Lost in the city with Herbert Go

In any given city, a net-work of telephone wires hum with conversation from one point of the metropolis to another, and on one such night the Chinese-Filipino theater actor Herbert Go is talking with a reporter about current life and times in Philippine theater.

"It was Rashomon, directed by Tony Mabesa," Go now says, when asked what particular play made an impression and got him hooked for good on Philippine theater.

The play, adopted from a short story by Akutagawa, was staged at the Leon Ma. Guerrero (AS) Theater at UP Diliman during Go’s undergraduate years in the late ’80s in the sprawling Quezon City campus.

Eventually, Go would get to read the short story and, later, view the film version of the Japanese master Akira Kurosawa.

The thirty-something actor/teacher/director is one of those behind the renegade Dulaang Talyer theater group, which stages plays almost as if it were guerrilla warfare.

"We need to professionalize the industry," Go says, stressing that he’d like to be able to master the practical side of the art, theater management.

This is perhaps where his Tsinoy side comes through, though that too may be a racial stereotype: the guy says he doesn’t even know his way around Ongpin Street.

The need to professionalize local theater became only too obvious to Go when he went through a "traumatic experience" in the direction of the Filipino adaptation of Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra in 1998.

He had to also serve as counselor to his cast, and host and waiter too since most of the rehearsals of the Dulaang Talyer production were held at the Go residence in Talayan, Quezon City.

Another DT production was Bilog, first staged in 1995 with a live band, Poppyfield, featuring compositions that were specially commissioned for the play as well as some previously recorded songs by the band Chain Gang, whose vocalist Naomi Villa joined the cast in a 2000 version.

"It’s a play about love, the creation myth," says Go, explaining that playwright Nic Pichay took the idea from the practice of Zen Buddhist monks who try to draw the perfect circle in the sand.

Like love, just when you thought the perfect circle has been drawn, you start all over again, the Tsinoy actor says.

The 2000 version, though, had to dispense with the live band due to logistics.

Go’s work has taken him to France where productions of Orosman and Zafira and Kalantiao were staged courtesy of a pair of French directors in the early ’90s.

Though the lines were in Tagalog, there were French subtitles flashed on a screen beside the stage. It was a pity, though, because the audience were few.

Go laughingly recalls one local production at the CCP when subtitles were also used in a Kabuki play, but where the projectionist was completely off cue, resulting in a mis-synchronization worse than haphazard lip-synch/dubbing in imported telenovelas.

"Bad trip," he says of that particular theater experience.

These days he is excited about his teaching at the Philippine High School for the Arts in Makiling.

He is dumbfounded at first when asked about his "approach to teaching."

"I guess you could say my approach is more experiential than theoretical," says Go, who goes to Makiling regularly to check on his wards’ work.

"They’re intelligent, they’ve been trained to analyze scripts, but I have to see what they are doing," the hands-on teacher says.

Among the plays they’ve done in school are those by Brecht, Chekhov, Shakespeare, Giraudoux, Pirandello, Noriega, Miller, Ionesco, Beckett, Wilder, and samples of the wild, wild Peking Opera.

"Picking Opera?"

"No, Peking, as Beijing Opera."

Peking Opera is where the actors’ faces are painted white but is a lot less subdued than Noh, he says; on the contrary, dialogue can verge on histrionics.

As much as possible, he advises his students not to act in a play they’re directing, unless it is a cameo, in which case the student can get a feel of bilocation.

He himself has experienced acting in the very play he directed, which he said was "extremely difficult."

"In rare instances it works, like with (the late Rolando) Tinio, who anyway was a real genius," Go says.

But most of the time, even if the actor-director is very talented, one aspect of the work suffers; "nahihilawan ako."

Of Chinese-Filipino authors, Go would like to review the work of Charlson Ong to see which of his stories are adaptable to the stage.

There are other Tsinoy writers’ works which have been staged, among which are the expatriate Paul Stephen Lim’s Mother Tongue (by Actor’s Actors) as well as Hans Ong’s Middle Finger–as in "up yours," he says.

Go is familiar too with the poetry of Fran Ng, which he’s read somewhere.

He laments that Tsinoys in theater are still largely depicted in stereotypes, such that when he played the role of Atek in the stage adaptation of Edgardo Reyes’ Maynila, sa Kuko ng Liwanag, he insisted that he do a revisionist, more human version of the kontrabida.

"I wanted to portray him as to be driven by love for Ligaya, which is the reason for his jealousy," he says. It was during the reading that he realized that through mere voice intonation he could change a character’s appeal (or lack of it) to the audience.

And therein lies the power of the actor, says Go, who has played roles ranging from a Shakespearean anti-hero to a saleslady in a Ballet Philippines production.

On the possibility of branching out to film, having been mesmerized by Ben Kingsley’s portrayal of Gandhi, Go says "it’s not that easy."

Theater has always been an actor’s medium, while film is basically the handiwork of the director and editor.

And where does the writer come in in all this?

"In the end, the script is what’s left, it is what is studied ... the view of the play and the playwright’s milieu," Go says. "Performance itself is intangible."

After a decade in theater, Go remains excited about doing Chekhov. "His plays are very psychological. A lot of the key action occurs backstage, and what unfolds before you is the characters’ reaction to what transpired that was not seen by the audience."

It doesn’t matter too that the actor continues to commute via public transport in the noble and ever loyal Metro Manila, as well as regular forays to Laguna.

It was while sitting across someone in a jeepney that he recognized a character that he essayed just months before in a play.

"He was playing a brick game. And I thought, that’s the character I played, but it was too late," Go says, amused at the little trick of delayed happenstance, much like a subtitle gone awry in the city of gestures and rapid mime.