Immersed in Manila in twilight of Marcos rule

There are a number of strong, sharply focused moments in Jessica Hagedorn’s sprawling, diffuse “Dogeaters” at the Magic Theatre, but their collective impact is muted by the chaos of narratives in the production that opened Wednesday, Feb. 10.

Hagedorn’s multiple-plot, landmark 1990 novel, a portrait of Manila in the tumultuous declining years of the Marcos dictatorship, contains so many principal characters that it’s easy to see why even — or, perhaps, especially — its own author would have trouble crafting a dramatically cohesive piece from its large scope.

[...] though the play has had well-received runs elsewhere since its first staging in ’98, its Bay Area premiere, newly revised by Hagedorn, may suffer from being too close to the hearts of its creators.

For the play, she’s eliminated several story lines and principal characters, and diminished others to mere mentions, making their significance invisible to those who don’t know the novel.

[...] with so many seemingly separate plots, from many strata of Philippine society, that tie together in some surprising ways in the novel, she’s kept some characters who remain so thinly developed that their stories seem superfluous.

With the Magic’s theater converted into a semi-cabaret (the first few rows of seats have been removed to make room for cafe tables and chairs), scenic designer Hana Kim’s lively projections — on the corrugated metal walls of the set — immerse the action in everything from lush patchworks of ferns and a beauty pageant to gritty street scenes, political rallies and a disco-ball-lit drag club.

Despite the best efforts of Esperanza Catubig and Melvign Badiola (more appealing as a comically over-the-top hairdresser), their jokes aren’t particularly funny and the material they’ve been given to provide historical background comes off as simplistic and didactic.

An expat visiting from San Francisco, making her an apparent stand-in for the author, she’s an intriguing, smart observer with some nice interchanges with her grandmother (Charisse Loriaux, also impressive as the frustrated sex-object movie star Lolita Luna) and a story begging for more development.

Tagatac is outstanding as drag queen club-owner Perlita, both in his lip-sync performance and as an increasingly central character in a story involving Rafael Jordan’s taut, impressive work as an aspiring DJ and male prostitute and Zulueta as his abusive pimp.