Words The Corner Studio
Editing The Kanto team
Images Mei Lim (for PASIYA)
In 1935, Filipino women were asked to vote on a Constitution that withheld their suffrage. This is the irony at the center of Every Male or Female, one of two original works comprising PASIYA, a co-production by creative agency The Corner Studio and the Santa Ana-based design practice Headroom, and its arrival this Independence Day weekend needs no explanation.
The theater twin bill runs from June 12 at Headroom’s creative compound on quiet Lamayan Street in Santa Ana, Manila, a multi-level design studio that has been steadily converting its floors into a gathering place for creative work that resists clean categorization. For PASIYA, the stage is a double-height, ceilinged space that serves as the studio’s emerging events venue, its main draw being the decommissioned La Lola Churreria VW Kombi parked within, along with whatever art toy the Headroom team has decided belongs there that week. Both plays are naturalistic and single-location, unfolding in real time within a confined space — a format that makes Headroom’s intimate, unconverted floor not just an appropriate venue but a deliberate one.
Both plays were written and directed by Eldrin Veloso, a playwright, actor, and partner at The Corner Studio. Veloso’s Pilato staged the trial of Christ through the eyes of Pontius Pilate at the PETA Theater Center for Holy Week 2025, and whose play Historya earned him Best Playwright at the Act Avenue Theatre Festival this year. Veloso’s PASIYA is smaller and more intimate in scale, and all the more pointed for it.
People v. Dela Cruz returns after a successful premiere earlier this year. Set in a Philippines trialing its first jury system, six jurors are locked in a room to decide one man’s fate. Before any verdict is reached, ego, piety, social performance, and personal bias take over. The satire is dark, the comedy sharp, and underneath both runs a question about what it means to wield power over another person’s life.
Every Male or Female makes its world premiere as part of the bill. On the morning of the 1935 plebiscite, three Filipinas gather before a women’s association meeting where one of them is expected to urge the others to vote for a Constitution that does not yet guarantee that right. One late morning, a political argument becomes a reckoning over principle, loyalty, and freedom itself, arriving, as it so often does, already conditional.
The two plays span nearly a century of national history, with freedom as their moral compass and choice as the force that moves the needle. That the twin bill opens on Independence Day in a mixed-use space not designed for theater says something true about our moment — that the work doesn’t wait for the right conditions, and neither does the freeing.
Veloso joins the cast alongside Pauline Arejola, Althea Aruta, JP Basco, Rain de Jesus, Aaron Dioquino, Vea Noroña, Emlyn Olfindo-Santos, and Carla Martinez, with Pat Gregorio as associate director and stage manager, Shaira Carandang as production designer, and Almie Layog as associate stage manager.
PASIYA runs June 12 to 21, with 7:00pm shows every Friday and Saturday and 2:30pm matinees every Saturday and Sunday. Tickets at tcs.helixpay.ph at P1,500 per show. •
