REVIEW: In ‘Jonah,’ intimacy comes with intrusion
There is something intrusive about Spike Theatre’s Jonah. It is there before Rachel Bonds’ play reveals the harder truths of Ana’s life, before we understand what the men who enter it will come to mean to her. Director Edith Garcia and set designer Dylan Lopez place a bed at the center of the playing space, surrounded by the modest accoutrements of a bedroom, and keep Ana there for nearly the entire play. It is where she sleeps, dresses, undresses, remembers, desires, retreats.
In this black box, configured in the round, there is little distance between Ana’s most private space and those of us watching it. We are already somewhere we perhaps shouldn’t be.
Then the men start coming in.
Highly intimate
Garcia’s production understands how loaded a bedroom can become when it belongs to a young woman who is rarely afforded the privilege of simply being alone in it. Ana (Chelsea Nikole Apolto) spends much of Jonah in loungewear, occasionally in her underwear, while boys and men knock, enter, linger, pursue, want.
Sex hangs over the production, but Garcia doesn’t make the atmosphere particularly sensual or sexy. Desire is knottier here, tangled up with vulnerability, coercion, memory and the difficult question of whether allowing another person into your space can ever be entirely disentangled from the possibility that they might take something from you.
Jonah (Riel Geli) encounters an Ana who is already somewhat closed off, but their courtship gradually becomes a charming game of pursuit. They run around the perimeter of the stage, chasing each other as their conversation develops: sometimes Jonah after Ana, sometimes Ana after Jonah. There is pleasure in their pursuit because it is reciprocal. Ana isn’t simply being cornered. Here, she is chasing back.
Geli gives Jonah a sweetness, a doe-eyed softness that makes these scenes feel safe, even cutesy. Against everything that comes later, their back-and-forth is an idyllic kind of intimacy.
Relentless pursuit
Then Danny arrives with Johnny Maglinao coming in hot as Ana’s stepbrother, carrying an air of trouble that makes even his presence feel imposing. Ana and Danny share a history of childhood trauma, and what has grown between them is difficult to name cleanly. They are family, but between them is attraction, dependency, and even damage. Bonds takes an uncomfortably long time to reveal exactly what these two are to each other, allowing the unease to accumulate before the nature of their relationship is properly revealed.
Maglinao’s Danny is so intense at times that the relationship between them felt almost threatening or coercive. Apolto’s work here shows us it’s not that simple. Ana is not merely frightened of him and goaded into submission. There’s a pull for her too. She is bound to him even as something in her appears to recoil. That contradiction keeps their scenes gripping because neither Danny’s next move nor Ana’s response to it feels entirely predictable. Whatever their relationship is has been contaminated by what they have survived together.
Johnny Maglinao as Danny; Photo Credit: Spike Theatre
The bedroom consequently means something different now. A space that once accommodated the blissful, playful give-and-take with Jonah has become claustrophobic. The set is the same but the man entering it has changed, as has Ana, and our understanding of what it means for someone to cross into her space has changed too.
Third time’s a charm
By the time we encounter Ana as an adult, that accumulated history makes another knock at the door difficult to receive innocently. Ana is now an adult and Apolto plays her as withdrawn, despondent, almost determined to reduce her exposure to the world. Then comes Steven (Edward Solon), an ex-Mormon and admirer of Ana’s work who wants, with increasing persistence, to know her.
Steven is gentler than Danny. Solon doesn’t bring Maglinao’s volatility into the room. Bonds gradually allows him and Ana to move toward something that suggests another possibility for intimacy. But Garcia’s production had spent the story showing men entering Ana’s room as an intrusion that it’s hard to believe Steven might be any different.
This is where Jonah becomes most complicated. Steven may impose himself differently, and certainly more benignly, but he is still another man knocking when the woman inside appears to want to be left alone. Apolto’s performance intensifies the discomfort: her adult Ana can seem so closed off that Steven’s persistence initially reads as another demand upon someone who has spent much of the play accommodating the two other males that came before.
One to watch
There is a bleakness to Garcia’s staging that makes the possibility of release feel harder won than the text sometimes seems to suggest. The black-box space, the bed that Ana never really escapes, her continual state of undress or near-undress, and the lighting all sustain the sensation of a woman being exposed. Even when intimacy begins to offer something other than danger, the production never entirely shakes the feeling that we are watching someone whose private space has been occupied for nearly two hours.
Edward Solon as Steven; Photo Credit: Spike Theatre
That exposure is made bearable, and often riveting, by Apolto.
At the center of Jonah, she gives a sensational leading performance as a woman growing across her radically different relationships to desire, fear, and intimacy. Ana could easily become just an accumulation of things that have happened to her. Apolto instead makes her contradictory: guarded but desirous, vulnerable without becoming merely fragile, capable of withdrawing from another person and still wanting to move toward them.
It is particularly impressive work as Jonah is showing audiences Ana’s present, or a memory, or her imagination, often without immediately telling us which is which. Apolto holds those versions of Ana together without flattening the character into the sum of her traumas. It is a demanding role, and Apolto emerges as the production’s center, delivering an exciting performance you can’t pull your attention away from.
The production around her is not always as assured. Bonds’ rapid back-and-forths occasionally sit awkwardly in the actors’ mouths, with exchanges that can a bit awkwardly delivered at times. The play’s shifts among memory, fantasy, and lived experience can also sometimes register as confusion rather than intentional ambiguity.
Strong start
There is something fitting about Spike Theatre choosing Jonah for its debut: a young company mounting a difficult, sexually and psychologically thorny play without sanding down what could make it uncomfortable? The result may be rough around some edges, but their roughness does not erase the boldness of the attempt nor its strongest elements in Apolto’s performance and Garcia’s daring direction.
This reviewer watched the 3PM, September 5 show.
Tickets: Php 1000-1500
Show Dates: August 29 to September 6
Venue: Dance Royalties Studio, Pavilion Mall, Mandaluyong
Running Time: approx. 2 hours (no intermission)
Producer: Spike Theatre
Creatives: Rachel Bonds (playwright), Edith Garcia (director), Satya Edilo (lighting designer), Malaya Tolibas (sound designer), Dylan Lopez (production designer), Regina De Vera (intimacy coordinator)
Cast: Chelsea Nikole Apolto, Riel Geli, Johnny Maglinao, Edward Solon
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