REVIEW: ‘Tagay Para Sa Ex’ paints a realistic portrait of romance under capitalism

REVIEW: ‘Tagay Para Sa Ex’ paints a realistic portrait of romance under capitalism

Fully engaged performances and a cutting script in BoxStage Manila’s occasionally difficult new play suggest exciting ways of using realism in theater.

 

Sometimes when a play goes out of its way to repeatedly break a seemingly obvious rule in theater, it may in fact be trying to point us toward a greater idea. In BoxStage Manila’s Tagay Para Sa Ex—presented as a drinking party among five friends, two of whom are meeting again for the first time in years since breaking up—dialogue often scatters, interrupts, and blurs together into multiple conversations at once. As a deliberate consequence of this hyper-real style, it becomes difficult to hear or understand every single word as the gathering inevitably descends into discord.

This risky choice doesn’t guarantee a better show, especially when the production ends up defaulting to easier contrivances and more conventional melodrama anyway. But for the most part, writer-director Dudz Teraña’s commitment to a more realistic approach results in a fascinating experience that keeps every actor engaged at all times and allows the script’s cutting observations about love under capitalism to resonate more deeply. For those willing to buy into its unique way of expressing itself, the play suggests exciting ways of using realism in theater.

Love as transaction

What’s surprising about Teraña’s writing is that, despite its fidelity to the irregular rhythms and tonal shifts of real conversation, Tagay Para Sa Ex is actually quite didactic with its views on relationships. But this directness still rings authentic because of how nuanced its insights are—on how romance is reduced into a series of transactions and deliverables to be met because of the financial pressures the characters have to deal with first. For the straight male characters here, love is something to be strategized and regulated to ensure stability in the long run. For the female characters, sincerity and the fulfillment of emotional needs in the present day are just as important, and necessary for long-term planning to even be possible.

The show isn’t always convincing; characters excusing themselves off stage to calm down feels like an easy out, and there are perhaps one too many instances when a song plays dramatically just as someone has said something serious. But even when its concluding scenes can’t help but be more ordinary than everything preceding them, the production still works as a portrait of young middle-class people in 2026. Teraña rightfully refuses to judge any of them, understanding that their cynical or idealistic worldviews have been shaped by the demands of corporate life and romantic ideals advertised to them online. The difficulty of maintaining a steady source of income ends up framing every other aspect of their lives.

Unspoken resentment

The repeated arguments that these friends get into are nevertheless intriguing to listen in on because of how naturalistic the cast is. There’s an almost improvisational quality to the performances that emphasizes all the things that aren’t being said: how each character searches for the right words to use, how they silently react to someone across the room (at times aided by Jemuel Satumba’s subtle lighting accents), how tension builds as one person tries to defend themselves.

As lovers-on-the-rocks Benj and Mich, Jel Tarun and Brigitta Marilla (alternating with Raffy Pascua and Karyl Oliva, respectively) portray the resentment building between the couple just in how they drape themselves around the circular apartment set, with Benj’s nonchalance and Mich’s naivety only dragging each other down. As lively party organizer Poch, Buknoy Gonzales (alternating with Jonas Cunanan) is almost all too content letting the others fight—an attitude stemming from Poch’s own private spite and loneliness.

AJ Sison (alternating with Kobie Hachero) fully commits to Mark’s unapologetic pragmatism, displaying an intelligence and certainty of self that would be admirable if it didn’t constantly veer into condescension. But among everyone in Tagay Para Sa Ex, Yesh Burce (alternating with Kloren Flores) finds the most complete roller coaster of an arc as Mark’s still-wounded ex-girlfriend, Liz. She arrives still hoping for the bittersweet fantasy of an awkward reunion, only to be met with disappointment that time hasn’t healed all wounds.

Validating the mundane

By allowing these characters’ personalities to freely collide with each other as if at a real inuman—to the point that people frequently end up talking at the same time or distracting each other through side comments and cross talk—Teraña calls our attention to miscommunication itself. At the risk of alienating the audience and occasionally making us feel like strangers lost at the party, Tagay Para Sa Ex succeeds in illustrating how noise can become comfortable when one is trying to avoid the elephant in the room. Constant chatter becomes a coping mechanism to attempt to reduce tension, to numb oneself, or (in Poch’s case) to steadily instigate necessary confrontations that have been delayed for far too long.

That Teraña has chosen to go with this “messier” approach feels like a statement in itself. Rather than tell these characters’ stories via a neatly packaged narrative, the play liberates them from the rigidity of a defined structure and lets them lay everything out. Knowing that these people already spend their daily lives as cogs in the machine, isolating themselves in their work or putting on a friendly face to give the appearance that they’re okay, it rings more truthful that the drama of their real lives would be depicted as messy and unpolished. Here, realism isn’t just about convincing the audience but about validating our most mundane experiences as worthy of being the subject of art, too.

This reviewer watched the 7 PM, August 1 press preview.

 

Tickets: P500–800
Show Dates: August 8 – September 5, 2026
Venue: The FEU Center for the Arts Studio, FEU – East Asia College, Sampaloc, Manila
Running Time: approximately 1 hour and 30 minutes (without intermission)
Company: BoxStage Manila
Creatives: Dudz Teraña (Playwright, Direction), AJ Sison (Assistant Direction), Kirstan Orbegoso (Production Design Head), Margarita Barrameda (Production Design Head), Jemuel Satumba (Lighting Design, Technical Direction)
Cast: AJ Sison, Kobie Hachero, Yesh Burce, Kloren Flores, Buknoy Gonzales, Jonas Cunanan, Brigitta Marilla, Karyl Oliva, Jel Tarun, RB Pascua