In Repertory Philippine’s 2009 staging of Portrait of the Artist as Filipino (a play written by National Artist Nick Joaquin), the audience is presented with an assortment of interesting themes; central is the struggle between art and reality.
Set in Intramuros in 1941, protagonists Candida and Paula Marasigan, spinster sisters and loyal apostles of beauty, art, and poetry, together with their father, Don Lorenzo (an aging, but respected painter), are fighting for an old and genteel way of life, but apparently losing in the face of imminent destitution (their benefactors—two well-off older siblings—refuse to continue financing their day-to-day needs and, instead, plan to sell off their dilapidated mansion, apportion its furniture, separate the sisters, and send the old man to be looked after in an institution).