One of the best people to discuss this matter is sociology professor and Tanghalang Ateneo artistic director Ricardo Abad. I caught up with him in between rehearsals for his play Don Juan: Ang Babaero ng Sevilla, the centerpiece of Tanghalang Ateneo’s 25th theater season, and interviewed him over merienda cena at a Katipunan resto. Since he wanted something light, we both had fiesta taco salads. That’s how most theater people eat: Light and unpretentious.
Ricky Abad started out in Tanghalang Ateneo as an actor in Anghel sa Impyerno in 1981, directed by Jesuit Rene Javellana, the current director of the fine arts program at the Ateneo. When Batch Saludo (now presidential spokesperson) went to Hong Kong to work for the now defunct Asiaweek, he asked Ricky, who was both sociology professor and Teatro Pilipino actor, to take the cudgels of the moderatorship. He, however, saw himself more as an intellectual actor with inimitable comic touch. Among his memorable appearances were in plays such as Creon in Antigone and Samuel Becket’s Waiting for Godot. He then took the job reluctantly, thinking he would have a more administrative role.
At the beginning of his directing career, he would not dare do anything Rolando did not do yet. He would trace what Rolando Tinio did. But though he has developed his own directorial style, Ricky’s theater still bears the mark of Tinio, who made available the western classics of the theater for a wider Filipino audience. Ricky acted during the heyday of Teatro Pilipino, and also saw how Tinio fiercely fought for a thinking theater. When he began directing himself, Abad put up plays that provoked reflection, especially on the way society was running. Aside from western classics, he staged Filipino plays, like Paul Dumol’s Felipe de las Casas at the Cultural Center of the Philippines. It was after watching the gala performance of that play in 1987 that Tinio and Ella Luansing gave Ricky their blessing. Ella said that he managed to make the students act from the heart. He knew that he had learned to view plays no longer as an actor but as a director.
Having no formal training in theater, Ricky had to get pointers from wherever he could. He is the quintessential theater artist who has the uncanny knack for reading plays, and tries to learn from all the directors and plays he watches. From Anton Juan’s visceral productions, he learned to balance the cerebrality Tinio ingrained in him. From Nonon Padilla, he understood that the director could use whimsy and the surreal to create dramatic effect. His unwitting teacher in direction, however, was Badong Bernal, who designed Hamlet for him. In a visit to Bernal’s Kiukok-filled house near Nepa Q-Mart, Ricky seemed like a stuttering student when Badong asked him for his concept for the play. He thought that "directing was ganun-ganon lang. Hindi pala, kasi you had a thousand and one things to attend to. I learned later through hands-on experience that direction has a management and marketing side, as well as the mentoring side, when you have to perform to your actors, then there is the nanny side, when you have nurture them."
Ricky Abad is a Filipino truly shaped by the Manila theater scene. "It is from these people that I got my post doc in directing."
After his many successful productions of Shakespearean and Spanish classical plays, he still sits through a play like a child watching Peter Pan for the first time.
Right now, however, Ricky Abad is one of our leading directors, especially of the classical theater, which he has contextualized in our culture without always making the actors wear baro’t saya. He is known for being able to squeeze out from beginners all that they have got. He has successfully balanced the Tinio thinking theater with his own brand of viscerality and humor. It is said that when S. V. Epistola found out that Anton Juan missed Abad’s Lysistrata (1994) he said, "Now, I can safely say you’re deprived." Although not intentionally wanting to be an Ateneo director, his productions convey vivacity and criticalness. But even when I acted for him in one of his earliest plays way back in 1985, I knew that he knew the essential aspect of the theater – namely, magic. Before the premiere night of my first directorial essay in 1995, he told me not to worry because there was always something magical that happened on the opening night of a TA performance. I believed and realized that this magic was beyond one’s control and was a gift of, what Ricky calls, the gods of the theater themselves.
Besides the nature of his theater, I was also very interested in how he reconciled being a director to his being a sociologist. He recounted the time when he had to convince a colegiala to do a kissing scene in Romeo and Juliet. Not certain that the Ateneo School of Arts and Sciences was ready for that, he had a serious talk with the actress to make sure that her parents, as well as the student audience in general, would not be scandalized by the scene. This incident illustrates how as a director he tries to make society change and not be complacent. Complacency, after all, is the seedbed of corruption.
Still on the relation of politics and theater, I asked him what I once asked Rolando Tinio and Zeneida Amador after the EDSA revolution: "Can the theater be democratic?"
Unhesitatingly he said, "No. There cannot be too many voices in the rehearsal hall." He, however, added that the autocracy should be tempered by democracy: "What you need are fair leaders. And a fair leader is someone who has vision, who knows where he is going. But when he wishes to be autocratic he must learn to persuade, such that when what he wants is too radical for the actor, he manages to bring him or her to a level that is comfortable for both of them. So what comes out is mutual consensus. It comes from within."
After two hours, Katipunan throbbed with the Saturday-night crowd. We then wrapped our sumptuous theater conversation. On the way home to Makati, I figured that Ricky embodies the theater artist who constantly thinks about society itself. He wants to mirror it, yet he also wants to teach and correct it. "For the majority is not always right. As Ibsen says in Enemy of the People, ‘the truth is in the minority.’" For this reason, it does not surprise me that he is directing Tirso de Molina’s Don Juan: Ang Babaero ng Sevilla: "I treated the script as a secular morality play. A kind of meditation on punishment, especially the society punishing the womanizer."
In his treatment of this play, he questions the whole idea behind punishment itself and how a mania for it might be detrimental to society.
As an artist, Ricky Abad had to push the envelop a little bit closer to the edge as he tried to change the mores of his milieu, not necessarily by lifting banners or by shouting slogans or being ostensively pro-poor. Instead he does it through the theater often considered elitist and classicist. Through him, Philippine theater has become a site for reflection, education, and solidarity. From his impressive years of being actor, director, and moderator of Tanghalang Ateneo one wonders if we should stop someone from running as president simply because he was a performing artist. But then again it might be better if he had a PhD in sociology.