#TheaterPH - What Happens When Three Plays Ask the Same Devastating Question About Love and God

There's a particular kind of vulnerability that only live theater can crack open in you. Not the kind you prepare for — not the kind you steel yourself against on the way to the CCP Complex, reminding yourself you're just going to watch a play, it's fine, bring a tissue just in case. The kind that sneaks up on you in the dark, somewhere between an actor's exhale and a silence that lands wrong, and before you know it you're wiping your face in the back row of the Tanghalang Ignacio Gimenez.

That's what Set B: Kapit Tuko of the ongoing Virgin Labfest XXI: Hubo't Hubad — did to me. And honestly? Worth every tear.

The Virgin Labfest, now in its 21st year and running until June 28, has always been the festival where Philippine theater dares to be unfinished, untested, and genuinely alive. This year's theme, Hubo't Hubad — nakedness, vulnerability, stripped of pretense — is not just a marketing tagline. It's a promise that every play inside that black box is going to ask something of you. Set B delivered that promise in triplicate.

HARAM by Alab Usman, directed by Mark Daniel Dalacat

The evening opens with Haram, and it sets the temperature immediately. Alab Usman's story follows three queer Muslims as they navigate the intersection of faith and love across borders and barriers — a premise that sounds, on paper, like it could tip easily into polemic. It doesn't. What Dalacat's direction achieves is something quieter and more unsettling: the feeling of watching people genuinely try to hold two true things at the same time, even when those things don't want to coexist.

The staging is spare, almost deliberate in what it withholds. The space becomes the tension — what's left unlit matters as much as what's illuminated. Haram doesn't resolve the debate between devotion and desire, because real life doesn't either. It just shows you the cost of carrying both, and it does so with a restraint that makes the moments of fracture hit harder. It's the kind of play that leaves you a little disoriented when the lights come up, not because it was confusing, but because it felt true.

BALOS by Neil Arkhe Azcuna, directed by Cholo Ledesma

Then comes Balos, and the room shifts. A wounded fighter arrives at a small Marawi hospital on the first day of the siege. Four medical workers are forced to decide whether to stay silent and save everyone, or speak up and risk it all. This is a play about the impossible arithmetic of conscience in the middle of war — a moral calculus no one should ever have to do in real life, and yet so many did.

Ledesma's direction keeps things kinetic, almost breathless. The staging mirrors the siege itself: confined, pressurized, with no clean exits. The ensemble — Vincent Pajara, Heart Puyong, Bong Cabrera, and DMs Boongaling — builds a collective tension that doesn't let the audience settle into the comfort of easy judgment. You'll find yourself rotating through positions: I would speak up. I would stay quiet. I don't know. That uncertainty is the whole point. Balos is Azcuna asking what we're actually made of when the stakes stop being hypothetical, and it asks that question in a Marawi hospital in 2017, in a way that doesn't feel like history at all.

LUALHATI by Gab Mactal, directed by Mara Paulina Marasigan

And then there is Lualhati. I'm going to be honest with you: this one broke me.

A former nun turned Philosophy professor and a nun from her time at the convent meet again. Their memories of faith and romance emerge on the last night of the wake held at the Our Lady of the Gate of Dawn convent. That's the premise, stripped to its bones. What Mactal's text does with it is something far more intricate and far more devastating.

What makes Lualhati extraordinary is its architecture. Marasigan's direction builds the play in layers of time — characters speaking to each other as their present selves while simultaneously inhabiting their past ones. You watch them now, knowing what you're about to learn; and you watch them then, before the weight of their choices fully landed. The structure sounds complex, but on stage it feels achingly natural, like the way memory actually works — non-linear, interrupted, always bleeding into the present moment.

The text is some of the most beautiful writing I've encountered at a VLF in years. Mactal's dialogue doesn't announce its meaning; it arrives sideways, in the spaces between what people say and what they mean, between what the Church asks of you and what your own heart refuses to surrender. It's about faith as a kind of love and love as a kind of faith, and the tragedy of discovering, too late or not late enough, that you might have chosen differently.

But a script this good still needs performers willing to live inside it completely. The cast features , Angel Aquino, Banaue Miclat, Iana Bernardez, and Sarah Monay — and they deliver. Sarah Monay and Iana Bernardez are luminous in the past-tense scenes, all barely-contained feeling and the specific tenderness of people who haven't yet learned what loss feels like. Banaue Miclat brings an intellectual gravity to her role that grounds the play's more philosophical moments without ever making them feel like lectures. And Angel Aquino — ang divine na Angel Aquino — is simply staggering. She does the thing that only the best actors do: she makes you forget you're watching a performance. She is just there, present and cracked open, and by the time the play builds to its final moments, I had stopped pretending I wasn't crying.

I cried because the play earned it. Not through cheap manipulation — through accumulation, through patience, through Mactal and Marasigan trusting the audience enough to take their time. The ending doesn't announce itself. It just arrives, fully assembled from everything that came before it, and it lands with the quiet finality of a door closing on something you can't get back.

The Set as a Whole

What I keep thinking about, hours after leaving the CCP, is how intentional this set feels. The festival directors clearly curated Kapit Tuko around a gravitational center. All three plays — Haram, Balos, Lualhati — orbit the same questions: what do we owe the people we love? What do we owe the faith we were given? And what happens when those two debts point in opposite directions?

Haram asks it through queer Muslim identity. Balos asks it through wartime survival. Lualhati asks it through devotion — religious, romantic, and the blurry place where the two have never been cleanly separate. Together, they don't repeat each other. They refract each other, each play throwing new light on what came before, so that by the end of Set B you've spent ninety-something minutes sitting inside a single aching question from three completely different angles.

That kind of programming is its own art form. And in a festival built on the promise of the new, the untried, the unstaged — it's a reminder that theater at its best isn't just about individual performances. It's about what happens when the right stories find each other in the same room.

Set B: Kapit Tuko runs until June 28 at the Tanghalang Ignacio Gimenez (CCP Black Box Theater), CCP Complex, Pasay City. Tickets are available via CCP Box Office and TicketWorld. Go see it. Pack a handkerchief. Don't say I didn't warn you.

FOR MORE AWESOME UPDATES,
You can follow me on X, Instagram, Threads, Tiktok and Facebook!
You may also subscribe to my YouTube Channel.
Thank you!

DISCLAIMER: All content provided on this blog is for informational purposes only. The owner of this blog makes no representations as to the accuracy or completeness of any information on this site or found by following any link on this site. The pictures or videos posted here doesn't necessarily mean that it's the owner's property. The owner will not be liable for any errors or omissions in this information nor for the availability of this information. The owner will not be liable for any losses, injuries, or damages from the display or use of this information.