When Ricardo (Ricky) Abad was nine years old, his father took him to the Ateneo Padre Faura Auditorium to watch “Cyrano de Bergerac,” that favorite play of many Filipino directors. He was immediately hooked on theater.
From grade school to college to well beyond graduation and, ah, middle age, this professor of sociology has been acting in and directing a slew of plays, classic as well as modern, English and Tagalog.
Without meaning to, he says, he has become part of the grand theater tradition of the Ateneo de Manila. Among those he has worked with, and learned from, are such stalwarts in theater as Onofre Pagsanghan, the late Fr. James Reuter, the late National Artists Rolando Tinio and Salvador Bernal, Nonon Padilla and Anton Juan.
“I stand now on the shoulders of theatrical giants,” says Abad.
He still enjoys directing more than acting, and is celebrating 30 years of directing for Tanghalang Ateneo.
When Abad graduated from college, Tinio offered him a scholarship at his theater program at the Ateneo, but Abad opted instead for a Fulbright scholarship in sociology at the Fordham University in the US.
“There are moments when I regret having done so,” he admits. But he made it up with Tinio upon his return by joining Teatro Pilipino and acting in nine plays before Tinio’s company closed shop in 1991.
Two strong desires
So what led him to the stage?
As he recounts it, it’s “part biography, part history, and at the core of it all, now that I think about it, lies two strong desires: one is to give others, students mostly, alternative and still meaningful visions of themselves and the social world; and two, to reach out to other cultural traditions that will energize the theater that I seek to do.”
He adds: “These desires have led me to venture into the traditions of the sarsuwela and komedya and plunge into intercultural theater for nearly two decades now.”
Recent triumph
Abad’s most recent triumph was the dazzling “Sintang Dalisay,” (2011-2012), a Muslim dance-drama takeoff on Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet,” which has been performed 55 times so far, including two international performances.
“It was also my final collaboration with Badong Bernal before he left us for the theater in the sky,” he says.
This director also plans to do more collaborative work with Filipino theater artists who are not based at the Ateneo, and with other Asian artists. In fact, he has just returned from a theater festival in Vietnam.
Abad goes for actors and actresses “who show up, do the work, enhance the play, learn quickly, get along with the crew, make fellow actors look good, try out various readings in rehearsals and show no vanity. They also move me when they perform. So I cast them often.”
He does not want to mention names, however, because he’s bound to miss a few.
Building trust
Students remain the core of Abad’s theater career. And he advises his colleagues: “Know the students well. Talk to them, join them in selected activities, know what they like and don’t like, celebrate their successes and give them hope when they are down. All these have value unto themselves, but they also build trust in the director-actor relationship. They also help the director push the appropriate buttons when exploring and doing the text.”
Students should be given a larger purpose of being in the theater, and not just for personal glory and the glory of the school or theater company, he says.
“Theater is not just an art; it is a weapon of change. And the better the students become, the more effective they will be in liberating people (including themselves) from oppressive systems, intellectual rigidity and moral backwardness.”