Penchant for long-winded ‘arias’ weighs down promising TV drama

DELAS ALAS. Her quietly dramatic moment passed all too quickly. Photo from pinoystop.com

Last Saturday’s “Maala-ala Mo Kaya” episode started out as a quietly and deeply moving dramatization of the tragic story of a mother (Ai Ai delas Alas) who went crazy, and subjected her husband and children to great pain and misery.

Thank goodness, her little boy didn’t let her wild tantrums lessen his affection for her, and he helped effect the healing of her mental problem with his steadfast care and love.

Alas, the happy healing turns out to be short-lived, because nasty neighbors keep casting aspersions on the “crazy” woman. Their vicious attacks culminate in the bloody death of one of her backyard animals, and this causes her mind to snap again.

Beloved mom

The turgid family drama continues its downward spiral until all of the children are affected—especially her oldest boy, who is forced to stop studying in order to take care of his demented albeit still beloved mom.

Naturally, this rankles, but he tries to go with the flow—until she decides to take things tragically into her own hands to “solve” everybody’s problem.

Of course, this only makes things worse for everybody concerned—and does the story’s dramatic arc a great disservice, because it deprives the episode of a cathartic and “earned” denouement.

All that the remaining characters can do is to eulogize her in throbbingly purple prose—but, that’s clearly not enough catharsis and closure for both characters and viewers alike.

The episode started out promisingly, especially in the relatively quiet early scenes that showed Ai Ai silently lost and trapped in her world of madness and inability to communicate.

The scene in which her young son is able to break through her wall of sullen silence and bring her back into the world of the living is movingly depicted, showing that the production, including the for once quiet Ai Ai, is capable of greatness!

—Alas, the beautiful moment passes all too quickly, as the characters find their (loquacious) voices again, and go on and on about how they feel, why they feel it, etc.

A major culprit in this regard is the script’s penchant for giving its principal characters long-winded and pseudo-poetic “arias,” long paragraphs or monologues during which they detail everything they’re feeling, leaving viewers with nothing of their own to contribute to what should have been a shared dramatic experience!

Negative effect

The arias have a particularly negative effect on Ai Ai’s initially moving portrayal, because when she speaks, she has a notoriously undramatic voice, frequently breaking here and there and even going into irritating “yodeling” mode, like a 13-year-old boy having to contend with the vocal onus of adolescence.

Sadly, even the other actors, including the two otherwise promising boys playing the madwoman’s son at different stages of his life, are compromised by having to intone long-winded and excessively “explicatory” arias of their own.

Due to these and other unfortunate excesses, what initially was a promisingly affecting and provocative drama eventually degenerates into an embarrassing compendium of thespic and scripting “sins.”

We would think that “MMK” would know that this is not the way to go, and that believable and truly affecting and insightful drama can’t be squeezed from such obviously hokey and self-serving excesses. When will essential lessons be learned?