Arthur T. Acuña
He combines matinee-idol style with an ensemble consciousness
By Randy Gener
New York City: Because of his sultry movie-star looks—the melting sigh among Filipino wags is “haaaay, nakakalaglag panty!” (as in, “good looks that can undo undies”)—Arthur T. Acuña instantly catches the eye. He is lean, masculine, cocky and stalwart, with dark eyes that brood with mysterious ardor. Is it an expression of enmity? Is he being wickedly self-absorbed? Is he goading you to pursue him? Is he available? As the writers and directors who’ve worked with him remark, something about him intrigues and draws you in.
“The thing with Art is that he has this quiet intensity, and it comes across as heroic,” says the director-designer Loy Arcenas, whose recent collaboration with Acuña spanned more than three years in several versions of Lonnie Carter’s The Romance of Magno Rubio in New York City, Laguna Beach, Calif., and Manila. “Art has qualities that you would associate with strong leading men. He has it. The fire is always there, and it comes out naturally.” Carter concurs: “If Clark Gable had been born and raised in the Philippines, he would have been Art Acuña.”
The comparison is deliciously apt. For a long time, Acuña has primarily been cast, like Gable in his heyday, as a dashing gangster-type with a certain raw style. Before the well-spoken Filipino-American became an omnipresent leading actor in New York’s close-knit Asian-American theatre community, his acting résumé was littered with tough-talking heavies and hopeless druggies. He was a standout as a Mexican drug-runner in Octavio Solis’s Santos & Santos for Imua! Theatre Company, incisive as an East Village junkie in Gino Di Iorio’s The Pigeon Tree, and mischievous in Qui Nguyen’s satire Bike Wreck, where, as a Chinese food delivery boy, Acuña exploited racial assumptions of Asian Americans and mugged a designer-suited Wall Street yuppie. (The latter two plays were produced by Metropolitan Playhouse on the Lower East Side.)
“Somehow that evolved—now I am cast in different roles,” says Acuña, interviewed during a day off from rehearsals of Pan Asian Repertory’s The Fan Tan King, a jaunty gangland musical by C.Y. Lee set during the violent tong wars of San Francisco’s Chinatown in 1888. With strong-jawed earnestness, he sings the part of Peter Fong, a wildly ambitious Chinese immigrant who owns a series of gambling parlors. (To describe, laughingly, how he’s moved from the periphery to the center, Acuña says, in an aside, that he used to play Judas in The Passion Play in nearby New Jersey—”I did that three times”—and has since graduated to playing Jesus Christ.) Though in Fan Tan King he plays another underworld figure, Fong is a meatier role, a force to be reckoned with, whose power and money generate a great mixture of respect, envy and terror among his Chinatown rivals.
Acuña’s likeness to the rascally actor popularly known as Rhett Butler is, of course, entirely superficial. Unlike Gable, who liked to smirk, lift an eyebrow and then push his women to the wall (sex was always in his mind), Acuña asserts his male supremacy only when the romantic part calls for it. Although he could charm the socks off of you, the most obvious characteristic of his acting is the absence of narcissism—the respect for his directors and fellow actors, the creative ideas he brings to the table, the outgoingness to the audience, the absolute willingness to experiment and discover something new. Would Gable stoop so exuberantly low as to funk it up as a farcical macrobiotic chef, Madame Wong, stuffed inside a form-fitting chong-san and a towering pagoda wig, in the Ridiculous Theatrical Company’s 1993 revival of Charles Ludlam’s How to Write a Play?
A risk-taker, Acuña has no compunction in being pressed under the oppressive thumb of a supremely vain woman. In the first image we see of him as the kowtowing actor and female impersonator Shen Tai in Pan Asian Repertory’s 2003 revival of Ruth Wolff’s Empress of China, Acuña is shackled, spread-eagled and tortured on a wooden hexagon inside the Forbidden City. Arrested for his irreverent mimicking of the Dowager Empress Tzu-hsi in 1898, on the eve of the Boxer Rebellion, Acuña’s wretched Shen Tai poses no open challenge to her villainy; he readily adapts himself and plays roles as demanded by his all-powerful female ruler. She tricks him, at one point, into taking a bite from a bowl of maggots.
This is not to suggest that Acuña has no bone of aggression, sexual or romantic or otherwise, in him. He can be breathtaking—as in Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters at the Public Theater in 2001, when his leftist rebel leader, Santos Tirador, holds out his arms while serenading Daisy, the Manila beauty queen turned Philippine revolutionary, with the romance song “Dahil Sa Iyo (Because of You)” and hoists himself up on her balcony. “Which he did with style and grace,” Hagedorn interjects. “You could call that scene his homage to Romeo and Juliet.” The decision to stage the serenade in that way sprang from Acuña’s inquisitive mind during the play’s workshop; his leap has been inscribed in the stage directions of the published script. Acuña’s bravado—his fearless sense of pleasure, confidence and intelligence in performance, which we respond to and share in—is a pride in craft.
“Art is a total actor,” declares Tisa Chang, artistic producing director of Pan Asian Repertory Theatre, whose consistent casting of Acuña in a series of language-driven, high-profile parts has led him to down the path to being cast, recently, as princes, kings and historical figures. “Art has a prodigious memory, excellent physical ability and clear investment in the material. He can master classics and musical songs, and he is a problem-solver. I often wonder why top Manhattan agents have not picked him up.”
In New York, which imagines itself as the center of the theatre universe, Asian Americans can get constrained in a ghetto. Season after season, actors can not only shine brilliantly but also perform at the heights of their powers, and yet they would still matter to only a coterie. Acuña has the longest reign as the city’s quintessential Asian-American sexy leading man, and yet he is like a best-kept secret. One snag, partly, is that there is nothing sullen or self-centered or self-promoting about him; he is almost too laid-back and agreeable in a crowd of over-caffeinated hustlers, underpaid strivers and strident waiters. Acuña doesn’t mind filling for another actor in a show that’s already on its feet. He gamely pulls double or triple duty, as in the National Asian American Theatre Company’s 2004 Antigone, to become just another member of a tightly woven chorus.
It comes as no surprise that he is part of the Ma-Yi Theater Company gang of Filipino-American actors who took home 2003 Obie awards for ensemble performance in the memorable Magno Rubio. In it, Acuña soulfully portrays the poetical migrant worker Nick, the stand-in for the Depression-era Filipino novelist Carlos Bulosan on whose hardscrabble life and eponymous short story Lonnie Carter based his verse play. Observes Carter: “Art is so even-keeled and in control, even as he is intensely passionate in his performances. When he did Nick’s soliloquies in my lay—several of them were written as sonnets—you don’t have the sense that he was reciting poetry. He made them conversational in the best sense of the word.”
Because of his youthful demeanor, Acuña frequently reads as younger than his true age (which he won’t divulge). “At the age of 22, I looked 15,” he says. “When all my peers had moustaches already, I didn’t have a single hair on my face.” Because his vocal instrument produces a solid sound and because he articulates English beautifully, he is the go-to guy when you are casting Asian-American characters with a huge classical dimension, or when you’ve got emotionally complicated roles in which the intentionality of the spoken dialogue carries the day—or simply when you require a sharp actor to make eloquent sense out of unwieldy text. In Ernest Abuba’s astral Kwatz! The Tibetan Project at Pan Asian Rep in 2004, Acuña comes off as earthy and firmly grounded while his Tibetan émigré, Dorje, slides into a comatose state and veers off into out-of-body experiences after being randomly mugged and attacked with a hammer.
Residing in the Bronx allows Acuña to be in the heat of the action. “It’s very fulfilling to create a character from the ground up. I like that, when you have a hand in how things evolve.” He inspires dramatists to rewrite scenes and move in another direction. “Let’s make it gray” is his mantra: “If he’s a heavy, I look for redeeming qualities. If he’s a good guy, I look for his darker qualities.”
Sired in an upper middle-class environment in Manila and educated in a private, coeducational Philippine university run by Catholic priests before he first visited the U.S. in 1986, Acuña belongs to a new generation of gutsy young Asian-American actors unsung to the mainstream populace, even when they have regularly recurring TV roles, as he does in “One Life to Live.” (His peers would be the likes of Ron Domingo, Eunice Wong, Orlando Pabotoy, Joel de la Fuente, Victor Lirio and Michi Barrall.) He’ll be seen this fall in Metropolitan Playhouse’s The Octoroon and in Ma-Yi’s spring 2007 revival of Magno Rubio; he has been tapped to take part in workshopping new works with Hagedorn (Pet Food), Arcenas (as Ho Chi Minh in 2 September) and Czech designer-director Pavel Dobrusky (Kleist’s Prince of Hamburg).
One tangible benefit of working for Asian-American theatres, Acuña says, is that he “feels less of an outsider.” He adds, “It’s just that I can relate to Asian Americans better, especially the Pinoys, because we know our own cultural oddities.” In a deeper sense, the foursquare Acuña is representative of the new immigrant New Yorker who will go where the work is. “As far as the work is concerned, it really doesn’t matter to me. Outside of that, what is the social interaction like? With Asian Americans, it’s a lot more fun and a lot looser. We share the same artistic hurdles.”