3 Reasons to Watch KISAPMATA: A Haunting Finale to Tanghalang Pilipino’s 38th Season: REVOLT

Tanghalang Pilipino’s 38th season comes to a chilling close with Kisapmata, a stage adaptation of Mike de Leon’s iconic psychological thriller, based on Nick Joaquin’s true crime reportage The House on Zapote Street.

More than just a retelling, this production is a theatrical exorcism—summoning ghosts, reviving trauma, and dissecting the horror of the Filipino family under tyranny. As the finale to this season themed Revolt, Kisapmata asks: “When the home itself is a prison, when love is a weapon of control, and when a father becomes the law—how does one fight back?”

1. Confront the Apparitions on Zapote Street

The film’s cast comes back to life, channeling the spirits of its original actors. Jonathan Tadioan is Dadong, evoking Vic Silayan’s chilling authority but magnified a hundredfold—his every smirk a prelude to menace, his laughter a harbinger of devious intent. Toni Go-Yadao is Mila, mirroring Charo Santos-Concio’s delicate beauty and tragic fragility, yet more torn, more bewildered, more trapped in an impossible choice. Lhorvie Nuevo is Dely, embodying Charito Solis’s quiet torment, but more battered, more abused, more broken—her madness a slow descent rather than a sudden break. Marco Viaña is Noel, channeled through Jay Ilagan’s helpless struggle to understand, adapt, and love, but here rendered even more martyred, more tormented, and utterly powerless.

But the true ghost here is the house itself, filled with apparitions lurking in its shades and shadows. Once a place of beauty, it now stands as a stark, skeletal ruin—spacious yet claustrophobic, airy yet suffocating. It is an inescapable purgatory for restless souls, tormented by their past, by the very emptiness that eats them, and by their unfinished business. The skeletal frame and looming shadows of “home” press down on each character like dead weight, mirroring their slow, inevitable descent into terror.

How do you dispel nightmares sitting on your chest when, even in waking, there are ghosts you cannot unsee?

2. Wallow in the Haunting of Zapote Street

Sound design becomes the play’s unseen antagonist—whispers slither through the walls, echoes of commands tighten around Mila’s throat, and incantations loop like a death sentence. The film’s suspenseful soundscape is amplified on stage, where every breath marks the beat of something horrific to come. Blackouts punctuate each drastic scene shift like a muffled exclamation. Repetitions build dread—Dely breaking the fourth wall with ominous recollections that double as warnings, Noel’s desperate attempts to become the husband that he is and not the pawn of a controlling father-in-law, Dadong’s demand that his wife feign sickness to keep Mila and Noel apart, again and again. Each scene of mother and daughter in the sickbed is another layer of lies, an infected mattress stacked so high with deception it is impossible to rest. Nobody rests or can rest.

Yet the true haunting emanates from the house itself—like an ultra-high-frequency wave, felt only in the blood and striking the bones. Once a middle-class haven of comfort, it is now a prison—neither gilded nor inviting, its bland sick space a cruel illusion, open yet inescapable. Shadows weave a net around its inhabitants; bars enclose everything and everyone in a cell of their own making. The real horror is not in the madness or the murders, slow and tormenting, but in the false promises of freedom—Mila and Noel’s fleeting hopes crushed under the weight of Dadong’s insidious “love.” The terror festers in every word spoken—control masquerading as care, obedience mistaken for devotion, tragically while not blind is inutile. Family and home rot from within, eating away at their silence-swallowed fear.

How do you break free from a love forged in blood, when the family you long to escape is the same one you ache to protect?

3. Relive the Horror of the Zapote Carnage

The play obliterates the boundary between stage and cinema, transforming a film adaptation of a crime report into a living nightmare. Like a slasher film meticulously constructed for maximum dread, it pulls together a haunting convergence—dead characters resurrected, a long-demolished house rebuilt, a horror story unfolding before our eyes. From the first nauseating moment Mila throws up, to Dely’s chilling chorus of recollection and warnings, to the time Noel’s was first introduced into the web of doom, each scene unfolds like a film reel unraveling. Projected images on the walls serve as ominous warnings—graffiti-like declarations that nightmares repeat themselves until something breaks it.

Dely replays the past as if trying to exorcise it, her trauma turning her into a ghost forced to relive the nightmare. Crime is not merely reenacted; it is warped into a feverish dream. Blackouts mimic the jump cuts of a film shoot—each pause an agonizing heartbeat between escape and further entrapment: Each blink is a revolt for hope or a descent to horror. Chiaroscuro lighting slashes across the set like prison bars, casting long, suffocating shadows. Rewinds loop movements in eerie repetition, trapping the characters in their own choreography of doom. Noel, swallowed whole by his solitary madness, is held captive and castrated not just by Dadong but by the axe of fate, his marriage to Mila and the quicksand of love.

Beyond the spectacle, the rot is made palpable—the slow decomposition of power, the decay of a family, the house itself becoming an earthworm farm that feeds on death. The massacre isn’t just an ending; it is the only possible conclusion.

How do you resolve a story doomed from the start, where tyranny is king and even the thought of freedom is a crime?

Why Kisapmata Is the Ultimate Revolt

Revolt is not loud—it is muffled, garbled, and suffocated. It is the silent rebellion of a daughter’s desperate bid for freedom. It is the horror of a home turned battleground, where love is a weapon and family is captivity.

Mila’s struggle to break free from her father’s control mirrors a broader societal reckoning: What happens when authority is absolute? When tradition demands obedience? When survival means submission?

Within Kisapmata, revolt isn’t just an act—it’s the haunting absence of it, the unfulfilled scream, the fate of those who can’t escape—but the implosion of a microcosm that grew from a bad nucleus, festered in the rejection of what must be done, which is simply doing the right thing; and choosing to accept what must never be accepted right from the start.

Tickets and Show Details

Kisapmata runs from March 7 to 30, 2025 at Tanghalang Ignacio Gimenez, Fridays to Sundays. Tickets are available via Ticket2Me, with prices ranging from ₱1,000 to ₱2,500.

Creative Team:

• Direction & Adaptation: Guelan Varela-Luarca
• Assistant Directors: Rafael Jimenez, Kat Batara
• Movement Direction: JM Cabling
• Set Design: Joey Mendoza
• Costume Design: Bonsai Cielo
• Music & Sound Design: Arvy Dimaculangan
• Lighting & Technical Direction: D Cortezano
• Intimacy Direction: Missy Maramara

The season ends, but the ghosts of Kisapmata linger—an eerie reminder that some houses never stop haunting because people would rather sit on the fence and allow the horrors to continue.

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