Yemaya is a Charming Coming-of-Age Play and Its Filipino Translation is a Triumph

(SPOT.ph) We went into Yemaya rather blind. We only knew Bituin Escalante is in it and that it's a Filipino translation of a foreign piece. The promo video didn't offer much to chew on, except it made us think, because the material is dialogue-free and entirely set to Carribean-flavored instrumental music heavy on percussion, that’s it’s like Once On This Island—but on a different, less colorful island?

The actual set doubles down on the island vibe. Right smack in the middle of the Black Box Theater of Rockwell Makati's Proscenium Theater is a large 3-foot sandbox framed on all four corners by wooden posts, or what's made to look like wooden posts -- this is theater, after all. Overhead, dangling from the ceiling, are various items including chairs, signages, and some huge rectangular object. These would be lowered to the performance space several times at different moments in the show, tied to thick ropes strewn with all sorts of debris and made to look naturally weathered. 

We're on some island, indeed. But it is made clear early on in the play that this would not be the singing-and-dancing fantasia play, despite the presence of Escalante. Yemaya is far more grounded than the Little Mermaid-inspired Island. It is a charming, affecting, real world-powered  coming-of-age story about a starry-eyed teenage boy from a farming family. It tells of his odyssey through poverty, grief, ambition, and the pursuit of belonging and a better life elsewhere.

The boy is Jesus and he is played by 24-year-old stage and film actor Tommy Alejandrino. Alejandrino’s Jesus is somewhere between raw and polished, earnest and playful, insouciance and dogged passion, as he makes the journey -- physical, mental, emotional, psychological -- from small town to big city to vast ocean. 

We first meet him with his family: doing the bidding of his loving but no-nonsense mother (Escalante); taking business lessons from his uncle (Herbie Go); and squaring off in a game of domino with the same uncle and another uncle (Anthony Falcon). It's the latter who takes him to the city where Jesus experiences many personal milestones. That includes his first brush with a seductress (also Escalante, in gypsy garb), his introduction to a refrigerator, and his first-ever taste of a cold bottled drink.

The script mines the encounter -- between Jesus and the kindly store owner who gives him the drink for free -- for laughs before portraying his actual experience of drinking as a very personal, life-changing moment that almost achieves a mythic rite-of-passage quality. 

Alejandrino plays this, and all his other moments in the play for that matter, with a light, almost cool touch and a lack of actorly theatricality. The entire performance is perfectly modulated, closer to cinema than it is to stage, and it's totally disarming and necessary in a play that asks the audience to embrace a life-size migrant story with larger-than-life elements, one that's both universal (Yemaya is the story of every Filipino provincial lad/lass working as a househelp in the big city, and the story of every OFW) and specific (the boat people from Latin American and African countries).

It's when the action moves from land to ocean where we meet the titular character Yemaya (Escalante in her third role), a mythical sea goddess who saves Jesus and his companion, city girl Maya, from a certain death as they run into a storm. It’s Maya, working covertly in the business of transporting locals to the United States, who becomes Jesus’ ticket to start his journey towards his American Dream. 

It’s also here where Yemaya fully unravels as one of the smartest, most creative, best produced works in Philippine theater in the first half of 2026. It's here where past, present, and visions of the future and the otherworld collide to create a narrative tempest that director Ed Lacson Jr. and his team brilliantly bring to thrilling life. 

Simply put, Yemaya is what happens when each aspect of production – direction, set design, music, staging, lighting, writing, acting – is handled with intelligence and delivered with quiet, sure-footed confidence, when everything blends together perfectly, seamlessly, without a weak element or anything overcompensating for or overpowering others. 

We would learn, post-show, that the original English-language piece—full title: Yemaya’s Belly—is from Quiara Alegría Hudes, the Pulitzer Prize-winning American playwright who wrote the book of In The Heights, the hit 2008 Tony Award winner for Best Musical later adapted into a film (to much lesser critical and box-office success) about the not-so-dreamy lives of Cuban migrants in the US. Written in 2003 as Hudes’ debut play, Yemaya’s Belly can be seen as a spiritual prequel of sorts to Heights and is even more powerful for it. 

Yemaya, the Filipino translation, compellingly makes the piece resonant and relevant to local audiences even without necessarily transposing it to the Philippine setting. We wouldn't want it any other way.

Yemaya runs until July 5 at the The Blackbox of The Proscenium Theater in Rockwell, Makati, with Friday shows at 8 p.m. and Saturday and Sunday shows at 3 p.m. and 7:30 p.m.