LITERATURE and cultural scholar Alex C. Delos Santos of San Jose, Antique is this year’s Peter’s Prize awardee for Excellence in Literary Studies.
Popularly known as “the father of modern Kinaray-a writing”, and erstwhile festival director of the Binirayan of Antique, Delos Santos is also a blogger and reviewer of books, movies, and all things literary and artsy.
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This year, Delos Santos produced and directed Nery’s long lost play “Panay Dreamgirls”, which successfully toured in Antique, Iloilo, and Negros.
He also took time to study three of the short award-winning plays of Peter Solis Nery.
His analytical reading, called “Games Peter Plays”, is included as an introduction to the recently released book of plays called Funny, Sad, and Dangerous (KDP: U.S.A., 2019).
This week, I yield my column space to share this excellent essay.
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GAMES PETER PLAYS
By Alex C. Delos Santos
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Kate O’Connor in Notions of Authorship wrote: “It is both difficult and tempting to hunt for the author within a work of literature. He or she is the deus ex machina, the ringmaster, and the world-builder. Yet obscured by characters, ironic sensibilities, editors, and time, the quest can become quixotic, even impossible. And often times this obscuring of the man behind the curtain is very much the author’s intention.”
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But not in Peter Solis Nery’s plays featured in this collection, because central to these plays is Peter himself in the myriad devices that the skillful playwright wields — a poem, a story, a character, and even a technique, or the attitude that pervades in the play — such that one is wont to ask if one of these characters is the playwright writing himself into the play. That these plays have won the nod of judges in the Palanca Awards, this Find Peter in the Play is a game that Peter Solis Nery seems to have played and won.
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In The Wide Ionian Sea, an older man of 35, who we shall know in the play as Mentor, meets a 19-year-old at an Internet cafe. The older man invites the younger to his house and seduces the prospect by way of his voluminous library, his stock knowledge and trivia — his beautiful mind.
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At its simplest, the plot is much like Mary Howitt’s “The Spider and the Fly,” but our playwright will simply not fall for that. He circumvents this game of seduction into something grandiose by alluding to Greek characters Mentor and Telemachus. Mentor is a friend with whom Odysseus left his little son Telemachus before venturing to the Trojan War. Thus, we get the very Mediterranean title The Wide Ionian Sea, and wonder how in heaven’s name it is situated in Panay Island. By way of introduction, the character Telemachus preconditions us that the play happens in a town called Ithaca.
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Call this a conceit, or an extended metaphor, a literary device that has been perused even by the greatest of writers like Shakespeare. Far from being a guardian-ward tale though, the play is a game, much like hide-and-seek, between Mentor who finds inspiration in the youth to finish a daring project of a hundred erotic albeit scandalous (as the playwright wants us to perceive) sonnets, which will affirm his place in the literary firmament; and his protégé, who seems to be failing at his attempts, and whose recourse is to betray his patron in secret.
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Could Mentor be Peter Solis Nery himself? Well, he began the seduction with his familiarity with authors like Ayn Rand, Tennessee Williams, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez — names that could be in Peter’s pantheon of authors.
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Peter Solis Nery has produced a film Gugma sa Panahon sang Bakunawa / Love in the Time of the Bakunawa (2012), from a novella he has written. Although the homage to Marquez’s novel Love in the Time of Cholera stops with the title, we cannot discount Peter Solis Nery’s adulation for the master of magic realism. In fact, his first Palanca Award in 1998 was for the story Lirio, about a precocious mute girl who had the misfortune of marrying an abusive husband, and heaven granted her wish to turn into a flower. Peter Solis Nery would use this same story to culminate the play, perhaps as a counterpoint to the loving image of Mentor cuddling the defeated Telemachus a la Pieta.
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Intertextuality in this play is heightened with each reading of random sonnets from Peter Solis Nery’s 2010 book 100 Erotic Sonnets from the Hiligaynon, each reading dramatizing the sexually-laden scenes, yet fluid as shifting from Hiligaynon and English texts. Mentor is fueled by the same motivation as Peter Solis Nery, who in his dedication of the internationally released 100 Erotic Sonnets from the Hiligaynon wrote that he “hoped to reclaim for Ilonggos their nipples, lust, lovemaking, and spiritual intercourse… All because I want to be remembered as the poet who gave back to Hiligaynon the people’s vagina, clitoris, penis, semen, cunnilingus, and honeymoon.”
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It is worth mentioning here that the playwright is also an actor and director. Aside from the aforementioned Bakunawa film, Peter Solis Nery has directed an earlier short titled Daba-daba (2010), which starred his husband Randy Graydon (now deceased); and acted in the recent Ikapito nga Adlaw (2016), where his daring exposure stirred some audience. These cinematic forays further nuanced the play. Scenes are recurring, written as a film director would take several angles of the same scene, or as a stage director would explore variations of a scene.
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In Gladiolas, he plays around a different technique by employing a projector as a narrator/actor, much like a tech-savvy Greek chorus. The actors’ thoughts or reactions are flashed onscreen and integrated in the dialogue, and sometimes the screen acts as another actor in itself. The play is blocked and lighted similar to The Glass Menagerie, the author of which was substantially mentioned in The Wide Ionian Sea. Apparently, Tennessee Williams is another of Peter Solis Nery’s models, and while he did discuss like in a Literature class how William’s play is almost autobiographical, it is in Gladiolas where we find the author’s autobiographical revelations. (To be continued as “Games Peter Plays”/PN)
