Almanac for a revolution / Nicolas Pichay.

"First prize/English drama."

and how a dead Plaridel, exhumed from a borrowed grave, is finally able to come home. Nicolas Pichay is a translator, poet and lawyer as well as playwright for theater, independent films and television. After finishing at the Philippine High School for the Arts, he took up theater arts at the University of the Philippines under a Lucresia R. Kasilag Sholarship. His poems and plays have won literary awards. Retelling common themes from unexpected points of view, they have also been described as "subterranean, disturbing, vulgar and textural". The poet Virgilio Almario has compared Pichay to a "Quiapo lizard," for his ability to be unobtusively observant of urban society's daily rituals of survival.

of old heroes debating with their own forgotten selves

of the collective consciousness that results from seeing three priests garroted in public

of traitors and their monuments

of youths practice-dancing with danger

past, present and future converge at magical contact points. Marcelo H. del Pilar-poet, lawyer, propagandist-exchanged ilustrado comfort for the sacrificial life of an exile in Spain : living in unheated rooms in the dead of winter

picking up cigarette butts from the street to keep warm. Yet "Plaridel" never lost sight of his mission to instill a sense of solidarity into the emerging Filipino nation. The playwright weaves into his historical plot the lives that run parallel with Plaridel's in a magical non-linear narrative-of parents talking to their unborn children

A magical play of Plaridel in exile Nicolas Pichay's plays-in English and Pilipino-continue to energize Philippine theater. His work is marked by a constant effort to break familiar structures in unexpected places. One of his conceptual obsessions is the idea of time-a fascination that suits Almanac for a Revolution perfectly. Its plot progresses like a musical score : time becomes a spiral