Portrait of the Artist as Filipino

written by: Prof. Florina “Lala” Castillo

National Artist Nick Joaquin’s “Portrait of the Artist as Filipino” occupies an unparalleled place of honor in the history, not only of Philippine dramatic literature but in all of Philippine literature as well.
Perhaps it is the poetry in it, the subtle, unspoken pain of the genteel poor of Old Manila struggling to survive in a world their genteel past never anticipated. It is pre-war Manila, just before the bombs fell in 1944.

In Bitoy’s words “while the world was hurrying gaily towards destruction…there was one house that never became a slum.”
What happens in that house is what “Portrait of the Artist as Filipino” is all about.  It is about a great but impoverished painter slowly dying along with the Old Manila.  It is about his daughters Candida and Paula, two women in whom youth and dreams have died but not dignity and gentility, trying to survive the ravages of poverty in an old paternal home which their brother and sister, Manolo and Pepang want to sell.

It is about the young go-getter of a jazz pianist Tony Javier, wanting to make an extra buck out of this situation of desperate poverty getting caught in his own trap.  It is about Don Perico, the Senator who stopped writing poetry so he could earn a living for his family.  It is about Bitoy, the young journalist, trying to interpret for himself and for us, the paradoxes of his times and who takes upon himself the poet’s mandate “to remember and to sing.”  It is about all of them, their choices showing us as the Senator says, that “Life is not as simple as it is in art.”

Source: http://lifestyle.inquirer.net/72500/what-portrait-of-the-artist-is-all-about

In 1955, his first play, A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino: An Elegy in Three Scenes, was premiered on stage at the Aurora Gardens in Intramuros, Manila, by the Barangay Theater Guild. He had written the play sometime around 1950 upon the urgings of Sarah Joaquin, who was active in Manila’s theater circles. Though it had been published in Weekly Women’s Magazine and Prose and Poems in 1952 and had been aired on radio, the play was not staged until 1955. It proved to be an immense success. It was made into an English-language movie by the highly respected Filipino filmmaker Lamberto V. Avellana in 1965, translated into Tagalog, adapted in other forms, and staged hundreds of times. No Filipino play in English has been as popular.

Using the flashback device of a narrator who recalls the sad fate of a prewar family as he stands in the ruins of postwar Manila, the play sets itself not only in the divide of war but that of past and present in Philippine society. Tracing the disintegration of an old and proud family in the transition from past to present, Nick Joaquin explored what had been abiding themes in his writing across the years.

Source: http://www.rmaf.org.ph/Awardees/Biography/BiographyJoaquinNic.htm