Imagine yourself as a doctor: A wounded patient arrives at your hospital seeking treatment. Then, you learn he is one of the rebels at the center of a just-born siege. Your job vows to help and cure but when doing so puts your entire hospital at risk, what is the right thing to do?
Playwright Niel Arkhe “Nik” Azcuna, also a professor in MSU-IIT’s Department of History, immersed himself in research and collected narratives from survivors and witnesses of the Marawi Siege in 2017. Eight years later, he found himself still looking at the wreckage the siege left behind.
“A filmmaker I know showed me his film about the internally displaced from Ground Zero, and until now, wala pa jud sila kauli,” he said.
“It’s sad. Gikalimtan na sila, mag 10 years na next year. What they have there are only temporary shelters.” The reality he saw reminded him of those narratives he gathered.
These narratives are marked by loss, anxiety, and most of all, confusion. The general confusion of not knowing what was happening, what to do, or how to move forward as everything around them fell apart.
While many have documented the siege, Azcuna felt that few artistic works had truly grappled with it. He did not want the people who look back into this tragedy to have the same confusion. Through Balos, a fictional one-act play selected along with 11 other plays for the 2026 Virgin Labfest, the tragedy is brought back to life and explores the conflict beyond what is often seen on the surface.
The Story, the Storyteller
Rather than recreating the military operations or political conflict of the siege, Azcuna deliberately shifted the attention of the play elsewhere.
“I’m looking into the war on a micro-level scale, the frontliners and normal people, sila moy naa sa atubangan making impossible decisions,” he shared.
The opening dilemma of this article is actually how Balos begins.
Four medical workers find themselves trapped in an impossible situation after wounded rebels seek treatment inside their hospital. Bound by their oath to save lives yet aware that helping the rebels could put everyone in the hospital at risk, they are forced to choose between duty and self-preservation but what they did is a logical gamble of both: smuggling them out in an ambulance.
The following day, the siege erupts.
More devastatingly, the rebels turn out to be teenagers who are former students of one of the doctors. They once shared his ideals and hope for evangelization but while the doctor eventually left, his students remained behind and were drawn into rebellion. Now in the present, he feels guilty and responsible so he wanted to help them change. On the other hand, another doctor’s father was killed by terrorists so the idea of helping terrorists was revolting and the act of calling the police on them was the better idea.
The playwright’s intention of this play was not to make the audience learn to sympathize with terrorists. He wanted to show how much tension and pressure these medical workers face when making important decisions in times of crisis.
“So ako pangutana sa play, is sakto ba or dili? Mag-leave siya ug open-ended question,” he states. Azcuna gave justice to each of the perspectives portrayed in his play. He did not pick a side.
The Multiplicity of a Narrative
Traditionally, stories of war reduce people into two opposing sides: heroes and enemies, good and evil, us and them. The playwright wanted to challenge that notion by putting the characters in situations where certainty becomes impossible.
“There is no right or wrong, wars shouldn’t happen,” he emphasizes.
In Bisaya, the word balos translates to “revenge” or “return”, as in asking “Unsa may ikabalos nimo sa ako?” (What can you give me in return?) or “Makabalos lang jud ko” (I’ll get my revenge).
Azcuna highlights the different ways people can interpret this word. The endless cycle of war is rooted in this concept of Balos: one attacks, the other retaliates. In the play, one doctor believes that doing good can reverse the cycle, while another doctor is consumed by the need to balos after his father dies fighting these terrorists.
During our chat, Azcuna shared that before writing, he would think to himself, “kani dapat makuha nila.” But this play gave him an idea that sometimes the problems in society have no resolution. He really wanted to resolve the conflict in his play but realized along the way “What if ibilin nalang nako na open-ended?” And that realization is what strengthened his play’s essence of open-endedness.
Moreover, one important thing Azcuna learned throughout his journey as a playwright is the value of trust. To trust your audience. Some may understand the message you hope to convey, while others may take away something entirely different. Once a play is shared, he believes it no longer belongs solely to its writer.
“When I share my play to the world, I don't own the interpretation anymore,” he said. Rather than telling audiences what to believe, Azcuna hopes they wrestle with their own questions long after leaving the theater.
Perhaps that trust comes from how he writes and creates his characters. “I find people na pwede nako ma-depict sa akong character. I take note of people's mannerisms, what they like and such,” he explained. “I pick up and characterize people so I can put it into my characters. It’s also my way of opening up my sensibilities to others and humanity at large.”
By drawing them from real people, Azcuna trusts the audience to make sense of them through their own experiences. In fact, the portrayal of the young insurgents in the play was inspired by the experiences of one of his former students, a story that challenged his own moral beliefs and reshaped the way he saw the conflict.
As a matter of course, before a play reaches its audience, it first passes through the hands of directors, actors, designers, and the rest of the production team. For Azcuna, that process also demands trust.
Bringing a Mindanao-centered story written in Bisaya and English to Manila meant working with collaborators who knew little about the Marawi conflict. Although the cast were born in Mindanao, most had spent their lives in Manila. As the person most familiar with the history and context behind the play, he found himself explaining its cultural and historical nuances to the rest of the team.
In turn, the others brought their own insights and together, those discussions ended up being just as valuable as the writing itself. In helping others understand his story, Azcuna discovered underlying meanings within his own work that he had not even noticed before.
That may simply be the nature of stories. They begin with one person but can gather new meanings through people who encounter them.
If there is one philosophy that runs through Azcuna's creative process, it is that every story starts with people. The people he meets, the experiences he hears, and the lives he observes eventually find their way to the stage. That is how Balos came to be.
Inspired by the narratives he encountered in the aftermath of the Marawi Siege, he transformed those realities into a story that explores the moral complexities of war, where easy solutions and clear answers seldom exist.
And once a story is shared, it no longer belongs to its playwright alone, but to every person who finds meaning in it.
Written by Bea Khryss Bongado
Layout by Kelsey Faith Bongcawel
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