Setting: Spotlight on Rica
Scene 1 Act 1
In the bedroom: Pink walls, pastel colors, surrounded with child-like things. There are actors as dolls & toys in the background – inanimate.
Rica is trying to tie her hair up – her father simply rotated the whole body.
Act 2
Aunts, Rica, Father in the dining room: Actors as decorations in the background – either as paintings, dining room objects.
Aunt2: Why Paris? Why three years and even more? Aba, this is getting too much now.
Aunt1: Ay naku, taking care of other people’s children, while, across the ocean, her own baby cries herself to sleep? Talaga naman!
Father: She wants to earn good money and build us a house.
Her father had always defended his wife, until recently when all talk about her return was shelved. It seems she must extend her stay, because of her employer might help her to become “legal”. The she can come home for a visit and go back to work some more-
*Rica is in her bedroom, took a box of letters by the side, and got one randomly. Father enters the bedroom, she offers the letter, asking him to read it for her – he refuses. Father leaves the bedroom.
Rica draws a stick Big Lady on an illustration board – emphasizing the idea.
Scene 2 Act 1
Rica is in her bedroom, lying down with the sheets over her face. A focus light on her.
A sound of a pot being turned over
A sound of kitchen utensils
(Her breaths make and unmake a hillock on the sheets)
(A plate shatters on the floor)
Back to a fetal curl, knees almost brushing chin –
(The sound of a plate crashes)
Rica rises & screams
(The sound of a pot hurled into a wall)
(She keeps screaming as she runs out of the bedroom, into the kitchen)
Actors are portrayed as kitchen utensils.
And the cutlery, glasses, cups, more plates –
Big Lady’s angry, Big Lady’s hungry, Big Lady’s turning the house upside down –
Her father just arrived: drunk, wasted.
Breaking it everywhere –
Her throat...