#TheaterPH - The Troll Farms, the Bedbugs, and the Award Nobody Deserved — VLF 21 Set A Is a Lot

There's a specific kind of discomfort you feel watching a play that knows you. Not the polite, "this is relatable" feeling you get from feel-good productions. Something deeper — closer to the sensation of being caught. That's what Set A: Tengang Kawali of Virgin Labfest XXI does, and it does it across three consecutive one-act plays that, together, feel less like a sampler and more like a coordinated act of civil courage.

Tengang Kawali — roughly translated as "playing deaf" — is a provocative title for a set that refuses to let you pretend you didn't hear. And right now, in this political climate, with elections barely fading in the rearview mirror and the weight of the past decade still so visibly unresolved, that refusal feels almost radical.

The three plays in this set — Anthony Kim Vergara's Password 123, Pilipinas 321, Floyd Scott Tiogangco's Patayin ang mga Surot, and Elijah Felice Rosales' Human Rights Story of the Year — are each about something different on the surface. But the common thread running through all three is impossible to miss: they are all, at their core, about power, complicity, and the systems we quietly agree to maintain until they consume us. Politics and the drug war haunt every set piece like a second cast.

Password 123, Pilipinas 321 (Vergara / Dir. Norbs Portales)

Let me be honest — I was not expecting to enjoy a play built around cybersecurity jargon. Disinformation campaigns, black-hat operations, troll farms — these are words that appear in news articles you mean to finish reading but never do. They feel abstract, procedural, exhausting.

Vergara makes them feel urgent. Personal. Damning.

The play is set inside what looks like a legitimate tech support center — rows of screens, the hum of server infrastructure, the casual rhythm of workers doing "a job." But Nix, the play's cybersecurity professional protagonist, starts to understand that the Blackteam he works for is running something far more insidious: a massive disinformation machine designed to manipulate public sentiment, specifically around elections. His cousin is at the helm. The family tie is not incidental — it's everything.

What Vergara does brilliantly is translate the architecture of digital manipulation into something you can feel in a black box theater. Terms like IP spoofing, sock puppets, and coordinated inauthentic behavior don't land as tech specs — they land as moral choices. Every jargon-heavy line is embedded in a human stakes moment, so even audience members with zero IT background follow along without ever feeling talked down to. It's genuinely rare to watch a play where the playwright has done that kind of translation work so cleanly.

And the election context? Devastatingly well-timed. Anchoring the story to Philippine democratic processes — to the very mechanism most Filipinos believe in even when they've been disappointed by it — gives the tech thriller framework a gut punch it wouldn't have had in any other setting. The play asks: what happens when the people who understand the tools best are also the ones being paid to break democracy? It doesn't answer that. It doesn't need to. 

Director Norbs Portales keeps the staging precise and cold. The set design leans into surveillance aesthetics — screens, data, the glow of screens-within-screens — which mirrors the play's central theme without overpowering the performances. Noel Rayos anchors the production with a quietness that reads as complicit discomfort long before it tips into moral crisis.

This was the piece I couldn't stop thinking about on the commute home. In a festival full of strong work, Password 123, Pilipinas 321 felt like the play that needed to exist right now, this year, in this country.

Patayin ang mga Surot (Tiogangco / Dir. Lhorvie Nuevo-Tadaoan)

The title translates to "Kill the Bedbugs," and yes — it's exactly as darkly funny as it sounds.

Tiogangco sets this play on the final night of the Duterte administration. A couple is inside their apartment, locked in the extremely specific domestic battle of an infestation. They are scrubbing, spraying, bickering — doing the kind of tedious home maintenance that feels absurdly mundane against the backdrop of what's happening outside their door: Oplan Tokhang, the brutal drug war campaign, playing out in the street.

The metaphor is not subtle and it doesn't try to be. The "surot" are not just bedbugs. The play invites you to sit with that equivalence and get uncomfortable with how easily it extends. What made this production particularly effective was the way director Nuevo-Tadaoan leaned into the couple's specific comedic chemistry — the theater was genuinely laughing at the bedbug bickering — and then let the humor curdle. By the time you realize what the sound design is doing in the background, you feel the darkness of it viscerally rather than intellectually.

The staging is intimate and domestic in a way that forces the audience into the apartment with them. You're not watching people navigate a national tragedy from a safe critical distance — you're watching two people choose the bedbug problem because it's the one they can solve. That choice, repeated and normalized, is the play's actual subject.

Human Rights Story of the Year (Rosales / Dir. Nelsito Gomez)

Two people. A farewell party. An international journalism award. And then a reckoning.

The setup is deceptively simple: Ish is about to receive a major global recognition for her human rights reporting. Her former colleague Doy shows up — not to congratulate her, but to publicly challenge whether she deserves it. The confrontation that follows is the whole play, and it's the kind of two-hander that lives or dies on the quality of its writing and its performers.

It lives.

Rosales' script does something sharp and uncomfortable with the question at its center: are we actually fighting for human rights, or are we building careers on the backs of victims while calling it advocacy? The play refuses to make either character a clean hero or villain. Doy's critique has legitimate weight. Ish's defense has legitimate weight. The audience is left to sit in the unresolved tension of a field — journalism, human rights work, activist media — that has always struggled with the line between witness and opportunist.

Under Nelsito Gomez's direction, the play feels like a pressure cooker. The blocking keeps the two characters in perpetual orbit — never quite face-to-face, never quite apart — which physicalized the ideological standoff without making it feel staged. CJ Navato and Justine Peña are both excellent; this is the kind of material that could easily turn into a screaming match, but they keep it at the temperature of something that actually matters.

What This Set Gets Right

The festival directors who assembled Tengang Kawali understood what they were doing. Three plays, each examining a different site where power corrupts the people it touches — the digital operative, the domestic bystander, the award-seeking journalist. Together, they form a coherent indictment of the many ways Filipinos have learned to look away. Not because we are cowards, but because looking costs something real.

That's the set's emotional argument, and it earns it. None of these plays are preachy. None of them offer resolution. What they offer is the rare theatrical experience of being seen — of sitting in a black box theater with a hundred strangers and collectively agreeing, for ninety minutes, to stop playing deaf.

Tengang Kawali is the kind of set that reminds you why the Virgin Labfest matters. Not as a training ground or a curio cabinet of emerging talent, but as one of the few spaces in Philippine culture brave enough to put the present onstage before anyone has decided what to think about it.

Virgin Labfest XXI: Hubo't Hubad runs from June 3–28, 2026 at the Tanghalang Ignacio Gimenez (CCP Black Box Theater), CCP Complex, Pasay City. Shows run at 2:00 PM (matinee) and 8:00 PM (gala). Tickets are priced at ₱1000 (regular) and ₱1,200 (premium), available at the CCP Box Office and via TicketWorld. For schedules and updates, follow the Virgin Labfest, CCP, Tanghalang Pilipino Foundation, and Writers' Bloc on their official social media pages.

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