Filipinos are the largest Asian minority in California today, good reason for Filipino-American playwright Felix Racelis to dig deep into his people’s history in As Straws Before the Wind, now in a world-premiere production at the Ruby Theater. Racelis focuses on Nene Santos (Tita Pambid), now running a convalescent home in the San Gabriel Valley with the help of her daughter Pilita (Sarnica Lim). The generational conflict between Nene and Pilita is a key dramatic component: the former can’t understand why the latter wants to leave her side to marry an elderly widower with four children. Pilita has her reasons, of course; she claims to be in love, but it’s clear that her real reason for leaving is to escape her overbearing mother. Nene is without question a difficult woman, one who often treats her daughter — and her patients — callously. In a flashback to the Philippines in WW II, we learn what motivates her behavior: the brutality of the conquering Japanese army, two of whose soldiers killed Nene’s parents right before her eyes. (Nearly a million Filipinos — approximately 57,000 soldiers and 900,000 civilians — were killed by the Japanese.) Nene’s troubled psyche is made worse by her economic woes: although she’s desperate to expand her small clinic — one of the few in L.A. that takes Medicare — the banks refuse to loan her any money. The embattled Nene takes out her frustration not only on Pilita but such aged patients as Capt. Enrile (Muni Zano) and Mrs Novak (Anita Borcia). The squabbles between Nene and her charges unfortunately become repetitive and tedious, as does the conflict between mother and daughter. As Straws Before the Wind suffers from a serious problem: the inability of the playwright to come up with a conflict that is urgent and important enough to truly hold our interest and attention. A what-if suggestion: What if one of her new Medicare patients was Japanese, an old man who had served in the Philippines in WW II and had maybe witnessed or even taken part in the horrific murder of her parents? Even if I’m out of line for suggesting such a re-write, one thing is clear: the play as presently written doesn’t work well. The story zig-zags and goes back and forth between present and past, but never gathers force, never catches you up in a gripping, hard-driving way. Racelis, it must be pointed out, is not helped by his director, whose stiff, clunky staging makes it difficult for the actors to do their best work.
