Robert Arevalo: Back home, back on stage

MANILA, Philippines - In a coffee shop somewhere off Rockwell, on the first day of the lunar new year, a role must be waiting for actor Robert Arevalo that would help define his career.

He’s turning 76 in May, and perhaps already as slim as when he won the Famas best actor award for “Daigdig ng mga Api” in the mid-60s, where his co-star and wife Barbara Perez won best actress, a partnership that would last decades.

“In those days there was only one award,” he says, on a Friday morning and as Friday mornings go, he talks with STARweek about among other things, his elementary and high school classmate at the Ateneo Benjamin Bautista, at whose launch of stories several years ago and a few blocks away, Arevalo had read excerpts in an impromptu program brimming with whisky and good vibes.

Robert Arevalo is also deep in preparations and rehearsals for his upcoming role as family patriarch in the Filipino adaptation of “Fathers and Sons” (Mga Ama, mga Anak), the translation into drama of the Nick Joaquin short story “Three Generations.” In the late ’70s he portrayed the son Selo in the version directed by the late national artist Lino Brocka; now he is being directed by Joel Lamangan in the Tanghalang Pilipino season ender third week of February.

There’s not much difference in approach between father and son, the actor says, because for all we know the lines may stay the same and yet the character is already a different one.

Growing old is part of the human condition, Robert Arevalo says, part of life’s tragedies this loss of power, where the young that once feared you now barely take you seriously.

Then there is always the temptation to experiment, at rehearsals and between performances, and at times during the play itself, but the actor says it is better to stick to the text, particularly if it is a period piece like this, which even has references to martial law and a-go-go dancers, and where Joaquin may or may not have been influenced by the novel “Fathers and Sons” by the Russian Ivan Turgenev.

Well in both cases, nihilism is an operative word, and the actor himself says he’ll be reading the Joaquin story again shortly.

“The character I play is immoral; no, amoral is more like it, there’s a difference,” Arevalo says of his role as father, one who dotes on and is doted on by a sweet painted lady, and who occasionally asks for the good old ginebra, what with dementia creeping in.

Before taking on a project, the actor says he considers three factors: script, director, and the people he’ll be working with. He recalls a time he turned down a role because after reading through a script, he felt unsatisfied with the translation, felt it was stilted. However, later when he watched the play with the different set of actors, he was pleasantly surprised that it worked out after all.

There too is the serendipity factor. Just last night he was watching a program where actor Frank Langella was discussing his craft, and the answers Langella gave in the interview could very well be the same things he could say in this interview on the art of theater.

Though this is not exactly a return to the stage – he did his first play after he did his first film – it is always a good thing to engage in theater; as it were, back to basics. Physical preparation may be similar in theater and film, but theater requires more stamina because less piecemeal; the discipline honed on stage is carried on to the cinema, that’s why big name movie stars say they still do the occasional play to keep in touch with their roots.

Aside from Brocka and Lamangan, the late Behn Cervantes has also directed him in the seminal anti-martial law film “Sakada,” where Barbara Perez also appears. Cervantes was a family friend, particularly close to Barbara, and they go back a long way.

Arevalo remembers a time he was in the play “Medea” back in the ’60s and he played the role of Jason; Behn was to be King Creon but he walked out mid-rehearsal, feeling unsatisfied with the way the play was being handled – he was not yet a director then.

He remembers when Behn had written something incendiary after Arevalo had been denied a US visa because he had lost his old one, something which really took the Americans to task short of attacking the Roxas Boulevard enclave, but eventually the actor did get his visa, not exactly because of what Behn had written.

In later films he was directed by Chito Roño in the faux horror “The Healing”, and in that movie on senior siblings “Fuchsia” also by Lamangan.

The actor subscribes to the late Mario O’Hara’s concept of timpla, where no two performances on stage are the same, that it is different every night notwithstanding having to mouth the same lines, move in the same blocking. The dynamic is bound to vary, between director and actor, between actor and fellow actors, between actors and audience.

A receptive audience in fact can inspire and goad the actors on to perform their best, not that they don’t give their all every night. So you have to keep on your toes every performance night, notice if a fellow actor does something slightly different, that could serve as cue. It’s an evolving dynamic, timpla, where the play develops a life of its own.

A misgiving Arevalo has is that theater can’t be made into livelihood, actors and other stage players have to resort to regular jobs such as television to earn their bread and butter, this is true not only here but also in the west.

The actor says doing plays is most enjoyable, feedback is immediate – not to mention that breathless moment when the lights go down and curtains rise and you can hear a pin drop just before the first lines are spoken.        

Arevalo is of the generation that spent their childhood during the Pacific War, though he remembers very little of the Occupation.

But that moment in elementary school when he was 9 or 10 years old and he first participated in an elocution contest was electric. It got him hooked. He also can’t escape the good-natured ribbing at times. Once after the performance of Fathers and Sons in 1979, Nick Joaquin had teased him, “Robert, next time let’s do it in English!”

Of course no matter how good the translation, there’s always something to be said for the original, especially for English language mavens like national artist Nicomedes.

Meanwhile, that dream role still waits, could be waiting for him. The actor knows it will come when it is offered to him.

Translating “Mga Ama, mga Anak” into cinema is not far-fetched; his role there has many possibilities. Perhaps Robert Arevalo as himself, the old underrated reliable, but not a documentary. And at this very moment on Pilar Street, Barbara Perez is preparing lunch because the house help is on leave. “She’s a good cook, but she hates to cook,” the hubby says.