YOU THINK YOU'VE GOT PROBLEMS?

We've been presented a number of women's apartments on theater stages recently. In Request Sa Radyo, both Lea Salonga and Dolly de Leon wander through a tidily kept apartment in New York or New Jersey, cleaning things on the daily. And in Sandbox Collective's Tiny Beautiful Things, Iza Calzado dwells in a less-tidy home that matches her magulo state of mind while crafting responses to strangers who write in to her inherited advice column.

- SCOTT GARCEAU

Those strangers show up in her apartment somewhat as apparitions: people whose voices she can hear, as they raid her refrigerator, make themselves at home on her furniture, and occasionally fold laundry. Mostly they talk about their problems. And Cheryl, who goes by the pen name "Sugar," talks about hers.

Tiny Beautiful Things, under the direction of Jenny Jamora, meets the difficult task of making a stream of spoken letters add up to drama, through lighting, subtly interspersed music, and excellent turns from (on the night we watched) Rody Vera, Brian Sy, and Regina De Vera as the letter writers/readers.

And of course, Calzado, whose performance moves through enough emotional stages that her fellow actors seemed on the verge of tears by the final "coming out" scene where she reveals her identity.