The Moro-Moro, and the Fireworks.
Here has been hastily erected a large booth, around which hundreds of natives are standing in an attitude of profound interest. A moro-moro play is going on. This is a sort of Philippine miracle-play, in which kings and queens and soldiers, and various persons with Biblical names, contend together. There is rivalry, ruin, and despair; there is death, murder, and awful retribution. It is a tumultuous tragedy; in which, too, are some subtle and refined elements, and a kind of gross humor, represented by the stage-fool and by the lads that take the female parts. There is, however, no coarseness; not a suggestion of it.
Love and religious persuasion and devotion mark the greatest number of moro-moro performances, and while some of the plays are fairly good,—not judging from too lofty a standpoint,—yet, on the other hand, it is indeed amusing to note how little in this line, how thin a texture, pleases the people, bombast and fury, honeyed accents and unnecessary vicarious suffering, false and flagrant violations of dramatic art—all alike are viewed with breathless interest, and applauded, or stoically witnessed as the occasion demands. The entire play is given in the Tagal language.
A Scene from the Moro-Moro Play.
The native spectators, indeed, enter into the action of the play with, as it were, a grim earnest; as if all their mental faculties were judging complex emotions and nice situations.
Nothing, indeed, in the native character is more remarkable than its unvarying decorum. Here the happy crowd has been standing for three hours, agape with delight, drinking in the rude splendors of tinsel potentates.
Here, too, they would be willing to stand for several hours more; but it is nearly midnight, and a sudden illumination on the other side of the square announces that the time for departure is almost at hand. It is seen that the villagers have constructed a miniature castle, now ablaze with fire-works. Various designs are traced by the spreading glow, and scores of rockets shoot into the sky, dropping a shower of brilliant stars. Ever and anon, at some unusual display, a murmur of applause rises from the admiring throng. Entranced, they stay until the last rocket has been drowned in the vast ocean of Night. Then all leave as silently as they came, and the village square is soon deserted; while the lamps and lanterns are allowed to burn till their glow is quenched in the brightness of the morrow’s sun.
