Review: (Toronto) Every Letter Counts

Nina Lee Aquino

Accepting the tiles given

Factory resumes with mixed hand

by Jason Booker

[This article has been corrected]

Every Letter Counts, the opening play in the Factory Theatre season, takes its name from Scrabble.  You know, the game you used to play with your grandparents: crossword-style board, double word scores and those numbered letter tiles. 

In Nina Lee Aquino’s latest work, the clues become a bit cryptic and the game-players remain enigmatic though the game play is enjoyable. 

Taken from Aquino’s own background as granddaughter niece to assassinated Filipino politician Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino, Jr., Every Letter Counts explores the relationship between six-year-old Bunny and her ancestors, both in 1983 when she met Ninoy for the only time and the present.

the program was the only tip-off that the set was intended to be the Aquino museum in Manilla

Unfortunately, for such a personal project, the question must be asked: who is the show for? 

While the four performers under Nigel Shawn Williams’ direction deliver strong performances, the playwright has given herself the prize role. As a young child, Aquino captures the precociousness and insolence of youth, though her transition to adulthood, interacting with her deceased grandfather, felt uncertain.  The fluid script lacks clarity in defining time and place for the audience – the program was the only tip-off that the set was intended to be the Aquino museum in Manilla and not simply an extension of the Scrabble metaphor, covered with defined panels of tortoise-shell wood.

There are numerous moments in the show when Bunny wanders about the stage, exploring the projections on the wall, expressing her emotions or hearing the echoes of her ancestors – which seem to help the actor create the right space for herself as the storytelling guide.  Instead of directing those experiences to the audience in a more experiential manner, telling or displaying, Bunny frequently faces upstage; these are her moments and not the audience’s. 

The show opens with a sequence of barely audible whispers that fail to introduce the onstage narrator: is this intended as a trip the audience takes with Bunny or one into her brain?  Thankfully, the introduction does establish Ninoy and why learning Scrabble from him, during the only four days that Bunny will know him, is touching and significant – with several strong scenes set around a card-table as Bunny learns how to read. 

Half of the time it feels like the play wants to initiate the uninformed and the other half of the time the show becomes an artist’s vanity project with the audience remaining an after-thought.  Because, while people may read the program to discover that Benigno Aquino’s death prompted the People Power Revolution, leading to the end of the Marcos dictatorship of the Philippines, they also may not get past the artist biographies to learn that. And who knows if the audience will understand the Tagalog last lines, after the show liberally uses the other tongue but subsequently translated into English as well.

Instead of getting past the game board, Every Letter Counts sticks to reading the rules, never certain if this exercise is meant as educational or entertainment, personal or public. 

As Ninoy teaches Bunny, maybe the audience simply has to accept the tiles life has presented.

Every Letter Counts plays until February 24, 2013 and runs 75 minutes