Metro Manila (CNN Philippines) — No Filter: Let’s Talk About ME billets itself as an original play by millennials, for millennials, about millennials. Its goal is to get people talking about millennials.
“I feel like this show is a conversation starter,” said Director Toff de Venecia.
De Venecia hopes that his work would inspire the audience to take a deeper look into the millennial generation.
“Questions — questions about this generation that’s still in the making,” said de Venecia. “We try to demystify this whole labeling thing that happens with millennials — that you know, they are more than just the sum of their selfies and their technology and their lingo.”
Bannered by familiar names in the Philippine entertainment industry, de Venecia has the task of managing the talents and personalities of Jasmine Curtis-Smith, Mikael Daez, Saab Magalona-Bacarro, Cai Cortez, Micah Munoz, Sarah Facuri, Khalil Kaimo, and Lauren Young.
According to de Venecia, his work with them was a collaborative process to develop the production to where it is at now, allowing them to share their own experiences to make the text more meaningful.
The production takes the audience into the minds of millennials through a series of monologues, as they deal with issues such as expectations, social media, and their day-to-day lives.
Being a performer-driven piece, it was important for the actors to put themselves in a lonely position and assert themselves on stage, something that each member of the cast did not fail to do.
The performers made the audience laugh and cry as they went through the trials and tribulations of a millennial, offering an entertaining — but nevertheless deep — insight into the generation.
Each member of the cast went about their craft, successfully adapting their on-camera skills onto the stage.
Some of the heavier moments during certain monologues were suddenly augmented by musical scores that were meant to sell the emotions that performers were trying to convey. Unfortunately, the music took away from what was a strong performance from those on stage, which could have been better emphasized without the scoring.
An original script will always be placed under more scrutiny by the Filipino theater-going public compared to foreign-made scripts, especially one that looks into society.
A bold move to make
The script itself is well-written and tries to be slick, and does well to place a generation under the microscope.
The material does well to place the issues of a generation into context. It also pokes fun at itself in an effort to show members of every other generation who the millennials actually are.
With a running time of approximately one hour and a half, one could wish that they also could have used the opportunity to talk about other topics like the value of a ‘like,’ the difference between the real self and the social media self, or other debatable points.
As a whole, the production does its job in starting the conversation about millennials in an entertaining way.
It’s a conversation that the director and the cast would be proud of starting.
