimately of the character andculture of the Sugbuanon Filipino. Of a certainty, no other expres-sion of Sugbuanon culture yields keener insights into that culturethan Sugbuanon theatre.

An investigation in this field would require the time and ded-icated labor of many students of Philippine culture. Beginningefforts have already been made in that direction, largely in the formof graduate research. Many more studies are called for. And thiswork is offered to further encourage our young students to contrib-ute to research in this field.

This work is an introduction to a critical anthology of pre-warSugbuanon drama. It presents a brief historical survey and chron-icle of pre-war Sugbuanon theatre and three plays of the anthology.It is the first main publication from a research project funded by

the Social ocience and Humanities Research Committee of the Uni-versity of the Philippines.

This work concerns itself with the vernacular theatre from1902 to 1941—the period of the first shining of the Sugbuanonstage. New Year’s Day 1902 is a landmark in the history of theSugbuanon stage. On this day, a play entitled Gugma sa YutangNatawhan (Love of Country), the first written completely in Sug-buanon-Visayan and depicting real people and events in recent Sug-buanon history, opened at the European-play—oriented Teatro Jun-quera in the capital town of Sugbu. It was an instant success. Ithad been written by Vicente Sotto, a popular journalist and an ar-dent scholar in Sugbuanon language and history, and the publisherof Ang Suga, the first vernacular Sugbuanon newspaper in thecountry. His play ushered in the period of the realistic drama ofSugbuanon life which held the stage for over three decades in thecapital town of Sugbu while at the same time becoming a part ofthe fiesta tradition in the rural towns and barrios of Sugbu andneighboring provinces. In its incandescent years, this drama wasrepresented at its best in the field of the zarzuela and the reflectiveplay by the works of Buenaventura Rodriguez (1893-1940) and inthe field of the comical play, by the robust farces and laughingscenes of Pio A. Kabahar (1892—1977). The plays of these twodramatists maintained their popularity even after the teatro wentdark at the beginning of the war in December 1941.

Specifically, this work aims to give the student, as well asthe general reader, an acquaintance with the history of this periodin the life of Sugbuanon theatre, an impression of its atmosphereand of the wide—reaching appeal of its new drama, and some in-sights into the value system of the Sugbuanon folk as reflected inthe playwrights’ choice of themes and in the audiences’ responseto the plays. This work aims, in addition, to introduce the studentto the art of Rodriguez and of Kabahar—by the best means of all,a reading of some of their plays—and to show him how they stoodamong their contemporaries as, above all else, men of the theatre.Finally, this work offers the student of Philippine theatre history,biography, and bibliography a chronological record of theatrical andother related events of the period compiled from the Bag-any Kusog,1915-1941. The terms Sugbucmon theatre and Sugbucmo'n dramaare used to refer exclusively to that theatre and drama which ischaracterized by the use of the language native to Sugbu province.

This book consists of three parts. Part One comprises a briefhistorical survey of Sugbuanon theatre and a descriptive account of

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the careers and several works of Buenaventura Rodriguez and PiuxA. Kabahar based on data recorded in the Bag-any Kusog. Part Twocontains the original texts of the first set of anthology plays—Rodri-guez’s three-act Bomba Nyor! and Kabahar’s one-act Babaye ugLalake and Miss Dolyz’ng—together with English translations andnotes. Part Three is a chronicle of Sugbuanon theatre derived fromthe Bag-ong Kusog, to which are appended an alphabetical listingwith dates of all play titles entered therein and a similar listing ofplaywrights and their works.

Part One is a survey of the theatre mainly in Sugbu provincewhere most of the performances recorded in the Bag-any Kusogtook place. The survey is divided into three periods. Within eachperiod, the dulcmg bim'saya or the Sugbuanon plays in the Sottotradition, are classified according to the three principal types bywhich the plays were then identified—the dulcmg hz'nom'han, thedulomg kataw-anan, and the drama or dulang mahz'nuklogon—andaccording to the four areas in which the plays were performed—the teatro or city theatre, the open-air stage of the city street andcity barrio fiestas, the town stage of the poblacion and barrio fiestas,and the provincial stage outside of Sugbu. After the classificationof the dulang bim'saya, the Sugbuanon plays of the old traditionaltheatre before Sotto are listed or described in chronological order,with emphasis on the mom—mom, the folk’s favorite theatrical. Next,the popular and other news-worthy actors of the day are considered.Then the audience is presented. The plays of Rodriguez and Ka-bahar, together with audience opinion on them, are surveyed last.

Depending upon availability of information from the source,the description of plays in the survey ranges from identificationmerely by title or author’s name or genre or place and occasion ofperformance, to that which includes all these data plus a listing ofartists’ names, a statement of theme, a synopsis of the argument,and a quotation or paraphrase of significant critical remarks. Onlydetails relevant to the careers of Rodriguez and Kabahar as men ofthe theatre are included in Part One, but significant data revealingtheir achievements in other fields of endeavor and their many-sidedcontribution to the life of the Sugbuanon community are recordedin the chronicle in Part Three.

The plays selected and translated for Part Two by the compilerare among those not noticed in the Bag-any Kusog. They have beenselected firstly, because they will serve to extend the reader’s knowl-edge about Rodriguez and Kabahar beyond what he can learn fromPart One; secondly, because they are of contemporary interest; and

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thirdly, because they have been warmly received by students fromunder-graduate and graduate classes in literature. Bomba Nyor! in-cludes an expose’ of the tragic situation where corrupt practices havecome to be accepted by the people as the normal way by whichelections are won. Babaye ug Lalake is a study from the comic pointof View of the universal problem of unfulfilled love. Miss Dolyingentertains and teaches with a light-hearted comedy of deceiversdeceived and a characterization of what many men have consideredthe ideal womanly.

Part Three complements Part One. It chronicles 1426 play per-formances comprising probably two thousand different plays, togeth-er with other related events, which constitute the specifics of thesurvey and biographical accounts in Part One. What would have beenmore than 1200 footnote entries are organized into chronicle entrieswith parenthetical documentation. Thus Part Three serves as thedocumentation section for Part One.

Part One and Part Three are based entirely on informationderived from the book-bound compilation of the Bag-ong Kusog in theVicente Rama Collection at the University of the Philippines. Thiscompilation was donated to the University in 1972 by the familyof the late Vicente Rama through Governor and Mrs. OsmundoRama of Sugbu. It represents the newspaper’s twenty—six and onehalf years of publication from May 1915 to December 1941.

The Bag-ong Kusog was published in Sugbu, Sugbu, by itsowner Vicente Rama, a member of one of the capital’s prominentfamilies, who earned a name for himself as journalist, writer offiction, theatre critic, and public servant. From the beginning, theBag-ong Kusog was interested in recording, among others, suchevents as were part of the social history of the Sugbuanon, partic-ularly those related to the deveIOpment of the Sugbuanon languageand literature. It printed reports of, and remarks on, many a Sug-buanon and Spanish funcz'on teatral at the teatros of the capital.It carried theatrical news, comments, rumors, and gossip, not onlyfrom around the siyudad (ciudad), as Sugbu, the capital of Sugbuprovince, has always been known to the Sugbuanon, but also fromthe poblaciones and barrios of rural Sugbu, as well as from a num-ber of other places outside of Sugbu. The reporters were eitherits own employees or other individuals who wanted to describefiestas in their hometowns. Rama himself contributed critiques ofplays acted at the teatros. The number of theatrical facts recordedin the Bag-ong Kusog increased as it grew from its initial four-

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page bi-weekly edition in 1915 to its thirty-six—page weekly editionbeginning in 1936.

The Bag-ong Kusog started out modestly on May 2, 1915 asthe four-page bilingual newspaper, Nueva Fue'rza, which was issuedon Sundays and Thursdays. It consisted of two pages of news andan editorial in Spanish and two pages of the same in Sugbuanon,along with short literary pieces, under the heading Bag-ong Kusogwhich is Sugbuanon for Nueva Fuerza. It had six pages in 1917 andeight in 1918. In 1920 it came out on Tuesdays, Thursdays, andSaturdays. In all this time the Spanish and Sugbuanon sections ofthe newspaper shared equal space. In September 1921, Nueva Fuerzaand Bag-ong Kusog became separate entities. Nueva Fuerza wasmade a vehicle of journalism in Spanish and English. Bag-ong Kusogbegan its independent life as an all-Sugbuanon weekly. It was is-sued on Wednesdays and varied in number of pages from eight tosixteen. It became a fourteen-page Friday weekly in 1923, increasedto twenty-six pages in 1931, and attained to its full length of thirty-six pages in 1936.

The Bag-ong Kusog is one of Sugbu’s most valuable newspapersources of pre—war theatrical information. It has recorded for pos-terity the first luminous period of Sugbuanon theatre. Its severaldescriptive accounts of play performances contain information onthemes, dramatic genres, playwrights, musical composers, producers,directors, actors, promoters, scene designers, costume donors, placesand occasions of performance, ticket prices, audiences—in short, awealth of detail that produces a distinct image of the theatre of thetime and a feeling of its atmosphere. It identifies about 430 playtitles which are significant indicators of thematic preferences amongplaywrights and audiences. Its brief notices where plays are iden-tified only by genre or place and occasion of performance offer sta-tistical evidence of the Sugbuanon’s enthusiasm for the dulcmgbim'saya i.e. the new Sugbuanon’ drama, of its far—flung popularity,and its variety of form. The Bag-any Kusog has recorded a consider-able amount of biographical and critical information on Rodriguezand Kabahar. Moreover, it carries an important historical accountof the state of the theatre at the turn of the century and of thebirth of the drama depicting Sugbuanon life and history—VicenteSotto’s “Mga Handumanan sa Sugbu” (July 4, 1924, pp. 2-3). Ithas also recorded the highly significant fact that the dulang bim'sayahad to compete with Spanish drama both written locally or broughtin by travelling companies of Spanish actors like the Compania deOpereta y Zarzuela Iberia, the Compania de Opereta y Opera Es-pan”ola Torrijos—Blay, and the Compania Tagaroma-Carvajal —— a

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competition that was to last till the war silenced the stage in1941 (See e.g.: “Intermedio Hermoso,” May 13, 1915, p. 1; “Zar-zuela ug Opera nga Manganhi,” Nov. 11, 1915, p. 3; “PolianteaNoticiera,” Jan. 23, 1916, p. 2; Vicente Rama, “Impresiones Tea-trales,” Feb. 3, 1916, p. 1; “Ang Tiyatrong Kinatsila sa Sugbu,”Feb. 24, 1933, p. 5; and “Kalandrakas,” Nov. 28, 1941, pp. 30-31).

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