The Curtain Rises Again: Toff De Venecia's Next Act

On the eve of a departure that felt like both an ending and a beginning, I ran into Toff de Venecia. Side Show, which closed at the Black Box Theater at Circuit Makati on Sunday, was his last production before London, his swan song before he leaves to pursue post-graduate studies.

- AA PATAWARAN

On the eve of a departure that felt like both an ending and a beginning, I ran into Toff de Venecia. Side Show, which closed at the Black Box Theater at Circuit Makati on Sunday, was his last production before London, his swan song before he leaves to pursue post-graduate studies. "Whatever I learn in my master's, I'm determined to apply when I come back to Manila, whether in the arts, public service, or another field entirely," he said.

When I first met Toff, I thought of theater not as a stage, not as lights and curtains, but as a kind of restlessness. He has the look of someone who can never quite sit still, though his chill exterior might suggest otherwise. There is always a plan, a project, a possibility. When he speaks, it feels less like a statement and more like an invitation, the way a director coaxes a performance out of his cast.

The name he carries is political. The weight of being a de Venecia—the son of a five-time Speaker of the House, Jose de Venecia Jr., and a former congresswoman, Gina de Venecia—in Pangasinan could have kept him tethered to bureaucracy, the grind of committee work, the scripted lines of Congress. Yet Toff has always been a producer at heart, staging ideas rather than speeches, with a vision that stretched past the proscenium. His district became his sandbox, and from it emerged an experiment that enriched the landscape of Philippine theater.

In 2014, a couple of years before the curtain rose on his political career, Toff founded The Sandbox Collective out of a desire to create work that mattered. He spoke of it as a platform for contemporary, cutting-edge productions, but what struck me most was the sheer audacity of its beginning. At a time when commercial theater in Manila was playing it safe with familiar blockbusters, he championed productions that felt like a brave insurgency, each story a provocation. I remember sitting in its inaugural production of