Garden gate and topiary

From director Ricardo G. Abad's notes on Tanghalang Ateneo's staging of Aristophanes' Lysistrata, translated into Tagalog by Jose F. Lacaba:

Aristophanes staged Lysistrata at a time when Athens, his beloved city state, had just lost a major battle against Sparta and was slated to suffer more routs catastrophic enough to end the golden age of Ancient Greece. That Aristophanes would write a comedy about a horrific war, and a sex comedy at that, testifies to the playwright's irreverent spirit and his powers to think out of the box.… So angry must Aristophanes have been that he took what at that time was an absurd idea, housewives as change agents, and gave these women the task of making men end the war.

This is the set that Gino G. Gonzales designed for the play. I know that it's a cheeky way to commemorate International Women's Day—and a unique entry for Scenic Sunday too—but I think Aristophanes would have approved.

Urban or rural, natural or man-made, take a sightseeing tour of our world's diverse scenery!

Pig heaven

Entablado (stage) is a student theater group of the Ateneo de Manila University organized just before the EDSA People Power Revolution. It focuses primarily on experimental and street theater and chooses plays which have strong socio-political content. The last play they staged certainly had a heavy dose of it, but it was also whimsical and hilarious. Titled "Ang Unang Baboy sa Langit" (The First Pig in Heaven), it was a musical adaptation of the children's story written by Rene O. Villanueva, a playwright and author of children's books in Tagalog. The story won first prize in the 1990 Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature, which is probably the Philippines' most prestigious literary award. The script was written by Christine S. Bellen, who also wrote the script for "Batang Rizal" (The Boy Rizal). The story takes place on Babuyan Island (roughly, Island of Pigs—baboy is the Tagalog word for pig) and the simple yet creative and very effective stage was designed by Gino G. Gonzales, a protégé of Philippine National Artist for Theater Design Salvador F. Bernal. The tree trunk platforms' bark is little pieces of bamboo glued to the sides of the painted wood.