April 2, 2006
Ric Gonzalo: A toast to reticent past & glazed future
By PINK-JEAN FANGON MELEGRITO
Last weekend, my mind is mesmerized imagining a workshop I’m at. My theater skills are getting a little rusty. And time is an ingrate friend-foe, a workshop somewhere in Bengao was taking place while I’m not available. Great.
“Bakit Babae Ang Naghuhugas Ng Pinggan” (Why women wash dishes) is a gender-conscious play concealed somewhere in my subconscious. Someday I’d meet one of its characters. And Rick Gonzalo was the answer. He was the instructor-facilitator of the Bengao workshop.
So I met him for an interview. Our ultra cheery a conversation filled with a snort or laughter every after each sentence. His tale of the hackneyed ups-and-downs of drama and success caught my attention no less.
Recollection of his educational background kicked off our chat. His acting interests started with his elective drama class at the Union Christian College (UCC- High School Department), La Union. From then on (early 1970s), he never let his acting skills fall off or be without.
Early start of harmful vices led him to oftenly changing his schools; from St. Louis College La Union to then Baguio Colleges Foundation (now known as the University of the Cordilleras) to finally going back to his alma mater UCC.
However, he established La Union-based theater organizations while in college: the Union Christian Theater Guild, Dulaang Panday and the Tahanan Outreach Program and Services for streetchildren.
Aftewards, his skirmish journey to Sta. Ana, Manila found him belonging to the Tanghalang Sta. Ana (founded by actor Lu Veloso).
The group gained him a Philippine Educational Theater Association (PETA) scholarship. In 1998, he was one of T. Sta. Ana’s senior trainors. He also became director-facilitator of Asian Social Institute drama modules.
Rick’s movie and theater stints unfortunately plagued him with what actors fear – star complexity.
“Di pa ko sikat, nalaos na ko. Feeling ko kasi noon, ako lang magaling at bida,” he remorsefully admitted.
He later learned that “in theater, everyone is equal, no one is indispensable”.
A renewed Christian Rick re-thought his downcast lifestyle. Then he became Amazing Philippines Theater’s first director. He became part of Gantimpala, directing him to Dulaang Kayumanggi, his current Pasay (Manila)-based theater.
Kayumanggi’s director Grundy Constantino introduced Rick to his current affiliation Concerned Artists of the Philippines (CAP) that participated in the 2004 International Workshop of Performing Artists together with Dap-ayan ti Kultura iti Kordilyera.
Currently, he gives workshops and leadership trainings in Manila and in provinces using his own module, a part of which was published in his writer-friend Alfonso Deza’s (of the famed PLDT commercial ‘Suportahan taka’) book Drama and Beyond: Another Unfinished Treatise (1998).
“Theater is the highest form of discipline. It is unlike film or TV where you can stop shooting if a mistake was made,” Rick quipped as one could trace in his face the indispensable lessons he succumbed and learned to share. #
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