Tolentino smuggled anticolonial dreams past censors by staging the nation as allegorical drama.

Evidence

The play personifies the nation herself as a character, Inangbayan (‘Motherland’), and shows her story across three ages. In ‘Yesterday,’ she lives in freedom and dignity before the colonizers come. In ‘Today,’ she suffers under the chains of foreign masters, her children divided, some collaborating, some resisting. In ‘Tomorrow,’ the play dares to dream: Inangbayan and her children rise, break their chains, and stand free once more. — , A Year of World Stories, 12721

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels masked-political theater elsewhere — e.g., allegorical plays under Soviet or Ottoman censorship.