Drumming Up Hopes and Fears with The Xavier Stage’s “Ang Bata sa Drum”

In a perfect world, the two opposing notions of "childhood" and "despair" would never have an opportunity to meet, let alone walk hand-in-hand like it was nothing to

be concerned about. It is indeed sad that for a lot of poor children in broken homes, this world is anything but perfect.

It is one thing to write about this sordid subject, it is another to make a short film on it. But for the Xavier Stage (TXS), Xavier University's resident repertory theater

company, the challenge was this: how to make this sad paradox of childhood misery come alive on stage? And with just two child actors, to boot?

"I actually asked Tat [Soriano, director of the play Ang Bata sa Drum] to undergo a lot of reading and writing... There were four exercises for him to understand the text, and for him to really translate his understanding into vision and into more palpable aspect of the play which you have now seen," says TXS Artistic

Director Hobart Savior, who reworked the script into full Cebuano from the original Cebuano-Tagalog opus by playwright Dominique La Victoria.

“We really have to decode the play, we have to understand its values, its theme, and me as the director, how I would react to these themes and values,” says Soriano, adding that a lot of research and contemplation went into the work of bringing life, meaning, and poignancy to the play.

The story is this: Roro (Gabriel Bacungan), the titular boy in the drum, had just received a harsh beating

for filching just a tiny