With a decades-long commitment to telling Filipino stories, the Philippine Educational Theater Association (PETA) is once again redefining the power of People’s Theater. This April, PETA’s Control + Shift: Changing Narratives returns to the PETA Studio Theater from April 10 to 19, 2026. Featuring a “StudioLab” of fresh stories and restaged productions, the showcase invites audiences to reclaim the Filipino narrative.
Since its successful 2024 debut, followed by a month-long festival in 2025, Control + Shift: Changing Narratives has been pushing the boundaries of what theater can be. Through a unique collaboration between PETA artists, students, and community partners, this year’s StudioLab continues to tackle the tough questions of our time. It’s a creative space designed for crafting stories that confront the present, hold space for healing, and envision more humane and democratic futures.
This year, Control + Shift: Changing Narratives StudioLab presents two new works, a product of the PETA Artist-Teacher Training, alongside two returning pieces from last year’s festival, including one developed with a theater group from a community partner. The lineup includes:
Set A: When Power Falls into our Hands
In a classroom and a workplace, people discover how easily violence, corruption, and silence can become normalized. But when power falls into our hands, we also face a choice: to comply with the system or to interrupt it.
CLEANERS
Playwright: Jhudiel Clare Sosa
Director: Julio Garcia
A group of senior high students discovers that their graduation depends not just on cleaning classrooms but on how far they’re willing to go when violence, power, and truth land in their hands.
MONIT-OH! MONIT-AH! (Restaging)
Playwright: Herlyn Alegre
Director: Norbs Portales
A forum theatre piece that follows Jaylord, a rookie waiter hoping to win his boss’s favor through a Christmas monito-monita gift, only to uncover how seemingly harmless acts can feed into the larger, corrupt palakasan system—until one brave decision challenges the cycle.
Set B: When Care Becomes Survival
In war-torn landscapes and communities living at the edge of disaster, care becomes something embodied… shared through faith, ritual, play, and collective endurance.
Tanghalang Bagong Sibol’s AT NAGKATAWANG-TAO ANG VERBO (Restaging)
Playwright: Mikaela Regis
Director: Anthony Cruz
In a small urban fishing community along Ilog Tullahan, religious icons and biblical imagery come alive—not as distant saints, but as reflections of the people themselves—revealing how faith becomes flesh in the daily struggle for dignity, livelihood, and hope.
BAGA NG GUMUGUHONG LANGIT
Playwright: Anj Heruela
Director: Ian Segarra
Amid the chaos of war, orphaned children fight to survive in a world that has forgotten them, begging for care from communities pushed to the fragile edges of survival.
BE PART OF THE SHIFT! Tickets are now available via Ticket2Me or bit.ly/CS2026Tickets. Rates are at Php 700 per set. For more updates, follow @petatheater on social media.
