MANILA, Philippines ? As a follo-up to your news item on the rehabilitation of the Metropolitan Theater, I suggest that the Met be renamed the Metropolitan Zarzuela Theater and Museum. This would make the Met more unique and meaningful because it would honor a theater genre which was used by our forefathers in their struggle for independence?the only theater in the long history of dramatic art that used theater so cleverly and strategically in the fight for freedom of Asia?s first republic.

The first floor of the theater could be lined with glass cases that would exhibit manuscripts and musical sheets, books, letters, costumes, props, sets, etc. I am sure families keeping these items across the land would be only too happy to donate them (permanently or periodically) for the exhibit.

Initially, I can think of four persons who could help in this project: Isagani Cruz, Jaime Laya and Nicanor Tiongson?all three authored books on Philippine theater?and Alexander Cortez, who successfully headed the Zarzuela Festival last February at the University of the Philippines-Diliman.

I must mention that my own research on the zarzuela of Bulacan, published by the Zarzuela Foundation as ?The Seditious Tagalog Playwrights: Early American Occupation,? was followed by the researches of the following professors: Filonila M. Tupas on Iloko drama; Alejandro J. Casambre on Pangasinan drama; Marcela C. Zamora on Tagalog drama; Maria Lilia F. Realubit on Bikol drama; Consuelo Damaso on Hiligaynon drama; and Wilhelmina Q. Ramas on Sugbuanon drama. They were published as ?Twelve Plays in Six Philippine Languages? by the NSTA UPS Integrated Research Program of UP. These researches on the Philippine zarzuela and many other collections should be part of the exhibit. I am sure that there are many more people who would like to see the zarzuela thus honored.

My mother, Paz Mercado Lirag-Lapeña, told me of her experiences with the zarzuela; that when she was six or seven years old, she used to wait in front of the Opera theater for couples unaccompanied by children so she could hold on lightly to the saya (skirt) of the woman and therefore enter the theater and watch performances for free. This love for theater is what I inherited from her and therefore in her honor, I wish to donate the manuscript and a good copy of my out-of-print book, ?Seditious Tagalog Playwrights.? I also wish to donate notes and photocopies of newspapers from the files of the United States Library of Congress and the US National Archives in Washington, DC, as well as several pieces of old embroidered ternos and voluminous sayas (long skirts) and nagwas (petticoats) which my mother had left behind in a box.

I hope my suggestion will be taken seriously so that our school children could be properly educated about a very important phase of our theater history and about theatrical events unique only to the Philippines. And as the Japanese and tourists go to the Noh Theatres and Kabuki theaters of Japan, Filipinos and tourists would go to the Metropolitan Zarzuela Theater and Museum in order to watch zarzuela and see the exhibits of zarzuela items and of, I hope, a surviving zarzuela telon or set.

For the money and labor still to be spent, we may as well work for a meaningful Metropolitan Theater?set apart from all existing theaters in the country and the whole world!

The contributor is a playwright and professor emeritus of UP.