TA’s The Death of Memory received the Best Stage Director (Non-Musical) and Best Non-Musical Production Awards at the 21st Aliw Awards, held on November 11 at the Manila Hotel. For the first time in years, a single play received two of the major awards.
Fine Arts Professor Ricardo Abad received the award for Best Stage Director (Non-Musical), while Glen Sevilla Mas, on behalf of TA, received the award for Best Non-Musical Production.
This is Abad’s first national award since he started directing plays 25 years ago. Meanwhile, this is Mas’ 9th play, which also won a 2006 Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Award.
TA’s Death of Memory ran from November to December 2007 at the Rizal Mini Theater.
Everyone’s a winner
The Aliw Awards is an annual event recognizing the best in local live and onstage performers in the Philippines.
Abad was relieved upon receiving his award. “I’ve been directing for the past 25 years, and this is the first time ever that I got an award in a national scale,” he said.
“I am also very proud, proud not just of myself kasi (because) in plays it is always a team [effort],” Abad added.
Mas felt both excited and nervous during the awards because he did not have an idea if he was going to win or not. “‘Yung sa Palanca kasi (in the Palanca), when you attend the awards night, alam mo na kung anong place mo (you already know your place) because they inform you two to three weeks earlier,” Mas said.
“I was very happy for the play…happier for Sir Ricky… happier for Tanghalang Ateneo, because it was really an award for the production. It was not an award for the play,” Mas added.
Award-winning thesis
The play was Mas’ thesis output when he was taking up graduate studies at the Catholic University of America. It was first staged in the United States by Michael Kramer, a known theater director there.
Mas said he wrote Death of Memory because he believed the importance of memory in one’s life. He used this belief as an inspiration in writing the play as well.
“I was in my late thirties then I asked myself where will my life go, just like the characters in the play,” Mas said in a mixture of English and Filipino.
“It was a good representation of where I was in my life then,” Mas added.
Symbolic play
Abad said what made Death of Memory unique from the hundred or so plays he had staged is the unique costumes (red and white) in the play.
Abad added, “[The play] was set in a kind of abstract place with certain movements and qualities of the play to make it different from ordinary life.”
In Death of Memory, Mas used the genre “theater of absurdity,” to show that the characters don’t get anywhere—the play begins and ends on the same spot every time.
Abad said the play combined the theater of absurdity that Mas intended, with the theater of cruelty he decided to employ. “The theater of cruelty [is] a theatrical device that is very graphic, loud and violent in the play to give it more power,” Abad said.
Just like Mas, Abad said that the play’s global theme made it stand out and win the award. “There is not much cultural reference…people in America will understand it, people in Europe will understand it,” he said in a mix of English and Filipino.
Going to China
Abad hopes that Death of Memory will be accepted at Shanghai, China, since the play is the Philippines’ entry to the first Asia Pacific Theater Expo at the Shangri-La Theater Academy for 2009.
Currently, Mas is finalizing the book version of Death of Memory, which will be available next year.
