Maria Luisa F. Torres 
 
 
      It has been said that the most enduring legacy of the nationalist 
 movement in the 1960s is the revival of Philippine theater, particularly,

 political theater. As such, theater sought to raise the level of awareness

 of the Filipino audience in response to the perceived needs of the 
 society then. Pulang Tala (1972) by Kamanyang tells of how a student 
 became a guerilla fighter; Barikada (1971) by Gintong Silahis drama- 
 tizes the historic Diliman Commune; Welga (1972) by Panday-Sining 
 depicts the need for the unionized workers to raise the level of their 
 demands from the economic to the political. The impact of the activist 
 theater could only be gauged by the long-term effects it had during the

 martial law years which followed the activist years. 
     Along with the activist theater productions, the 1960s gave birth to

 the first productions of Brecht's plays. Mother Courage and her Children

 was mounted in English by Repertory Philippines in Manila in 1968, and 
 the Philippine Educational Theater Association produced The Good 
 Woman of Sezuan in English in 1970 and in Pilipino in 1971. 
     The 1970 production was directed by a Czechoslovakian director, 
 Ladislav Smoceck, and the second was directed by Brooks Jones, an 
 American director. 
     But in the midst of the westernization of the Filipino, on the one 
 hand, and the political turmoil, on the other, the reception of these first

 productions of Brecht's plays was understandably ambivalent. By 
 PETA's own assessment, the key concept of the V-effect was under- 
 stood as "grotesque stylization in production and performance."

     Consequently, what was then referred to as Brechtian theater was 
 expected to have white clown faces, vocal orientalism, masks, among 
 others. Along with the confusion was the fact that before Martial Law 
 was declared, the main political arena was the streets. Thus, it was 
 difficult enough to mount Brecht's plays on stage; it would have been 
 even more difficult to do Brecht's plays in the marches. So, as PETA's 
 own evaluation would have it: "For the political activists of the time,
the 
 characters and plot of Sezuan might have been too non-committal, even 
 if the second production was already in Pilipino; and for the experimen-

 talists, the execution might have been too subtle, or not shocking 
 enough to warrant a theater vogue for them to apply in their own work. 
 For many others, the two productions must have remained an intellec- 
 tual and literary curiosity." 
     Martial Law was declared on September 21, 1972 in response to the 
growing militancy of the protest movement and to insure the domination 
of US imperialism and the rule of then President Marcos. At this point, 
the Armed Forces of the Philippines became the dominant force in 
keeping the people subjugated, exercising brutality unknown for many 
years as may be gleaned through the hundreds and thousands of cases 
of arbitrary arrest, tortures, disappearances, extra-judicial executions

or "salvagings" and massacres. It has been documented that in the
first 
years of Martial Law alone over 50,000 people were arrested, detained 
and tortured without charge or trial. From a regular force numbering 
57,700 before Martial Law, the military soared to 275,000 a few years 
before Marcos was ousted. The repressive military, aside from the 
regular forces, had the Barangay Brigade, the citizens army reserves, 
 
 
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