Mrs. B is Mrs. Edita Tronqued Burgos. Mrs. Burgos is the mother of Jonas Burgos. An activist, Jonas Burgos was abducted on April 2007 and up to now there is no trace of him at all. In Ever Gotesco, where the abduction took place, a guard served as the only witness. The guard saw how five men and a woman dragged him out of the mall as public as our own poverty. People also saw how you can be pulled out of a very public place and into oblivion without other people being able to do anything to save you. Or stop people from hiding you forever.
Mrs. B is also a play. It is a thirty-minute or so something of a monologue, where the everyday life of a mother is played out and played by professional artists. Mrs. B is not your usual mother. She lost her son to abduction and not to accident or disease. She knows her son is somewhere and that people are looking at her always each day as she looks for that son. She also knows deep in her heart that her son during her search may have been alive. She does not tell us but we know that, as a mother, she hopes to see her son again. We do not know how far her grief and courage have brought her to. Does she believe that her son is still alive?
The more Mrs. Burgos tells us where she has gone and where she will go to seek justice for those who have disappeared because people caused the disappearance, the more we see the fact that we can only listen to what she says but we will never be in her place. She has carved her own niche by the circumstances of her being mother to a missing son and that niche is both a grave and altar.
On Friday, Feb. 12, 2010, in that small theater that is the Bantayog ng Mga Bayani Auditorium, the play unfolded. That night the play's producer was National Artist for Literature, Bien Lumbera. That night, I had the privilege of watching once more a play where the culmination of the drama took place not onstage but offstage. That night, Ms. Bibeth Orteza played the role of Mrs. Burgos. She alternated with Gina Alajar. Those who have watched the two performances took note of the disparate interpretations by the two actresses of the role of Mrs. Burgos. Both performers were said to be both intense in their delivery but in the end, it was really the role - the character of Mrs. B that carried the narrative to some kind of theatrical fruition. I say "some kind" because we all know the search for the missing son continues and the play - this great protest play - cannot be called a real play if it settles for a compromise in our imagination.
We do not want a resolution that is based on literary conventions but a resolution where the missing son is found and, with due respect to the loved ones, or his remains located. And, more than the closure of life and death, that justice is served. That is what Mrs. B is all about.
The monologue is set on a bare stage, save for a small altar and a table full of vegetables waiting to be chopped and cooked. The scene is an everyday scene. Mrs B is preparing a special Easter Sunday lunch. Throughout her conversations, she talks about her son whose photo is visible on the altar, flanked by votive candles and the statue of Virgin Mary.
The play, written by Written by Palanca awardees Joi Barrios-Leblanc and Rowena Festin and Concerned Artists of the Philippines (CAP) member Grundy Constantino and directed by Socrates Jose, is not entirely and technically a monologue. In between the remembrances of the mother, characters in shadow reenact the fading voice, the images of the son being tortured.
As Mrs. B, Bibeth Orteza is commendable in the part. At many points, you could hear the sobbing n the audience as her Mrs. B went through anger, silence, reproach, grief, temporary relief, despair and anger again.
But the greater drama really took place outside the stage.
When Mrs. B exited the stage, from the audience came several persons representing those who in real life lost their loved ones. The relatives of the Desaparecidos. Onstage, they started to identify themselves as daughter, son, wife, friend while holding on to real photos of the disappeared ones. Onstage too stood the real Mrs. B, this time holding a bigger photo of Jonas. These individuals were performers but we know they were not performing when their voices brought, when their chins trembled in sadness, when their voices rose to demand answers. Behind me, the sobbing was almost a keening, a near wailing.
That night, we confronted theater, real theater, where actors merely facilitated the release of true feelings. Out of the theater that night, the world spun with all its evil and injustice unresolved.