It’s a wrap! The Tanghalang Aranzazu never fails to amaze their audience with this year’s laboratory play on Remi Velasco’s “Ondoy: Ang Buhay sa Bubong” with the creative direction of Raymond Escalona, making another milestone for the organization.
Through the laboratory play, the Tanghalang Aranzazu schooling made clear that the program did not only focus in recruiting new members for the organization but also in honing and utilizing their prior skills and talents.
The humorous and lesson-filled one-act play was actually a first prize winner for the 61st Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards which was a challenge for the actors and even the production to ingeniously perform the play and competently justify its well-renowned achievement.
Straight from entering the venue is the carefully designed set which depicts the roofs where the setting of the play took place during the destructive floods due to typhoon Ondoy. The reactions of the audience in which laughter regularly filled the venue were an obvious proof that the actors successfully played their roles.
The lights and sounds intensified the mood and setting for the play somehow bringing the audience the throwback feels on how it felt to be facing the raging typhoon. The plot itself was unquestionably well-written involving almost all kinds of different conflicts, from the struggles involving the stratification in the society but also a struggle within each character’s personal issues.
The open-ended plot was also unexpected leaving the audience having different thoughts on the possibilities of how might the story have ended. It was all performed satisfactorily that the audience wanted more when the play came into an end, “Hala tapos na?” “Nabitin ako.” “Akala ko may susunod pa.” were the conversations that are commonly heard.
All in all, Tanghalang Aranzazu’s hard work paid off since watching the play was definitely worth it, and the parishioners should look forward for more creative performances from the organization.
Mariele Aquino
Junior Writer, Website Team, Media Ministry
Mariele R. Aquino is a member and website writer of the NSDA’s Media and Public Information Ministry, an aspiring future medical specialist and currently a STEM senior high school student in the Royal and Pontifical University of Santo Tomas. Her principle in life is that genuine success is something achieved through a path and battlefield of dodging a thousand bullets without the course of self-centered desires and conducts for temporary existential accomplishment. As a form of simple youthful religious fervor, Mariele used her skills, talent and dedication in writing to serve her Lord but also to grow not only intellectually but more on spiritually.
