A 19th-century French short story about a mother’s vengeance gets reborn as a Marinduque Holy Week tragedy — FEU Theater Guild’s 93rd season opener asks what faith is worth when grief demands its own justice.
Guy de Maupassant wrote “La Mère Sauvage” — “Mother Sauvage” — in 1884, a short, brutal story about a French peasant woman who loses her son to war and answers it with an act of vengeance the story never fully forgives her for, or condemns her for either. It’s the kind of story that survives because it refuses to resolve.
The Far Eastern University Theater Guild (FTG) — the university’s student theater company, now opening its 93rd season — takes that same unresolved question and moves it to a specific place and a specific war: Mogpog, Marinduque, during the Japanese Occupation, the four-year period from 1942 to 1945 when Japanese forces controlled the Philippines.
The result is MORYON, written and directed by Dudz Teraña. The play borrows Maupassant’s plot, but stages it inside one of the most recognizable religious traditions in the country.
A French Short Story Finds a Filipino War
The play is set on Holy Thursday, timed to the island’s own Moriones tradition — the Lenten penitential festival where devotees dress as Roman centurions in painted wooden masks, reenacting the legend of Longinus, the soldier said to have pierced Christ’s side at the crucifixion and been converted by the miracle that followed. It’s one of the most visually distinctive Holy Week observances in the Philippines, and MORYON uses it as more than backdrop. The masks that define the festival — figures of penance, of soldiers seeking redemption — sit uneasily next to a story about a mother waiting for her son to come home from a war that has already decided not to let him.
That son is Joaquin, a young guerrilla fighter trying to prove himself in a world that has long underestimated him. His mother, Caridad, is the one left behind — and the one forced, when the occupation reaches her own doorstep, into a choice the play frames as a collision between faith, justice, and what a mother is willing to do about both.
What the Masks Are Actually Hiding
The production’s own framing gets at the real tension better than any outside summary could: what happens to justice in a town bound by faith and tradition, when grief refuses to wait for either? MORYON doesn’t ask that question abstractly. It asks it through Caridad specifically — a woman whose private loss has to somehow fit inside a town’s collective, public ritual of penance. Mogpog’s yearly Moriones penance gives the town a shared, public ritual for guilt and forgiveness. Caridad’s private debt to the war has no equivalent ritual to settle it.
Rewritten through occupation-era Marinduque and the Moriones tradition, MORYON gives Maupassant’s moral dilemma a specifically Filipino shape.
Who’s Playing Caridad and Esteban
Caridad is played on alternating performances by Maria Alexandra Mayano and Maria Ysabel Delos Reyes — the latter also serving as the production’s Executive Director. Esteban is alternately taken on by Dave Bambang and Aldin Covarrubias. Behind them sits a full student production team spanning direction, design, technical execution, marketing, and house management — the kind of full-scale mounting a 93rd-season opener is built to carry.
MORYON runs at the FEU Center for the Arts Studio, on a campus that carries its own piece of Philippine cultural history: FEU’s Art Deco campus received an Honorable Mention in UNESCO’s 2005 Asia-Pacific Heritage Awards for Culture Heritage Conservation, and several of its buildings have since been declared National Cultural Treasures by the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA). Guests are encouraged to arrive 30 to 60 minutes early for a free guided walk through the campus before curtain.
Field Notes: MORYON at FEU
- Venue: FEU Center for the Arts Studio, Manila.
- Dates: October 1, 2, 3, 8, 9, 10, 15, 16, 17, 22, 23, 24, 29, and 30; November 5, 6, 7, 12, 13, 14, 19, 20, 21, 26, 27, and 28.
- Times: House opens 6:00 PM, performance begins 6:30 PM.
- Bonus: Arrive early for a free guided walk of FEU’s Art Deco campus.
Tickets:
- ₱150 — FEU students, faculty, staff, and FEU/FTG alumni with alumni ID
- ₱250 — Non-FEU students (valid ID required)
- ₱500 — FTG alumni without alumni ID, PWD/senior citizen discount
- ₱700 — General public
MORYON is staged by a full student production team — Assistant Director Kirstan Erin Wayne Orbegoso, Executive Director Maria Ysabel R. delos Reyes, Finance Director Trisha Tan, Production Manager Marjorie E. Uson, Head Stage Manager Danielle Schwartz, Production Designer Althea Carla H. Sibulo, Technical Director Martin Gabriel L. Mesina, Multimedia Director Johann Edgar S. Oliveros, Marketing Director Edrud Adriyel Madalan, Publicity Director Irish Jane L. Oliveros, and House Manager Zoe Trinity C. Sisam.