Sublimity in print.
I went to Sto. Niño Mactan Montessori School on May 28 with little idea what this play was about. I was only told moments after the curtains had risen and everything went dark: first, that this was set in 1940’s Bataan, during the Japanese Occupation, and second, that it was a musical. Both were enough to keep me in my seat already.
Risa: The Echoes of a Silent Brush tackles the idea of life in wartime in a way that may seem underwhelming at first. They announce the setting as it is, but barely include the war into the story. However, as the play came to a close, I eventually began to appreciate how they individualized life in war through the characters and their circumstances. War is present in the musical: it is the ruthless, unrelenting taker of lives. War is what cut Risa’s life short. War and death are nihilistic beings that distort the momentum of life, as well as the meaning of living. The stories of these characters were nipped from their buds before they could even blossom, and in the grand scheme of things, these people were just numbers on a tally.
War is unnatural, where days feel like a blur to soldiers. It’s not the fault of the medium that captured the war – film, photos, or written accounts – but it has an inherent value that it cannot be understood. In Julia Halperin’s Can the Pen Match the Sword? A Look at the Value of Words in the Depiction of War, she emphasized poetry, fiction and theatre as media that can truly capture the experience of war, because of the way they are told – the plot, the characters, the lines in the text, and the essence of the real story (or story-truths, as Tim O’Brien called it). These elements are what set stories like this musical apart from the depiction of war in reports and documentations – on accuracy first, before emotion. But in the process of accuracy, the viewers are merely limited to being observers.
That’s why I like the fact that we, the audience, were denied seeing what Risa was painting before she was caught by the soldiers. It embodies the “silent brush” in the title, and matches the lyrics of her song (it goes along the lines of “…painting shapes no one can see.”) It’s not only an expression of her plight as an unrecognized artist, but it’s a reflection of the stories of people in Bataan during the war that are long unretrievable. Casualties receive double the neglect. Their safety is breached, and their memories become lost among their numbers. Today, this double neglect reflects Palestine, where people’s names appear in our screens one by one, asking for our help. Clearly we are shaken by the danger they experience, yet their names only linger on our minds as short as our attention spans.
By the end, she wakes up with her paintings, her life already finished. It’s just like the photos of war, taken and shown to the public, images so clear to the eyes but devoid of the feelings of those who experienced it.
It is for this same reason that my favorite song in the musical is the one Maria sings in the middle of the play (for reasons of familiarity, I’ll call it “Born to Help”). Aside from the fact that she performed it very well, the lyrics themselves are impactful, particularly the lines she mentions about doing this job of caregiving where there’s no attention or recognition. Maria (top-left of the photo) gave her life for pure, authentic social work, and just like Risa’s unseen painting, Maria’s story is just one of the many unwritten ones in Bataan. Not only that, but by singing this song, she creates a beautiful paradox. She sings that her work will go unnoticed, but the audience can hear her voice. We can hear her tell her story, and resonating with her voice are those of the many doctors, nurses, and caregivers who poured their hearts out for the injured. The war in Bataan was gruesome even before it began. Many soldiers died in hospitals from injuries, malaria, and dysentery when they had no choice but to eat rotting meat and drink unfiltered water. It wasn’t only a war between men, but also a war with nature.
Overall, the musical exceeded the message of just Risa’s life. It is a collection of stories that broke the walls of invisibility, wrote another way of seeing life in Bataan, and tugged at our hearts in short, fleeting moments. Good job, Grade 11 – Freedom and Grade 12 – Veracity! And congratulations on completing all performances of this production.
PHOTO GALLERY
