‘Para Kay B’: All About Lucas
‘Para Kay B’: All About Lucas
Major spoilers ahead for Para Kay B
Pain can be dangerous. When you can’t accept the fact that you’re in pain and you don’t medicate yourself soon, you infect everyone around you with it. You are too blinded by your pain that happiness is removed from the equation. As a writer, when pain is all you’ve ever known, there’s a high chance that your pain can bleed into your writing.
In Para Kay B, Lucas creates life with every story he makes. He has a thesis in mind for his collection of short stories: There’s a quota in love and only one in every five women ends up with their true love. With this in mind, the expected ending of four women ends in pain and misery. Though as the play progresses, we quickly learn the truth and even realize that the whole story is geared more towards finding his growth than of the female characters, despite having their respective happy endings in the end.
There has been an increasing vitriol being cast upon cis-male writers who write irresponsibly about female characters. We have long seen stories about women who were either romanticized or victimized to great lengths. Considering how the stories developed and how Lucas’ story turned out, it seems like his story is more for himself than for Bessie — a way of expressing the pain he got from loving her. This explains the many taboo stories he made for Bessie that turned into a melodrama and heartbreak. After yearning for love and escaping a place who didn’t believe in love, Erica can’t seem to learn to love her boyfriend. After years of pining and waiting, Irene’s older childhood friend who she has been pining for years can’t seem to remember her. Sandra, who has suffered enough from the incestuous relationship she had with her brother, has to live with the reality that their love child has a birth defect. When Ester is finally happily content with her relationship and situation with her former maid Sarah, Sarah’s husband swears to never die so that they could suffer more. And Bessie? Lucas, the character, leaves her after being severely attacked by her lover Brigs.
There’s a resistance from his own characters with decisions he made for the novel, which produced the most well-written and acted scene of the play. They demand agency over their own stories which also reveal the many facets of womanhood. It’s a meta-twist that is geared towards Lucas’ healing and development. For so long, he can’t admit to himself that he and Bessie could never be together, so he devised a plan where the readers will choose who will get the happy ending. In this way, he doesn’t hold the fate of the character he wrote based on him. This fueled the rage within the characters he had written. Had his characters not demanded a better ending for themselves, he wouldn't be able to confront the fact that Bessie can never be his and that the character Bessie he wrote is far from the real Bessie who has her own flaws and decisions in life he cannot control.
The play is ultimately the confrontation of the male writer and the power of literature. It can create worlds and transport you into them. It can challenge your beliefs and confront the many prejudices we absorb from society. It reveals a character, in this case, Lucas the Writer. The author who’s responsible for these characters to take flight has the most well-developed arc in the play. This might leave a sour taste for some, but with Lucas’ growth comes the development of how he has written a more respectful ending for each character.
After knowing the motivations as to why Lucas wrote the stories he made, it made me realize that an underwhelming performance can really shift the quality of the presentation of the narrative. In the majority of the show, Lucas tells the story to the audience. This is a challenging feat and I commend him for giving his best on narrating, although the frequency of his stuttering over his lines can be a little distracting at times. There is a noticeable lack of conviction in his narration of the very words he wrote and as a writer, you must know by heart the stories that came out from your imagination. While the socially awkward approach he is trying to aim for the characters might be a good enough reason, in the scenes that feature him as Lucas the character and not just a writer, he never really sold the terrified yet angry state of Lucas that led him to leave Bessie at one point.
If you can get past this flaw, what you can find is a well-rounded play all about the many lessons of love: the heartbreaks and the joys, as well the prejudices and dilemmas you’ll encounter in the pursuit of love. The production itself boasts standout performances from the five female leads as well as the side characters. As someone who has not read the original Ricky Lee book and went to this show blind, I am now more eager to read the text and relive the varied and diverse stories of love I’ve seen on stage.
Para Kay B was staged from September 12 to 28, 2025 at the Doreen Blackbox Theater, Arete, Ateneo de Manila University.
