AT THEATER and media fora and workshops, some people ask us how we’ve developed our “acute” appreciation for the art and craft of acting.

Looking back, we recall having watched memorable performances on the silver screen that showed us how great movie actors could be—like the luminously insightful and viscerally moving portrayals by Greta Garbo, Laurence Olivier and other enduring and “immortal” stars of cinema.

In addition, we’ve been privileged to savor theater performances all over the world—in different parts of the United States, London, Paris, Japan, China and the Soviet Union.

 

Inspiring

And, most edifyingly, we’ve been able in the course of our own theater career to have acted with some great Filipino actors, who challenged us to do our utmost to rise to their inspiring level of performance.

More than any acting class or workshop, they showed us by their intense example how much more can be achieved in the thespic arts when actors “forget” themselves and “disappear” into the characters they play and vivify.

We recall the dramas we were privileged to act in with the late, great Vic Silayan, whose larger-than-life personality and temperament transformed “ordinary” characters into iconic representations of nobility of the heart and spirit.

Acting with Vic was a “risky” proposition for any theater tyro, because he would simply mumble his lines during rehearsals—then “explode” in full thespic fury on opening night!

Woe to the inexperienced and insecure coactor who happened to be on the same stage with the theater master then—he’d end up thoroughly upstaged and shown up for the rank amateur he was!

Another acting great in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, was the Tita Muñoz, whose exceptional combination of beauty, textured voice, temperament and artistic insight made her one of the most memorable queens of the Philippine stage.

Like Vic Silayan, Tita was a primal thespic force who took no prisoners in her focused pursuit of artistic excellence and beguiling believability in her passionate performances.

Acting with her could be like trying not to be swept away during a big storm or tsunami!

And yet, she could also be the very soul of artistic generosity, showing “selected” acolytes how to go from mediocre to proficient, proficient to competent, then from competent to great in their own portrayals.

 

Biggest challenge

Of all the productions we acted in with Tita, the biggest challenge was Rolando Tinio’s staging of two of his own prize-winning plays, “Claudia and Her Mother” and “It’s April, What Are We Doing Here?”

Starring in both plays with Tita was the similarly formidable opera singer, Mitos Sison. And Rolando paid us the supreme compliment of tapping us to play the only male actor in both plays.

We were still wet behind the ears at the time, so we were thoroughly unnerved by the challenge of keeping up with our two veteran costars, as they came up with their artistically “ferocious” portrayals.

While occasionally “terrifying,” the experience taught us a lot about thespically daring to go where angels fear to tread, and heroically “defending” the character you’ve been given to play.

That’s where great acting begins and ends.