Guelan Luarca honors late theater veteran Ricky Abad in intimate play ‘3 Upuan’

3 Upuan, the latest play written and directed by Guelan Varela-Luarca, began with a desire to work with theater and screen actors Jojit Lorenzo and JC Santos. “I asked if they were down to make a play with me. They said yes. That’s when I started writing something for the two of them,” Luarca tells Rappler.

While writing, Luarca felt that he needed a third person for the project. “Maybe female,” he says. He already had some names in mind, but at the time, he met up with Martha Comia at Gener Cafe, a drinking and dining spot in Quezon City.

“She said she had been wanting to go back to acting, so I asked her if she’d want to join us. She said yes. The boys said yes to Martha. And that’s the three people I needed to fully write the play.”

This, even as Luarca has yet to figure out the core of the story. “But I had flashing images of childhood, family, memory, time,” he’s quick to point out. “That was also the time when I had just landed back here in Manila to work on a project which my mentor, Ricky Abad, was supposed to direct,” he continues.

Sadly, Abad — a theater veteran and former artistic director of Ateneo de Manila University’s innovation hub Areté, passed away in December 2023. “So I was back in Manila weighed by grief,” says Luarca. “Thus, the play — time, grief, family, contemplation, losing a father.” 

It feels only fitting that 3 Upuan’s restaging this year remains in Areté, but now with a slightly bigger seating capacity. “From 30ish to 60ish,” shares the director. 

The material finds three siblings trying to make sense of their father’s impending demise due to esophageal cancer, as Lorenzo, Santos, and Comia reprise their roles from last year’s run. The actors, alongside Luarca, lighting designer D Cortezano and film and theater director Giancarlo Abrahan, also serve as the producers, after founding the new theater company, Scene Change.

At turns cynical then meta, emotionally granular then grand, 3 Upuan functions as a breakneck reversal of time — how to bruise it, how to mourn it, how to revel in it. In Luarca’s hands, time is at once abstract and tactile, joyous yet still racked with pain, behaves like a juvenile, and bears existential shrapnels hacking through our tender lives. The show’s blocking and soundscape are carefully measured, its dialogue often spasmodic yet propulsive, and its performances as achingly transfixing as it is feverish. First fantastic sight of the year.

Ahead of the staging’s already-sold-out run on February 1-13, 2025, I spoke with Luarca about the show’s intimacy, veering away from his dystopian fixations, how he views theater now, and what’s next for Scene Change. The conversation has been edited for length.

“It’s become clearer to me what this practice really is all about. And it really is about collaborators,” says Guelan Luarca. Photo courtesy of Giancarlo Abrahan

The play features only three actors and three chairs, alongside a limited audience seating – very intimate and minimalist. How necessary is this artistic decision to what the staging is trying to capture?

The intimacy is absolutely necessary, I think. It’s a whisper of a play. A gentle hug. It takes its time. It skips and hops around time. It needs patience and understanding and attention and openness. Things which, I feel, can be best achieved in a room full of friends. I can’t always just be showing this play to friends, so I thought, what can approximate the intimacy of friendship? Intimacy of space, I guess. Thus, keeping the audience count small.

Let’s breathe together and feel each others’ feelings. Let the cramped space turn us into empaths, patiently waiting on each other’s feelings. The performance doesn’t employ theater lights, at least not in a traditional way, so we’re aware of each other as we’re also watching the actors, you can see everyone’s faces.

Since this is a rerun, are there any significant recalibrations in the material?

The audience count, this time, is a wee bit bigger. From 30ish to 60ish. And the space also shifted, from the first run’s open two-quarter setup to a three-quarter one. Otherwise, none. The play is such a fragile thing. I don’t wanna be too rough with it. Let it be its simple, humble, plaintive, little self. I don’t wanna touch it too much, I don’t wanna tinker with it, it might bruise.

All the actors are reprising their roles from the original run. How was it working with them?

Some of the most fun collaborators I’ve ever had. Audience response has been painting this play as being quite emotional. I don’t know. You wouldn’t guess that from our rehearsals. We’re constantly laughing and teasing and having fun. I guess it’s because we know how vulnerable the play makes us, so as a defense mechanism — because we’re not exactly the healthiest people when it comes to being in touch with one’s feelings, and so we deny by way of laughter — we insisted on keeping rehearsals light and silly and funny. 

Jojit is one of the most secure actors I know; someone who’s so in touch with his feelings and his ego that he never ornaments his performance, keeps it lean and straightforward, and truthful. Personally, that’s my favorite kind of actor — those who don’t do a lot. Just enough. Just trusting their sincerity. Keeping it close to their chest. 

JC and Martha are also like that. JC is a striking presence, handsome and expressive, you’d think he swaggers, but really, he’s so withdrawn, in the shadows, a raw wound. Stinging, fresh, smarting, red. Really sore. Then Martha, who I think is crazily underrated. Her emotional availability, eyes like lighthouses, her refusal to question and intellectualize, but understand things on an instinctual level. 

But more than their qualities as actors, what made them perfect for the play are their qualities as people — kindness, humility, self-assurance, hard work, and humor. Humor, most importantly. ‘Cause my only luho (extravagance) as director is that I need to laugh at rehearsals, no matter how inappropriate or ill-timed. And of course, the fact that I wrote the play FOR THEM. If someone else wants to stage this play with a different cast, I can’t be involved. JC, Martha, and Jojit have gotten under my skin as far as this play is concerned. They own it just as much as I do.

The official poster for the staging’s rerun. Photo courtesy of Giancarlo Abrahan

How do you think this show strays away from your recent dystopian projects, such as Ardór, Nekropolis, and The Impossible Dream?

I feel like, politically, I’m in a rut. Or to put it in more constructive terms, I’m gestating, trying to understand the world in my own terms. Because things feel like it’s gotten so out of hand, that we’ve completely normalized psychopathy as a political ideology. With that, I find myself turning inward. The inwardness, and the humility and simplicity that comes with it, is what’s made this feel like a break from my usual stuff. But as far as I’m concerned, it’s actually less a break, but more a rechanneling. It’s the same intensity of feeling as the three plays you’ve mentioned. Just, perhaps, in a different shade?

Most of your works are overtly political. Is it something that comes naturally to you? And when you work on a material, do you start with a theme, a character, or something else?

I’m not really sure how overtly political I am, since I can look at playwrights like Boni Ilagan and Malou Jacob and say that compared to theirs my work’s a lot less political? But maybe my plays do have a sense of engagement, like it’s trying hard to make sense of the social world, or of contemporary history, thus the sense of political overtness?

I think my plays aren’t even politically useful, since they’re mostly speculations. Or interpretations, rather than appeals to move and do something. When it comes to theater and its political power, I only believe Augusto Boal: “The theater itself is not revolutionary, it is a rehearsal of the revolution,” and as far as I’m concerned, rehearsals mean it’s the space to speculate, make mistakes, try things out, question everything, take nothing for granted as truth. 

I don’t have consistent triggers for writing. Ardor was the product of the students’ protest during the pandemic plus listening to Talking Heads’ “Burning Down the House.” Nekropolis was from Vicente Rafael’s Sovereign Trickster and four days’ worth of theater games with Tanghalang Pilipino actors. Impossible Dream was prompted by Melvin Lee’s what-if. So whatever’s in the air, one just catches it and prays it amounts to a complete draft. Something weird and baggy and full enough to make butingting (tinker around) during rehearsals and rewrites (which to me happen always at the same time; I can’t rewrite without rehearsals).

The staging is a team-up between Ateneo’s innovation hub Areté and Scene Change, which you recently founded alongside D Cortezano and Giancarlo Abrahan. What’s that collaboration like, and what’s next for Scene Change post-3 Upuan?

Arete — by that, I especially mean D Cortezano and Dr. Jerry Respeto — have been so generous and trusting, giving me a space to play. I was rehearsing Sintang Dalisay, and saw the Hyundai dressing rooms for the first time. I immediately told D I wanted to use it as a performance space. He said to ask permission from Dok Je with a pitch. I saw Dok Je later and told him I really want to use that small space, and I’ll work with Jojit and JC and Martha, and I don’t have a script yet, I don’t even have a story, but I will have one. And I won’t need much. Almost zero tech. Pennies. Give me a month. He said yes. Insane. 

Scene Change is so exciting. It’s our first season. It’s made up of Jojit, JC, Martha, me, Gian, and D. Gian and I just had a programming meeting the other night over iced tea and matcha and a sugar-free cookie. I don’t think I can announce the whole season yet; but I can’t help but spill just one — our next production, sometime June/July this year — I’m adapting Gian’s film Dagitab into a play. Can’t wait! I’m terrified!

Considering the many stagings you’ve already written, translated, and directed, how has your relationship with theater changed, if at all?

It’s become clearer to me what this practice really is all about. And it really is about collaborators. Audience response and ticket sales and reviews are all accidental. It’s really about working with the team. I write for them. I direct them. I watch stuff and expand my tastes all for them. I love, love actors. Their bodies, their voices, their hearts. 

I’m constantly curious about different shapes of stories, different speeds, different structures, different means to use and exhaust the stage, new stage craft, technicals, etc. — because actors and collaborators deserve to be stretched and challenged, to be given the limelight, to be allowed to become many things and be great, and turn to nothing so they can put on many roles beyond their real selves. 

Theater people are such beautiful human beings (not all of them, alas, some of them are mean and impatient and lazy, and when they are, they’re not very good, not very interesting) but when you find the beautiful ones, you’re all set to have the best time creating stuff. It’s making pocket communities, small ecosystems, your people, people who make you their people too. Nothing beats the feeling of being someone’s people. You get to hold hands and remember what’s great about the world while it’s burning. What a way to go. – Rappler.com