Fiction Always Outlives Us

There is an unremarkable table in a restaurant where two men eat steak as if it contains the shape of their future. A fork taps. A glass shimmers. And somewhere beneath it all, a typewriter clicks—Marcus’ typewriter, even though he isn’t here, reminding the room that words carry weight. Silence fills the space between their sentences, thick and trembling. Nothing about it seems remarkable—except the memory that lingers in those small gestures, as if the ordinary were only waiting for someone to notice.

This play knows such moments well. Four years after the release of the film, About Us But Not About Us has been reborn on stage at the Power Mac Center Spotlight Black Box Theater, carrying secrets like breath. Presence is not what is there; presence is what is felt. Every glance, every hesitant laugh, every pause that refuses to get up and leave vibrates with tension. Marcus—Eric’s former partner in the 2022 film, whose suicide shaped the story—is gone, yet on stage he is resurrected through memory, conversation, and the unspoken pressure between Eric (Romnick Sarmenta) and Lance (Elijah Canlas). They reprise their roles, joined by Epy Quizon as Marcus, whose presence adds new weight to this delicate choreography of absence.

And then comes the first truth: All of us are boring, except for the fiction versions of ourselves.

On stage, the line lands heavier than it does on the page. It settles softly on the chest like a breath held too long. Ambition—quiet, unrelenting—pulses beneath every step, every ordinary gesture brought to life by memory. Lance wants to be something more, to reshape himself, to step out of the skin he was given and into the one he imagines. That longing becomes a kind of gravity—unseen, insistent, impossible to escape. And the tension between desire and restraint hums like the typewriter in the background, marking every beat of uncertainty, every withheld confession.

The story was almost left unwritten. Jun Robles Lana, its creator, hesitated. Trauma is not something one returns to lightly. Memories are sharp and refuse to stay where they belong. But months of revision, months of care, months spent shaping a world that is not quite here and not quite there—liminal, omnipresent, ghostly—gave it life. 

You do not become a great writer by stealing someone’s work.

This is not just a line; it is a confession, a warning hidden in dialogue. In the hushed space between lights and shadow, it reverberates. Who are we writing for? Who are we trying to become? And at what cost? Ambition gnaws quietly at the edges of everything we do, and everything we allow ourselves to imagine.

Every audience reshapes the performance. Each show is a new version, a new deepening of the story’s intricate tangle of presence, absence, and tension. You, seated in the dark, bring your own whispered memories—things you didn’t know were still alive. Every one of us carries something unspoken, a shadow we keep folded inside, and the play catches it, shows it to the light, and makes it pulse. The typewriter clicks in the distance, each keystroke a heartbeat of what was lost, what is imagined, what might never be spoken.

The unsettling magic of this production is not only what is shown, but what is felt when no one is speaking. Presence and absence blur. Memory and imagination fold into one another. Ordinary gestures—a glance, a pause, a hand brushing a glass—become heavy with unspoken longing. And the world outside the theater feels smaller, quieter, compared to the one that exists in that air, in that pulse, in that intensified moment between light and breath.

This is the confessional heart of About Us But Not About Us: a place where every ordinary moment carries its own weight, where the self you imagine is heavier than the one you live, and where absence is almost, but never quite, empty.

If you want to see how ordinary becomes extraordinary, how absence becomes presence, and how the stories we carry inside us—our secrets, our ambition, our ghosts—expand into the lives of others, About Us But Not About Us runs every weekend from February 14 to March 8, 2026, at the Power Mac Center Spotlight Black Box Theater in Circuit Makati. Watch closely—because once you notice these moments, you may realize that some parts of yourself never leave the stage, even when the lights go down.

Article: Xyra Caryl Zaleta

Graphics: Keren Hope De Leon