Sa Kaharian ng Araw 2022

Dulaang Sibol of the Ateneo de Manila Junior and Senior High Schools presents its online production of Joel and Dr Onofre Pagsanghan's musical, Sa Kaharian ng Araw from February 4 to 6, 2022. The production may be viewed at the Dulaang Sibol YouTube channel at 630pm every evaning, from Friday to Sunday, 4 to 6 February 2022. The show will be available online for 12 hours on each show date.

Click go.ateneo.edu/kaharian2022 to go to the channel.

Introduction to Sa Kaharian ng Araw

Dr Onofre Pagsanghan

Few school activities put a school in as transparent a showcase as does a school’s theatrical presentation; for it displays to public view what a school is about, what a school does excellently, what it does shabbily, what it doesn’t do at all; and most importantly, what a school values.

Dulaang Sibol puts the Ateneo de Manila High School in a showcase. The man-for-others, that the Ateneo values, definitely merits Sibol center stage.

Of course, one can highlight the presence of something by putting it dead-center; but sometimes, it is more startling to spotlight a presence by its absence, an absence so intense it burns a hole dead-center.

Sa Kaharian ng Araw explores the theatrical possibilities of the second option. What Kaharian puts on center stage is not the man-for-others, but his antithesis—the man-for-self in his many masks: the man-for-prestige, the man-for-possessions, the man-for-power. But at the end of the play—when the man-for-self confronts, in terror, the void in his life, and pitifully screams out his hollowness—what the audience sees is not only the shell of the man that is, but also, the ghost of the man that could have been, and hopefully, in catharsis, the vision of the men the audience could be.

Kaharian is not a comfortable play; it probes; it disturbs. It journeys along through the first four scenes in unabashed fable-fresh simplicity, until it explodes almost unexpectedly in a shattering fifth scene. Kaharian is reminiscent of the Morality plays of the medieval ages, particularly Everyman. Both plays are allegorical. Both revolve around a journey and center around the journey’s end. Both plays try to illuminate what in life is truly of value.

Morality plays, especially if they are crafted specifically for modern audiences, could answer the play requirement of high school drama groups beautifully, for at least three reasons. First, because high school drama groups are school-based, they would prefer plays that teach moral values; because Morality plays sprung from the Church’s instructional Mystery plays, they do precisely that. Second, because high school drama groups are of and for the young, they prefer plays with simple yet entertaining story lines; because the Morality plays were not written for royalty in palaces, nor for monks in monasteries, but for every man in the marketplace, the Morality plays are almost fable-like in simplicity and charm. Third, because high school drama groups have mostly enthusiastic, but inexperienced actors, they would prefer roles that are simply but attractively delineated; because Morality plays are allegorical plays, the characters are symbolic of virtues and vices, personifications even of the most beatifically virtuous and the most blatantly vicious, and caught between these two exciting polarities—Everyman, who is every man.

The only point of disenchantment could be perhaps the four- or five-hundred year gap between the generation for whom they were intended and the generation now in our schools. Much as modern high school drama groups and audiences would prefer simplicity in substance, they would perhaps expect a certain sophistication in stagecraft and an updating in moral thrust.

Kaharian aspires to be a modern Morality play. The plotline is fable-simple. Two friends journey in pursuit of worldly splendor in the mythical kingdom of the Sun and, in the process, find out a lot about themselves and each other, and the distance between a life lived for self and a life laid down for others. The characters are symbolic. The two friends, Ponce and Paolo are two facets of every man: Ponce, the Everyman who is thing-oriented; Paolo, the Everyman who is person-centered. The three kings of Rain, Wind, and Darkness are symbolic of the hurdles and the vicissitudes that tantalize, even as they agonize, success-seekers to plod on with greater abandon. The Kaharian ng Araw is symbolic of earthly success that beckons beguilingly and then burns the beguiled.

Kaharian dramatizes the tension between the hole in the pocket and the hole in the heart. “Talaga bang higit na mahalaga sa iyo ang iyong tagumpay kaysa sa tao? ”Paolo asks his friend Ponce in mid-journey. And toward their journey’s end he asks again, “Di ka ba nangangambang magising isang umaga, at matuklasang ika’y mali pala; na lahat ng tinapon mo’t inaksaya, ang siya palang tunay na mahalaga?”

The play ends even as it begins: still another Ponce, still another Paolo, still the world of the users and the used, the abusers and the abused. Like rats, they race ruthlessly on, dead-set on the tinsel splendor of the Kaharian ng Araw.

When I chanced upon the first version of this play, as written by a fourteen-year-old Sibolista in second year high school, I knew that here indeed was raw material for a significant Sibol play.

And Dulaang Sibol tells the story lovingly with its full, if limited, arsenal in theater craft: prose threatening to leap into poetry; songs, a blend of pop and folk, hopelessly quixotic; sets and costumes, stylistic, thrifty, Filipino.