Alyssa Somido

2015-07997

Reaction Paper on Tisoy Brown: Hari ng Wala

I really liked the play. I really did. The acting was fantastic: every actor gave their best. Neil Ryan Sese was the one who took the titular role, and he did a fantastic job. I must admit that there were times that I found things hard to follow. During the play itself, I would ask and wonder what were certain things or what exactly was happening, but after a few days of contemplating, things got clearer.

I loved Tisoy Brown’s character. He’s an anti-hero, he’s hard to love, he’s frustrating, he’s confusing, but that’s what makes him so interesting. All the flaws he has adds depth to him, and he’s turned into such an interesting character. He’s so human.

Tisoy Brown seems to be a proud guy. He’s proud of being himself, even though he doesn’t really know who he is. You can tell by all the shifts in his identity during the duration of the play. He seems to have tried everything: he made a religion, he got a drug smuggling thing going on, he tried to find Atlantis, he tried being a maligno (but dropped out last minute.) He tried everything but in the end, it seems like his life still ended up being nothing. He was so extremely average that he didn’t even deserve a place in heaven or hell, so they were just going to recycle his soul for something else.

I find myself identifying with him. He claims to become an emperor even though he has nothing, and an emperor of what? One of the things he takes pride in is how much “himself” he is. He has nothing but settles for the idea that “at least I am who I am, and I’m proud of it.” In the end, when he’s crowned, it’s said he’s king of himself and in effect, he’s king of nothing. He has no identity.

When death comes for him, he scrambles and tries to make a deal to show that he accomplished something in life, but alas, everything he did was nothing new. It meant nothing and he wasn’t unique. As a person who dreamed of greatness and claimed to one day be an emperor, it finally dawned on him that his entire life was just one of the many insignificant lives in the sea of the average. It resonates with me, because I’m a person who aims for greatness and fears being average. It’s in human nature to want to be more than what people think you are, and the ultimate failure is finding out that you were nothing special to begin with. It’s far more terrifying to be average than to be in the extreme low, for me at least.

One of the last scenes was when he was trying to find Maristin to testify about his sins so he can at least say that he did something bad so he could at least go to hell. It was bittersweet, because she did genuinely love him, but that love just made her say that he did nothing wrong to her. She loved him, but he needed her to tell him everything he did wrong.

In the end, I found the play beautiful. It resonated with me on a personal level, and I loved every aspect of it, from the over-the-top scene with the spinning bed to the eerie veiled girls in Tisoy’s cult. Every part was well-executed and I’d love to see another play again.