Two Women as Specters of History: Lakambini and Indigo Child

Rody Vera cultivated the serendipitous vision of regarding Gregoria de Jesus, widow of the first would-have-been President Andres Bonifacio, as the body on whom the betrayals and shortcomings of the foreign invader, local elite, and well-intentioned revolutionary would be inscribed. With the return to popularity of the surviving members of Marcos’s family, premised on the wager that the present generation would be ignorant or dismissive of the strongman’s monstrosities, Vera responded to an invitation to provide a play that turned on the traumatic experience of a left-revolutionary activist, the late-twentieth-century counterpart of de Jesus. . . .