Building a playground for theatre-making: Mark Mirando on the genesis of Porvenir

The company’s name carries historical resonance. Porvenir draws its lineage from Teatro Porvenir, the anti-colonial theatre collective associated with Philippine revolutionary figures Andrés Bonifacio, Macario Sakay and Aurelio Tolentino, who deployed dramatic performance as an instrument of resistance against American colonial rule. While Mirando is careful not to equate contemporary independent theatre with early 20th-century revolutionary struggle, the historical precedent remains an inspiration.

“We are working in a very different time, of course, and I don’t want to claim that what we’re doing carries the same political urgency,” Mirando clarifies. “What stayed with me was the idea of theatre as a space where a generation could respond to the conditions around them. For me, porvenir also carries its literal meaning: what is to come. I keep returning to this simple idea that the future is the kids. In many ways, we are also just kids who wanted a place to create. Porvenir became our playground. But having a playground also comes with the responsibility of asking what kinds of stories we want to tell and why they need to be told now.”

This mandate was tested in Porvenir’s first full-length production, El Fuego del Alma [The Fire of the Soul], a Filipino adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s 1948 Southern gothic drama Summer and Smoke. Translated into Filipino by Eljay Castro Deldoc with dramaturgical direction by Mirando, the production relocated Williams’s narrative of repressed desire, spiritual conflict and social restraint into a rural Philippine provincial town.

Mirando’s engagement with Williams’s text was deeply personal. He first encountered Summer and Smoke during his undergraduate studies but felt distant from its themes. Years later, his mentor, the late National Artist for Theatre Tony Mabesa, suggested he direct the play. Though scheduling conflicts prevented the project at the time, Mabesa’s passing prompted Mirando to revisit the material through the lens of grief, faith and personal reflection.

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“As I grew older, the play started speaking to me differently,” Mirando reflects. “The things that once felt distant became very personal. Somewhere along the way, the play’s shadows became my shadows as well. I understood more deeply its grief, its questions about faith and desire, and the struggle of moving forward with life despite everything that gets in the way. I was also drawn to the fact that Summer and Smoke has had a complicated history onstage. I wanted to wrestle with it and understand why it continued to stay with me.”

Central to the production’s strategy was establishing a direct resonance between the original text and the socio-cultural realities of Philippine society. “Questions of faith, desire, repression, morality and the body take on another dimension when viewed through our history as a colonised people,” Mirando observes. “That became the reason to reimagine the work through a Filipino lens rather than simply stage Tennessee Williams as written.”

Instead of staging El Fuego del Alma inside a conventional proscenium auditorium, Porvenir chose Sine Pop, an ancestral residential house built in Cubao, Quezon City, in 1948—the exact year Summer and Smoke was written. This site-responsive choice allowed the venue’s architectural features, natural light, surrounding bamboo and domestic scale to actively participate in the performance.

“Working in found spaces isn’t something that started with El Fuego del Alma,” Mirando explains. “Even in college, I was already directing work in cafés, lobbies, ruins, classrooms, wherever we could make theatre. Spatial storytelling has always been part of how I make work. I don’t see the venue simply as somewhere you put a production. It can participate in the storytelling. What was special about Sine Pop was the history and the connections we kept discovering as we worked there... Somehow, this old American play, our Filipino reimagining of it, and this old house in Cubao found themselves together.”

The performance incorporated an ensemble of actors—including Opaline Santos as Alma, Sandino Martin as Juanito, Hariette Mozelle as Rosa, Vincent Pajara, Sheryll Ceasico and Rolando Inocencio—performing with a rotating cast system where actors alternated roles across different performance dates. In El Fuego del Alma, the domestic architecture functioned as an active agent, framing the tension between internal longing and external societal judgment.

The transition from low-overhead staged readings to a fully realised theatrical season posed formidable financial and logistical hurdles for the fledgling company. Mirando personally financed the initial production budget using his private savings.

“Everything changed when we decided to move from staged readings to a full production,” Mirando admits. “We needed more manpower, a bigger management team and, of course, a much bigger budget. Our first week was difficult in terms of sales. In many ways, running Porvenir felt like running a start-up. When you’re starting with limited resources, you take on multiple roles because there are gaps that simply need to be filled.”

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Initial slow sales during the opening weekend gave way to word-of-mouth recommendations from early audience members and theatre critics. By the second and third weeks, performance runs were selling out. “Word of mouth started spreading,” Mirando recalls. “For a new theatre group, that gave us something money couldn’t simply buy: trust. People who didn’t know Porvenir before were suddenly willing to take a chance on us.”

To ensure broader community access despite rising production costs, Porvenir established a sponsored audience programme, securing contributions from private patrons to provide subsidised or complimentary tickets to students and young theatregoers who might otherwise be priced out.

Operationally, Mirando emphasises that Porvenir’s survival depends on a collaborative model built on mutual respect and shared responsibility. Rather than enforcing rigid institutional hierarchies, decisions regarding staging, design and production workflows are negotiated collectively.

“Collaboration doesn’t mean that everyone will always agree,” Mirando notes. “For me, it’s a constant negotiation. Consensus matters, and that requires a lot of conversation. When there are disagreements, we try to return to the shared goal of the production. What are we trying to make together? What does the work need?”

He is equally determined to cultivate a production environment that rejects coercive artistic methods. “A lot of us came from a theatre culture that could be very harsh and obsessed with excellence,” Mirando reflects. “Of course, we want to make excellent work. But I don’t believe excellence should come at the expense of the people making it. We can demand rigour from ourselves while still recognising each other’s boundaries and humanity.”

Looking ahead, Porvenir does not plan to limit itself strictly to reimagined foreign classics, nor will it permanently abandon staged readings or conventional proscenium spaces. The company’s trajectory encompasses original Filipino plays, collaborative devised works and ongoing material development.

“We don’t want to box ourselves into one kind of theatre,” Mirando states. “Porvenir began with original Filipino work through Lost in Transit, our staged-reading twin bill of plays by Shenn Apilado. Giving Filipino writers more space is very important to us... If we’re going to revisit a foreign classic, there has to be a reason beyond simply admiring the play. It should reveal something about who we are, the society we live in or the things we’re grappling with now.”

As Porvenir navigates its future, Mirando remains focused on building a sustainable framework where artistic inquiry and ethical production practices can coexist. “Five years from now, I don’t think I’ll measure Porvenir’s success only by how many productions we’ve done or how many seats we’ve sold,” Mirando concludes. “What matters more to me is what we’ve been able to create and provide for artists. If Porvenir can provide a lasting space for that culture, and if other theatre-makers benefit from having that space, then I think we’ve done something worthwhile.”

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