Anak ng PETA

Fourteen years after making it to the cover of this magazine along with other young men and women of verse and prose (at the time), Rene Villanueva can only vaguely remember what he said during that interview, and so is unsure whether the things he said then still hold true today.

A whole lifetime can pass by you in 14 years, and a couple of events in Rene’s own life during that period of time stand out: his being in the first batch to make it to the Palanca Hall of Fame (with at least five first place awards in the annual contest through the years), and his near-death experience in 2000 during a holdup/mugging in Quezon City that landed him in hospital, the same year he had a stroke and a triple bypass operation.

"I guess that was my lucky year," he says now, recalling also how about a week or two after the mugging, he almost got hit by a falling coconut.

The Philippine Educational Theater Association (PETA), of which theater block Rene is very much active, is paying homage to him by staging three of his plays during three weekends this February at Rajah Sulayman Theater in Fort Santiago.

He was unable to make it to the pictorial at Fort Santiago one late afternoon, preferring to divide his time between his home in Antipolo and teaching loads at the University of the Philippines in Diliman and Ateneo de Manila in Loyola Heights.

"Matanda na ako para diyan," he says, indicating he is too old to be interfering in what is basically a director’s duty such as casting, in his plays The Bomb (directed by Soxy Topacio), Walang Iwanan (Melvin Lee) and Watawat (Raffy Tejada).

A couple of the plays, though, have been staged by the PETA theater block, although this is the first time the three plays will be presented in a commercial run.

Theater could well be the lifeblood of Villanueva, and Saturday mornings find him in a classroom in UP Diliman, conducting a playwriting class to graduate students of the creative writing program.

On a particular morning the lecture deals with the pride of a writer, echoing perhaps Franz Arcellana’s Pride of Fiction and U2’s Pride (In the Name of Love).

It is on that pride, Rene tells his class of five, where a writer’s sense of salvation lies.

"If you don’t have that voice, then create that voice," he says, to emphasize that writers must make it feasible for themselves to be able to write.

He frowns no end on the concept that a writer must wait for the necessary inspiration, and neither does the idea of spontaneous or automatic writing hold water for him.

No fan of the subconscious, Villanueva says that all good writing must have a preconceived design because a writer must know where he or she is going.

To the young ones Rene, who has authored at least 50 plays and a slew of children’s books as well as some screenplays, imparts how the play consists of different characters outside of the author.

This being the case, "dapat iba-iba ang tono, ang speech patterns." After class he affirms what has long been suspected to be the most important trait of a good playwright: one must have a good ear, one must know how to listen for the varied nuances of language.

Of course through the play’s fleshing out the writer is at the very center, and at its conceptualization he or she must be open to everything, yet at the same time remain careful not to be drowned in the details, where after all the devil may be hiding.

The creative impulse should always be on the writer’s side, Rene says, if not within. "If you have a deadline, you should deliver the goods unless you’re dead or dying."

It’s a motto that Rene continues to live by, and which explains why he was in a writing frenzy for the most part of last year because he thought he would not last 2002.

Aside from his plays and playwriting classes, Villanueva is also well known as being among the pioneers of Batibot, the now defunct Filipino children’s program, and author of children’s books, like Unang Baboy sa Langit and the National Book Award-winning Ang Mahiwagang Buhok ni Lola.

A collection of essays that reads like an autobiography, Personal, was published by Anvil in 2000 and also won an award from the Manila Critics Circle.

One of the essays contained in the book reminisces about his late father and the meriendas they used to take together in a restaurant which has long since shut down.

The eatery was near the Quezon City Hall, where father and son bonded over swigs of Choco-vim, whose bottle is a veritable period piece.

Another essay deals with the forbidden pleasures of bts or bedtime story books bought clandestinely in the alleys of Sta. Cruz and Quiapo.

"Hindi na alam ng mga kabataan ngayon ang bts, alam nila triple-X," he says, referring to simple porn that can also be a rite of passage.

The art of telling a story, and to just bts, is basic as far as Rene is concerned, and he laments how many entries in an independent film and video competition lack this facility.

"They may have all the technology at their disposal, but without a well-told story, wala rin, eh," he says.

A daughter of his accepted the book award that year, since he was in Malaysia at the time. "Duktor na yon," he says, adding that at 48, he is already a lolo.

And what of the original cast of Batibot? Ate Sienna, he tells us, is now a terror at the campus of University of Santo Tomas on España; Kuya Bodjie is also teaching; Ate Joji appears in TV commercials, while Mokyo has intermittently appeared in stage plays and as actor in the films of independent filmmaker Jon Red.

"Gusto nilang mag-reunion ang Batibot, pero masyado pang maaga. Siguro after five years," Rene says of the cast and crew of the children’s show that folded up in 2000.

As for Kiko Matsing and Pong Pagong and Koko Kwikwak, they’re gathering dust in a bodega somewhere, he says.

But back to the Saturday class, Rene is instructing his students to do an exercise involving a) selecting a character and giving him an assigned class background, age, general disposition and description; b) an objective in the development in the action or progress of a play, specifically relating to the character’s pursuit of happiness; c) machinations of fate or in which the playwright can play God and step in deus ex machina style, and d) obstacles galore ranging from the psychological to the physical and sociological.

He assigns them for next meeting to come up with three separate stories based on a single character/action statement, playing around with the chronological concept of beginning, middle and end.

Sitting in the classroom can encourage flashbacks, but he is still the same Rene who was a co-fellow in the 1978 UP Writers Workshop, which chronicler Tony Serrano said was the best, counting among the fellows such droppable names as Marj Evasco, Eric Gamalinda, Joey Ayala and Eric Caruncho.

"Teaching is the job most conducive to writing," he says, relating how one feeds off the other and vice versa, as he takes leave and makes his way back to the hills of Antipolo.

He only goes down when he has a class or workshop, or maybe to watch a play of his to be staged by other sons and daughters of PETA, rambling around with the playwright’s sort of a trilogy, that can also be construed as a beginning, middle and end.

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Rene Villanueva...In Retrospect is onstage at the Rajah Sulayman Theater in Intramuros from February 13 to 22 at 7 pm. For ticket information, call PETA at tel. 410-0822 or 724-9637.