This is the poster of the last production of my play before I left the country in 2019. UP Repertory Company performed Ang Mga Maharlika (The Aristocrats) in September that year ; it premiered on the same year at the Fringe Manila.

The poster was designed by Manila-based artist Rombutan. It was revised several times after it was released to the public to promote the performances. It was banned on Facebook, the actors and the production (including me) received countless death threats and intimidation from the supporters and loyalists of the Marcoses and of course, Duterte. Ang Mga Maharlika was supposed to be toured in several venues that year but the production decided to cancel the shows.

Ang Mga Maharlika retells the story of the scandal of the former dictator Ferdinand Marcos and his mistress, the American actress Dovie Beams.

I wrote and finished the play in 2010 in a quaint cafe in Cebu City called Kukuk’s Nest owned by actress and writer Maria Victoria Beltran. The play was based on Beams’s biography written by exiled journalist Hermie Rotea; the book was banned by Imelda Marcos in the Philippines. I found and eventually bought the hardcover copy of the book used as a display in Kukuk’s Nest along with other trade books. It was stolen from my table inside the faculty room of the School of Languages, Humanities, and Social Sciences at the Mapua University where I used to teach. Beltran, last April, was taken by the regime’s police authorities without warrant for her criticisms to government’s inaction to the pandemic.

I am posting this here for posterity. Freedom of expression and the freedom to dissent are long dead in the Philippines. Duterte and his fascist regime’s Anti-Terror Bill is awaiting for his signature to formalize and ‘legalize’ the death of freedom of expression in the country.