Palanca winner Floy Quintos takes his final bow with 'GRACE'
(The interview for this piece was one of the last that award-winning playwright Floy Quintos gave before his sudden passing yesterday, April 27.)
Can you imagine a life of total obedience where you are expected to accept without resistance and in total silence when your superiors tell you that your personal testimony — something you’ve seen with your own eyes and heard with your own ears — is false, thereby declaring to the world that you are a liar, a fake, a fraud?
Seven-time Palanca winner Floy Quintos cannot and this disbelief at such a kind of life is what compelled him to write his next play, GRACE.
A fictionalized narrative of the controversial events that allegedly happened in a Carmelite monastery in Lipa, Batangas in 1948, the dramatic piece centers on two real-life nuns — a young novice named Sister Teresita and the convent’s Mother Superior, Sister Cecilia — who got embroiled in what became international affairs reaching all the way to the Vatican.
It revolved around 21-year-old Teresita’s claims of having visions of the Blessed Mother Mary and receiving a series of messages from Her. There were also reported showers of rose petals falling from the sky into the convent witnessed by the Carmelite nuns and the people who visited them after news of the apparitions spread throughout the country.
Three years later, in 1951, the Vatican declared the events were not of supernatural origins and, therefore, not worthy of belief. Having made a vow of obedience, Sisters Teresita and Cecilia had no choice but to abide by the decision as well as the order not to speak about the apparitions and the petal showers ever again.
“That’s so alien to us,” Quintos said, noting how people these days have no qualms about expressing themselves, advocating for what they believe to be true, and fighting for their rights.
“‘Di ba right now, ‘Ay hindi. I’m right and I will put it on social media. I will fight for it. It’s a cause,” he said. “They lived in a time that was so repressive. It’s such a different life, a different way of looking at things. It’s such a different discipline which we don’t know in this world anymore. That’s what fascinated me and why I wanted to write the play.”
GRACE marks the first time that the story of the so-called Lipa Miracle is being dramatized. Only one television program, award-winning broadcast journalist June Keithley’s The Woman Clothed with the Sun from 1990, has been produced and it was a documentary.
The narrative art form gave Quintos the opportunity to probe, not about the veracity and the nature of the still-debated occurrences but rather the real-life human stories and the emotional and psychological impact of the official Church findings, particularly on Sisters Teresita and Cecilia who are at the story’s center.
“GRACE does not take a particular position,” the 63-year-old playwright noted. “We cannot say that the Church is right and she (Sister Teresita) was wrong.”
What Quintos was interested in was the Filipino psyche and “where we are today.” The play, he said, “wants to tell the story from the point of view of two women” as it asks important questions about faith, obedience, and resistance.
That story involves Sister Cecilia being removed from the Carmelite monastery in Lipa and sent to a convent in Jaro, Iloilo where she was demoted as a kitchen maid, and Sister Teresita being asked to leave the convent, thereby ending her religious vocation. “That really hurt her very much because she left her family and had wanted nothing else but to be a nun,” Quintos noted.
The play’s own press describes it as “an examination of what it means to cling steadfastly to one’s beliefs in the face of suffering, to cling with extreme humility, patience, forbearance, and silence – qualities fast becoming obsolete in our age.”
The beginnings
GRACE is culled from several published sources, notably Sister Teresita’s own memoir titled I Am Mary, Mediatrix of All Grace, the memoir of Fr. Angelo de Blas, the Dominican psychiatrist who came to the Philippines to investigate the case for the Vatican, and June Keithley’s companion book to her documentary.
Quintos has had the Keithley book since 2008 when he found it while cleaning out her mother’s belongings after she died. But he didn’t read it until almost 10 years later, in 2016. That’s when his interest in the story came about. He immediately started writing a script and kept at it over the years, parking it in 2022 to take on a more current and urgent topic — the highly-charged 2022 national elections.
The resulting piece was the comedy The Reconciliation Dinner, which brilliantly captured the human and personal side of the most polarizing political affairs in the country since 1986.
The play was both a critical and commercial hit. In fact, it had three successful runs in three different theater venues.
When Dinner was over and done with, the show’s producer asked Quintos if his next play would also be political. He said, “no more.” He pulled out the draft of GRACE he had already written and told his producer that he really wanted to do it.
It turns out that the new piece has quite some politics in it, too, albeit not in government but in another institution.
“GRACE is saying that this is a Church of God run by men,” Quintos noted, referring to the Catholic Church. “Things will happen, decisions will be made.”
That decision has met resistance from the Marian devotees of Lipa, especially after the recent release of the 1951 document containing the official Vatican decree against the apparitions and petal showers.
“What’s happening right now is the devotees are asking to reopen the case,” Quintos says.
Now that’s the kind of world the multiple Palanca awardee can easily imagine, believe in, and identify with.
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GRACE runs on weekends from May 25 to June 16 at the PowerMac Blackbox Theater in Ayala Circuit Mall in Makati. Tickets are available at Ticket2Me.net or thru 09175112110 for the June 1, Saturday, 3 p.m. show.