Amiel Leonardia’s back in town

Amiel Leonardia’s back in town

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Who he? Just the guy who taught us what an enormous force of art, of culture, of nature we daresay! theater is.

And taught not just us – he taught the whole Silliman community and town of Dumaguete, but particularly the former.

Amiel was head of the Speech & Theater Department of SU second half of the 1960s, and them were the years when it came to theater, when Silliman University produced plays that a few – the happy few – knew just how good.

We were a graduate student in English then, and we must say right here and now – because come to think of it, we’ve never said this before – those plays were part of our education, sentimental or otherwise.

Was it in the summer of 1967 or in June and July as classes began? We’re reminiscing the time we first saw a play that Amiel produced and directed, Rashomon. Later we would realize that we’d seen Rashomon before – as a movie in its English, and Hollywood, adaptation. The movie had two of our favorite male film stars in it, Paul Newman and Laurence Harvey; Newman playing the Mexican bandit, and Harvey the American army officer whose wife the bandit rapes before the eyes of the husband who is tied to a tree.

Many years later, we saw the original Japanese version as directed by the great Akira Kurosawa with the bandit played by Japanese film icon Toshiro Mifune. No doubt the original film was superior, though your eyes kept being stolen by the English subtitles.

But the theater Rashomon was something else. And we were seeing a production that had an absolute amateur actress playing a lead role (the young, 16-year-old Rowena Tiempo – albeit no ordinary 16-year-old, to be sure).

Two exceptionally good actors though, Arturo Dionson and the late Lupre Autajay, were in the cast playing major roles and, boy, if what they say of movies is true – that movies are the art form of our time – we’d say, yes, but theater is the art form of all time.

That first semester (schoolyear 1967-1968) saw Amiel’s next production which happened to be Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (where he played a principal role as a last minute replacement – about a week to go before performance when he fired the actor), one of the landmark plays in what’s known to students of drama as the ‘theater of the absurd’.

We were a semester or two late in coming to Silliman. The previous year, Amiel had done another theater of the absurd, Six Characters in Search of an Author by Luigi Pirandello. And if these weren’t enough, Eugene Ionesco’s The Chairs, though that came years later in the 70s, and we are unsure if it was Amiel still who directed it.

Those were world plays! For good measure, he did The Trojan Women by Euripides of Classical Greece, and Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare of Elizabethan England.

Blitz forward to 20th-century stellar plays like Arthur Miller’s All My Sons, and Edward Albee’s Zoo Story.

The marvel of it is that these plays, with those swordfight scenes in two of them, were performed at the Woodward Little Theater, and jeez was the word ‘little’ ironic.

We can remember only one light, little, thing he did: Arsenic and Old Lace. We were in it!

Why were we in it? It was only our second time to act on stage, and we guess, the answer to our question is that Amiel and us were great fans of the legendary American actor James Dean. Go figure.

Silliman, Dumaguete lost Amiel to UP Diliman right after Martial Law in 1972. To quote from one of the tramps in Waiting for Godot: “Such is life!”

But since we also wandered in the big city in the second half of the Seventies, we very occasionally saw him at the UP campus. For a long, long while, we were rather sad that the theater people in whose circle he moved were apparently unaware of him as director and actor. He seemed to us a kind of exile, yet, content to remain classroom professor and set designer for years. And it didn’t look like that subdued status would change.

Think again. All of a sudden, we heard that Tony Mabesa cast him to play the lead role in Elsie Martinez Coscolluela’s masterwork: In my Father’s House. (The thing seemed serendipitous. The playwright was in Silliman exactly the same time as Amiel. In fact, you can say the same space, too, mainly Hibbard Hall and Silliman Cooperative, just back and forth for coffee).

Amiel’s acting debut in Manila? We would say – OK, I would say – the outcome was inevitable. In the late great Nick Joaquin’s favorite phrase: he bowled them over, the viewers, the critics, the circle of friends who drank coffee with him on the second floor of the UP Faculty Center. “He knows all the tricks!” reportedly commented film and theater director Behn Cervantes. “It wasn’t just tricks,” was poet and columnist Krip Yuson’s reaction. “Where has this guy been hiding?” went another quip.

Well, he was with us in Silliman for a bit of a time, and we knew decades ahead that indeed, this guy has the habit, somewhat inborn, of hiding behind a most unassuming, almost receding exterior.

In my Father’s House will be performed at Luce on July 19 and July 20. Veteran theater actress Dessa Quesada-Palm of Manila, and Dumaguete’s Jose Riodil Montebon play the principal roles.

Amiel Leonardia is back in town directing it.
 
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