San Francisco’s Bindlestiff Studio lays claim to being the first Filipino-American theater in the nation. But The Guerrillas of Powell Street is a unique project even for Bindlestiff. It’s both the American premiere and the English-language premiere of a play that was first performed in Manila in 2008. But while it may be an import, it’s really a local story.
Rody Vera’s play is based on the book Mga Gerilya sa Powell Street by Benjamin Pimentel, a Bay Area journalist whose novel is inspired by a series of articles he wrote for the San Francisco Chronicle about a group of Filipino World War II veterans who hung around the cable car turnaround on Powell Street in the early 1990s.
Fighting against the Japanese occupation of the Philippines, an American colony at the time, these soldiers were promised U.S. citizenship and military benefits after the war. Fifty years later, they’re still waiting for the veterans’ benefits that the U.S. government promised them and still hasn’t delivered. Now facing death, they hope to be able to have their bodies shipped home intact for a proper burial in their native soil, instead of the far more affordable option of cremation, which is contrary to their traditions.
In minimal staging by director Pablo Tapay Bautista, the pace of the play is pretty lackadaisical. Because it’s about a bunch of guys hanging out on the street, there are a lot of scenes of the same five veterans just killing time, teasing each other, joking around, sometimes singing, and helping each other out en masse when necessary. Occasionally they meet with a lawyer whom they just call “Attorney” (Rhoda Gravador), who briefs them on the progress of legislation to secure the promised benefits.
Along the way, some of the men reenact sad stories from their past. Ruben (Allan S. Manalo), who now spends all his money on a prostitute (a cartoonishly swaggering Gravador), found his brother’s dead body on the battlefield. Tex, the guy in the outlandish cowboy gear (Apollo Madayag, outfitted by Joyce Juan Manalo), is being woefully mistreated by his green-card wife (Gravador again), but figures he’s paying a karmic debt because of something terrible that happened during the war. Fidel, a likeable but low-key guy whose arms almost always hang limply at his sides (Augusto Gonzales), also has a tragic back story that has nothing to do with his military service.