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 of that year; it premiered in the same year at the Fringe Manila.

The poster was designed by Manila-based artist Rombutan. It was revised several times after being released to the public to promote the performances. It was banned on Facebook, and 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 scheduled to tour 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, which was used as a display in Kukuk’s Nest and other trade books. It was stolen from my table inside the faculty room of the School of Languages, Humanities, and Social Sciences at Mapua University, where I used to teach. Beltran, last April, was taken by the regime’s police authorities without a warrant for her criticisms of the government’s inaction on the pandemic.

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