Dogeaters is, essentially, a critique turned inward more so than outward. The responsibility for the Philippines problems is laid at the feet of a population loosely embodied, symbolically, by character Joey (De Ocampo). He prefers to retreat into victimhood, drugs and gold-digging whoring rather than be part of a solution to change the country. Through the contrast of boisterous beauty pageants and radio soap operas with the bleak reality of life under a repressive regime, a portrait emerges of a country whose desire for solace trumps the pragmatic need for change. The narcotizing effect of glamour is represented, unsurprisingly, by Imelda Marcos, who famously saw for herself the duty of being some kind of light, a star to give [the poor] guidelines.” As rightly or wrongly caricatured by Natsuko Ohama, we get a woman whose obliviousness to the real needs of her people borders on the fluffy, if not the insane. That people buy into this fluffiness, the play suggests, is the tragedy.
As far as political analyses go, however, Dogeaters isnt particularly revelatory. Structured to alternate between the superficial merriment of entertainers Nestor and Barbara (Pabotory, Del Mundo) and the intense drama of prison interrogations, murder, doubt and fear, we get a schizophrenic mix of cheap laughs and inexpensive sorrow highlighting I.F. Stones adage that all governments lie, in this case through pop culture. That we dont get anything new isnt so bothersome as the fact that the characters dont have any more depth than anything else in the play. (This, despite a running time of two and a half hours, including a second act that makes the endless parade of endings in Lord of the Rings: Return of the King seem brief.)
Too Much of Everything
With storylines involving a reformist senator, his daughter and her rebel lover, a Filipina returning home after growing up in San Francisco (the playwrights avatar?), and a few others, Dogeaters aims big: big ideas, big cast, big ambition, even a big, impressive set that involves seating around and within the stage along with the clever use of props. But the rule that character quality is inversely proportional to the number of characters inhabiting a play holds true. Dogeaters could be said to consist of sequential vignettes, any one of which could be expanded to a satisfying full-length play but are instead relegated to the status of half-formed ideas that happen to share flattened characters with other vignettes. The goal is to portray the complex mixture of influences acting on Filipinos, but the result is unfocused.
And for all that some scenes achieve a sort of authentic human drama, Dogeaters suffers from the multiple personalities of glibness and melodrama, with little in between. Consider a character who embodies both extremes at once, a character named Perlita. Here is such a flamboyant, flaming cross-dressing gay diva, performed with the requisite over-the-top theatricality by Ivan Davila, that the warning signs outside the theater should be less about the gratuitous, heavy-handed sex scenes than the gratuitous, heavy-handed clichés. But this really only begs the question as to whether Dogeaters is a comedy with a serious streak or a serious exposé using humor to keep audience members from slitting their wrists in sympathetic despair with the characters. Either way, unrestrained ambition, undeveloped insight and a fidgety attention span yield a highly uneven, imploding theatrical experience.
Dogeaters. Written by Jessica Hagedorn based on her novel. Directed by Jon Lawrence Rivera. Starring Robert Almodovar, Gino Aquino, Christine Avila, Esperanza Catubig, Ivan Davila, Fran de Leon, Liza Del Mundo, Ramón de Ocampo, Antoine Reynaldo Diel, Golda Inquito, Alberto Isaac, Kennedy Kabasares, Dom Magwili, Natsuko Ohama, Giovanni Ortega, Orlando Pabotoy, Elizabeth Pan, Ed Ramolete, Nick Salamone, Minerva Vier. Kirk Douglas Theater: Through Feb. 11. http://www.kirkdouglastheater.com