Teatro de Recoleto of the University of San Jose–Recoletos staged Pitik, a student-led play written and directed by Alexa Gabrielle Camingao addressing sexual abuse, dissociation, and mental healthcare.
The production prioritized showing emotional consequence over explicit violence on stage, utilizing sensory elements, lighting shifts, and sound effects to reflect the main character Rose’s psychological trauma.
Playwright Alexa Gabrielle Camingao noted the play intentionally avoids a neat resolution, offering pre-show content warnings and usher assistance to support audiences through its heavy themes.
In collegiate theater, it is easy to mistake shock value for dramatic power. It takes more courage to pull back and let silence carry the room.
With Pitik, written and directed by Alexa Gabrielle Camingao with co-writers Hyacinth Estudillo and Michael Villaflor, Teatro de Recoleto (TDR) of the University of San Jose–Recoletos proves that student-led productions can handle heavy, delicate realities with mature precision. Centered on Rose, a domestic helper caught in sexual abuse, inaccessible mental healthcare and generational wounds, the play traces the quiet crises familiar to many Filipino households.
Cebu theater group gives voice to survivor through 'Pitik'
Student audiences laughed during the early banter, leaned forward as domestic tension mounted and gasped when the truth unfolded. Pitik strikes a rare balance between theatrical grit and responsible storytelling.
Staging the unspoken
At the core of the staging is a commitment to show emotional consequence over spectacle. When Rose is assaulted by her employer, Edgar, the production refuses to exploit the violence on stage.
“For us, the rule was to show the impact, not the injury,” Camingao told SunStar Cebu. “In the scene where Edgar assaults Rose, we don’t show the act. The lights dim, the heartbeat SFX rises and then it’s a sudden blackout. The audience fills in the rest and I think that is more honest and more respectful than putting it in front of them.”
That discipline builds a sensory vocabulary across the performance, translating psychological fracture into stagecraft.
“We also gave trauma a ‘language,’” Camingao said. “The piercing sound and the snap SFX mark every time Rose shifts and each alter has its own color of light. The childhood flashbacks are in sepia, like a memory that has faded but never left. Silence works the same way. Rose’s silence in front of Doc Gwen says more than a monologue could.”
The armor of dissociation
Rose’s dissociation is not presented as a clinical oddity but as armor forged to compartmentalize unbearable pain.
“The clearest one is dissociation,” said Camingao. “Rose’s identities — Tina, Olivia and Mike — each carry something she couldn’t carry alone: Tina is the child who still wants to be loved, Olivia is the conscience and Mike is the protector who turns violent.”
Tying these identities together is the Cebuano nursery rhyme “Napulo ka Tudlo.” Once a tender lullaby hummed by her mother, Mirasol, the melody becomes an anchor Rose hums to steady herself whenever the world threatens to cave in.
A complicit household
What gives Pitik its resonance is its refusal to blame a single monster. Rose’s tragedy is sustained by familiar bystander apathy: an employer wielding financial power over a worker who needs her salary for medication; a mistress, Susan, so consumed by grief that she looks away; and a peer, Nadine, who uses humor to brush past warning signs.
A community that judges Rose for her mother’s past and a healthcare system that offers only an unaffordable prescription compounds the harm. Help arrives through Doc Gwen only after the damage has been done.
No easy cures
Rather than offer an unearned resolution, the production treats recovery as fragile and unfinished.
“Definitely fraught,” Camingao said of Rose’s journey toward healing. “I didn’t want a tidy ending where one kind doctor fixes everything. The ending is not a cure. It’s Rose singing the song again, changing lyrics, with the whole room unsettled.”
“There are small seeds of healing, but the play shows that healing isn’t a straight line,” she added. “The play doesn’t answer whether Rose will recover. It only insists that she deserves the chance.”
To balance the heavy themes, the production builds in safeguards and spaces for the audience to decompress, from pre-show content warnings to ushers on standby.
“Inside the play, we give the audience small places to breathe,” Camingao explained. “Nadine’s humor, in the early scenes especially, lightens the mood and makes the later scenes hit harder. Mirasol’s lullaby gives us tenderness, and Doc Gwen is a quiet, safe presence. Catharsis, for me, isn’t a happy ending. It’s feeling something and understanding it. I hope people leave sad, yes, but also more willing to listen to someone who is quiet.”
Camingao said the production hopes audiences reflect on what happens when someone’s pain is continually neglected. More than offering solutions, she said, people must learn to notice, listen and resist judging others solely by what they see. Sometimes, she added, care begins with paying attention to the small signs that someone may be struggling. S