Ricky Abad, theater artist, and more

Of the many titles of my good friend, Ricardo “Ricky” G. Abad (1946-2023), who passed away unexpectedly the day after Christmas, I am quite sure that “theater artist” will last the longest. My basis is the survey evidence that we Filipinos feel much prouder about our achievements in culture and the arts than of our achievements in science and education.

The Ateneo de Manila University, where he was professor emeritus of sociology, memorialized him this week thus: “Remembering Ricky: Sociologist, Theatre Artist, and Teacher Extraordinaire,” (ateneo.edu, 1/2/2024). He was all of those, but I would give first billing to his theater, ahead of his sociology.I think that forthcoming generations of Filipinos will want to see presentations of “Pagpapaamo sa Maldita” (2002), Ricky’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew,” and “Sintang Dalisay” (2012), his version of “Romeo and Juliet” in the context of Sama Bajau culture, networks, music, dance, and performance art. They will look forward to seeing how Ricky decolonized The “Merchant of Venice” into “Ang Negosyante ng Venicia” (1999), “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” into “Pangarap sa Gabi ng Gitnang Tag-araw” (1990), and “Richard III” into “RD3RD” (2018). After the lockdown, Ricky produced “Azul: Ang Sirena ng Sigwa” (“Azul: The Mermaid of the Storm,” 2021). Such works never expire.

Visiting China with the theatrical Ricky. My first time to meet Ricky was in 1980, with a Philippine Social Science Council delegation to China, on invitation by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. At that time, he was president of the Philippine Sociological Society, and I was president of the Philippine Economic Society. We also happened to be editors of our respective journals.

I think we were the two youngest of the group. For a week or more, we were in Guangzhou, Beijing, Shanghai, and maybe one other city. We were accompanied everywhere by senior Chinese academics, happy to be paroled from collective farming—a form of domestic exile—and practice speaking English again. I remember taking a photo of Ricky, arms widespread, on top of the Great Wall.

It was during Lent; on Palm Sunday we visited an empty cathedral, its windows paned with clear glass, the stained glass having been destroyed in the Cultural Revolution. Only an old Chinese priest was there; he and one of us, a history professor from De La Salle, conversed in Latin, their one common language.

Ricky the world-class survey researcher. In 1995, Ricky, Linda Luz Guerrero, and I went to Cologne, Germany, to represent Social Weather Stations (SWS) at the annual meeting of the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP). Part of the agenda was deciding the survey topic for 1998, and we were batting for a re-run of religion, the topic in 1991, the first year that SWS did an ISSP survey, and on which Ricky had done a paper as sociologist of religion. (Added by Ricky to the agenda was “The Rocky Horror Show,” which was playing in Cologne then.)

The ISSP religion topic was the baby of Andrew Greeley (secular priest, novelist, sociologist, and survey researcher; but whose autobiography says he is “just a priest, not a hyphenated anything”). For me, Father Andrew was the most fun to be with of all the ISSP people. I’m sure Ricky was the most fun of the SWS group for the others, a bit like Father Andrew’s counterpart.

The religion topic won the vote; SWS got elected to the questionnaire drafting group of five to six countries, the topic’s workhorse. The group’s task was to submit a first draft of the questionnaire in 1996, then do pretests and a second draft by 1997; the survey itself would be in 1998. Ricky joined us in 1996 (Slovenia), and 1997 (Netherlands), when every survey question was finally voted on. In 1998, SWS hosted ISSP in Manila. Ricky was still on our team in 1999 and 2000 (Spain and Portugal). The religion topic was repeated by ISSP in 2008 and 2018.(Adding an “import” like Ricky to the team is standard in ISSP, since no member survey institute has in-house expertise on all topics. For instance, we had political scientist Jose “Pepe” Abueva on our team in England in our [winning] campaign for Citizenship as a survey topic for 2004. Pepe had studied survey research at the University of Michigan, and pioneered election polling in the times of Magsaysay, Garcia, and [Diosdado] Macapagal. He then represented SWS in Citizenship drafting group meetings in Mexico and France.)

Ricky even made it fun to take statistics as a course. I heard his former students say this at his wake last Monday. No wonder he got a Metrobank Award for Outstanding Teacher.

Ricky’s super-long standing-ovation. At the end of the funeral mass at the Ateneo’s Church of the Gesù last Tuesday, the clapping lasted for many minutes, with “bravos” shouted from all sides. It lasted longer than I have ever heard an ovation after a stage presentation. There was not a dry eye in the church, including mine. It was the exact type of recognition that Ricky would have appreciated.

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