history y criticism
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history y criticism |
Taking it to the streets -- a people's |
| El Progreso, Honduras. In the
sweltering mid-day
heat of this dusty tropical market town, abone the
crowing of roosters, the honking of taxis and the
shrill blare of cheap radios pumping out the
saxophone-filled rhythms of merengue and punta,
rises the sound: an other-worldly moaning,
modulating higher, then lower, echoing eerily across
the dirt trails and wood shacks that ring the center of
this small city.
To North American ears, though, familiar with the workings of the modern theatre, it is not so much the sound itself as its context here in a provincial outpost of one of this hemisphere's most impoverished countries that makes the noise seem so unlikely, so disjointed from all coherent sense of time and place. The sound is that of vocal warm-ups. teatro la fragua, back from a lunch break after an intensive morning of work, is preparing for its regular afternoon rehearsal. Six young men and one woman, ranging in age from their late teens to mid-thirties, stretch out across the floor of the aging wooden social hall which, equipped with three gradeo rows of benches, a deck of floodlights and a spacious trust playing area, serves as their theatrical home. Under the low hum of ever-so-slowly rotating ceiling fans, which do little to dissipate the suffocating summer heat, the actors lead themselves in the daily routine of calisthenics, yoga and vocalizing that starts each of their rehearsals.Founded in 1979, teatro la fragua -- "The Forge Theatre" -- has defied all odds, surviving public indifference, economic setbacks and political repression to become one of the most stable and enduring popular theatre troupes in all of Latin America. Operating from its base in El Progreso, the third-largest city in this country only slightly bigger than the state of Ohio, the company is in its 13th year of bringing theatre to the masses of poor Hondurans, many of whom, illiterate and with little access to the sources of official culture, have never seen a live play before in their lives. Performing for a paying public in their home theatre, as well as touring the town and hamlets of the mostly mountainous countryside, the La Fragua players continue to present a diverse repertory that has included Lope de Rueda and Moliere, prominent Latin American writers like Ruben Dario and Osvaldo Dragun, dramatizations of native Honduran myths and legends, and religious pieces taking direct or indirect inspiration from the Christian gospels. The religious connection, perhaps difficult for many North American to appreciate, should not be underestimated. La Fragua operates under the auspices of the Jesuits, who own the complex on which the theatre is built, and who ministrer to the espiritual and material needs of Hondurans through a variety of social and educational programs both in El Progreso and throughout the country. Currently, the troupe devotes six months of the year to religious plays associated with the Christmas and Easter seasons, while reserving the other half of the year for works of a more secular nature."Our artistic approach to the religious pieces is the same as the secular ones -- it's just that the content is different," notes Jack Warner, a lanky Jesuit priest in his mid-forties and St. Louis native. As La Fragua's founder and artistic director, Warner has been the company's chief driving force. "Of course, with the religious pieces, you reach a wider, more popular audience, since our secular pieces are basically for school audiences, which in this country assumes a certain social standing. "My own initial involvement with the group grew out of a church youth group I was in," explains Edy Barahona, a native of eastern Honduras, and one of La Fragua's co-founders. Today he continues to act, as well as direct shows, lead workshops and handle the company's business affairs. "I was only 17 years old at the time. The only performance experience I had ever had was singing with my church choir. I didn't know what theatre was. I had never seen a play."Like Barahona, many of La Fragua's members have joined the troupe through their involvement in church-related youth groups and activities, including the drama classes that the company now sponsors. The religious connection, besides the spiritual direction it provides, offers the group a network of support and a public legitimacy in a society where most secular institutions, both public and private, are characterized by inefficiency, corruption and turpitude. In contrast, the grass-roots Catholic Church in Honduras and throughout Latin America, particularly as represented by orders like the Jesuits, has frequently identified itself with the most progressive, even revolutionary, social forces. For Warner, then, who dresses in jeans and tee-shirt and peppers his language with the occasional obscenity, there is no contradiction between his roles as priest and artistic director. He is on the record as saying: I've come to see that the concept of divine inspiration of the gospels and the concept of artistic inspiration aren't really that far apart . . . . I believe very firmly that any writer, any artist, is reaching for something beyond himself, beyond our littleness. Art is always in some ways, touching deep spiritual questions of who we are, what is our place in this world and what does life mean. This religious core of La Fragua's work, then, has led the troupe to forge a theatrical style that may be termed "neo-medieval," appropriate for a country where, still dragging the leg irons of a feudal past, the majority of its peasantry can neither read nor write, chronic malnutrition and disease make surviving to adulthood a blessing, girls routinely become mothers at the tender ages of fourteen and fifteen, and campesinos farm almost unbelievably steep and rocky slopes not far from the immense and fertile plantations of multi-national fruit companies. In this neo-medieval society, the church, gracing the central plazas of its far-flung towns and villages, remains for many the central focus of life. Totally eschewing realism and naturalism, then, La Fragua eclectically mixes the didacticism of Brecht's "epic theatre" with Grotowski's actor-centered "poor theatre" to create stylized pieces which rely heavily on physicalization, gesture, pantomime, dance and music. These influences are conscious: Barahona, surrounded by the Spanish library of theatre books in La Fragua's offices, can talk knowledgeably about Grotowski and Brecht, while Warner, an M.F.A. graduate of Chicago's Goodman School of Drama, will occasionally incorporate practical workshops and discussion of these theories into the group's "When I first got here, I used to see a lot of Hollywood movies," Warner recalls. "They're tremendously popular here, usually shown with Spanish sub-titles. The interesting thing was, the sub-titles flicked by so quickly you could barely see them, let alone read them. Now my Spanish may not have been that good back then, but I was sure I could at least read them better than most of the people in these theatres, who had very limited educations but who seemed to be enjoying the films. I kept on asking myself: how are they doing this? And then it hit me: they're not. They're going to the movies for the images, the spectacle, not to read the sub-titles or understand the dialogue. Most of them have no idea what the characters are saying. And that inspired my approach with teatro la fragua. Images matter much more to non-literate audiences than the written word." This emphasis on images, on physicalization, comes through in all of La Fragua's work. Take, for example, during rehearsal of Los motivos del lobo (The Wolf's Motives), a parable by the turn-of-the-century Nicaraguan poet Ruben Dario involving the encounter of St. Francis and a wild animal. The performers, under the direction of Warner, are able to improvise solutions to a sequence with a ballet-like grace reflecting a total physical commitment rarely shown by North American actors. Another short piece, El origen del maiz (The Origin of Corn), developed by the group from a local Indian legend, features a lengthy interlude in which the Old Man, played stunningly by Jose Ramon "Chito" Inestroza, dances through the first human planting and havesting of corn, to the simple but effective accompaniment of live musical effects, including Guillermo Fernandez's wonderfully humorous imitation of a rooster. This interlude takes up almost half of the piece's playing time and, without a word of dialogue, effectively conveys a good deal of its plot. La Fragua's physical intensity has come through hard work. The extensive exercises which start their morning rehearsals, as well as classes taught by a visiting dance teacher from the nearby city of San Pedro Sula, have helped the actors hone this discipline of the body. Besides, Warner enjoys a luxury not known to many of his North American counterparts: as a professional, full-time company, La Fragua maintains a regular 40-hour work week which, along with the fact that the group's core members have been working together for five years or more, has permitted the group to develop and maintain this body control. Of course, the actors vary in their commitment to total physicalization, according to their experience and talent. Some seem sloppy and unfocused in their movements and, as a result, this work-in-rehearsal lacks the clean line and dignified grace that would invest it with real power. But at their best, as represented by the impressive body control and fullness of voice of Inestroza, they achieve an authoritative force usually only hinted at by popular and children's theatre groups doing similar work in the United States. "In addition to the dance lessons we take here, I've studied pantomime at the Cultural Center over in San Pedro Sula," says Inestroza, who, at age 22, is in his fifth year with La Fragua. "I love acting. It's been a tremendous opportunity for me. If I weren't doing this, I'd probably be making shoes. I'd been learning to be a shoemaker." Inestroza's opportunity came, when during a stint as the theatre's gardener, he was invited to join the company. With a sixth-grade education, he has actually enjoyed more schooling than most Hondurans, many of whom never get beyond third grade. Following Grotowski, La Fragua uses the actors' bodies as its chief scenic element, keeping other visual components to a bare minimum. Costumes are simple and reusable, usually tights and color shirts, although Warner emphasizes "a tight control of color." The floodlight serve as simple illumination; colors and technical cues are virtually non-existent, with live music often replacing lighting to suggest shifts in mood. The blocking worked out in the full-thrust, non-raised playing area usually adapts itself easily to the plazas, churches and schoolyards where the company frequently finds itself performing. In this desperately poor country, necessity dicatates this "poor theatre." Anything else would seem obscene. Although it places a primary emphasis on movement, the group maintains a healthy respect for text. Still, as Barahona points out, "If we're using a text from Spain or Argentina, we try to adapt it to the Honduran situation. That might mean altering the language, changing the setting somewhat. But essentially we respect the text. We just try to make it relevant to our social situation." The group prefers plays written in verse, whose accessibility to rural audiences may come as a surprise to North American theatregoers, who associate poetry with difficult, florid language in the tradition of Shakespeare. "It's easier for our audience to understand verse," Barahona explains. "It's the rhyme, I think. Prose is the hardest thing for people with no education." Warner cites Paul Sills's Story Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of Nicholas Nickleby as inspiration for innovative ways of incorporating storytelling and narration into stage action. This influence is evident in the rehearsal of Los motivos del lobo, as Barahona and Fernandez search for novel ways to activate their narrator-characters. What starts off as recitation involving alternation of off- and on-stage voices evolves, under Warner's gentle prodding, into a dynamic panoply of narrator-actors who fan out in different directions, take part in the action, enact characters, make sudden (and surprising) exits and entrances, all the time oscillating between choral passages, virtually chanted in unison, and straightforward individual narration. The entire troupe has become a narrator-chorus, framing the central confrontation between St. Francis (played by Inestroza) and the Wolf. Chicano Theatre of the 1960's and 1970's has also impacted La Fragua's style. Appropriately, the company's repertory has featured works associated with this movement, such as Dragun's El hombre que se convirtio en perro (The Man Who Turned Into a Dog) and Teatro Campesino's Las dos caras del patroncito and Soldado raso (The Two Faces of the Boss and Buck Private), pieces created by Luis Valdez during his work with California farmworkers. "In some ways, we're modeled on Teatro Campesino," Barahona says. "Somebody associated with it, though, saw our work and said we were doing the kind of work they used to do. Somewhere along the way, he said, they got off track. They became a theatre for the middle class." Whatever La Fragua's models, its influences, its style, there is no question that Warner remains its central figure, the pole around which all other elements orbit. Though the group makes many artistic decisions collectively, and though veterans like Barahona and Fernandez have increasingly assumed important roles in the overal life of the theatre, the buck eventually stops with Warner, who, though he does not act, directs most of the company's shows, piping out notes in an easeful Spanish still punctuated by the nasal vowels of his native midwest. Armed with his degree from Goodman, a number of years experience directing musicals in Catholic high schools, and brief stints working with ghetto kids in St. Louis and campesinos in Bolivia, Warner went to Honduras in 1979 with the specific intent of founding a troupe like La Fragua. Why Honduras? "Well, the opportunity was there, with the Jesuit centers here," he says, adding with a laugh: "Besides, I figured, If I could do it here, I could do it anywhere." The group started in the remote eastern town of Olanchito, but the region's isolation, emphasized by poor roads and communication, made survival there difficult. The group quickly moved its base to El Progreso, more accessible to major population centers like San Pedro Sula, the economic capital of Honduras. In 1965, the Jesuits had purchased property in El Progreso previously belonging to the United Fruit Company, one of the two major banana-producing empires operating in the country. Having diversified itself as United Brands, the company had consolidated its headquarters in nearby La Lima. The building which is now the theatre, a brief stroll from the town center, had fallen into disrepair, much like El Progreso itself, once a thriving commercial center for the banana camps on the east bank of the Ulua River. A bridge over the river, providing readier access to La Lima, had left El Progreso without a solid economic base, though the town continued to be a magnet for human misery and squalor, its population swelling to over 100,000, most of the newcomers inhabitants of shantytowns and marginal neighborhoods along the city's fringes. The actual building Warner converted for the theatre had been the social hall of the banana company's country club, a place where executives and their families enjoyed dances and evening parties. The process of turning the decaying, termite-infested structure into a comfortable and serviceable theatre has been a decade's labor of love for Warner and the company. The early years were difficult for a number of reasons. Warner's goal of building La Fragua's financial base out of a steady, paying local audience proved elusive, forcing the group to look abroad for grants and gifts to sustain itself. Support from the local community was not forthcoming. "A lot of people thought we were crazy," Barahona recalls. "Especially all the physical exercises we do -- nobody had any idea why we would bother to do those things." To understand the difficulties La Fragua faced, one must understand something of Honduras, which usually ranks ahead only of Bolivia and Haiti as the hemisphere's poorest country, and statistically continues to trail even its war-torn neighbors of El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua in terms of life expectancy, infant mortality, unemployment and per-capita income (2) -- all this inspite of an unprecedented decade of United State military and economic aid, including millions of dollars funneled through projects sponsored by the Agency for International Development, as well as one of the largest Peace Corps program in the world.Honduras seems to be in search of its historical and cultural identity. In Maya times its sparse indigenous settlements were but outposts of an empire centered in the Guatemalan highlands and the Yucatan lowlands (although the magnificent ruins of the 8th-century city of Copan sit today in Honduran territory, about five miles as the crow flies from Guatemala). In colonial days, Honduras was but a remote province of the Spanish Kingdom of Guatemala, centered near modern Guatemala City. Both before and after Honduras's independence, British imperial interests controlled large sections of the country's sizeable Carribbean coast, logistically remote from the capital of Tegucigalpa. This century, the international fruit companies have enjoyed an economic sovereignty over this same coast, leading many to term Honduras, with some justification the quintessential "banana republic." Most recently, broader economic interests, most of them centered in the United States, have exercised a degree of influence and control rarely seen even in this age of multi-nationalism. On a cultural level Hondurans have little to boast of. Nicaragua has produced internationally-acclaimed poets like Dario and Ernesto Cardenal; El Salvador has its Manlio Argueta and Roque Dalton; Guatemala can claim the Nobel-Prize-winning novelist Miguel Angel Asturias. Honduras's major claim to literary fame is Jose Trinidad Reyes, a 19th-century writer of religious dramas called pastorelas; although La Fragua has produced a number of his plays, his works are rarely read or staged today. Lacking the palapable, living indigenous heritage of Guatemala and Mexico, Honduras produces little in the way of folk crafts; you will not find beautiful weavings for sale here. Even in popular music Hondurans prefer merengue from the Dominican Republic, ranchero from Mexico and North American disco hits from the 1970's. One has to visit Honduras, though, to understand this gnawing cultural poverty which permeates life there. The newspapers, all tabloids, compete with each other for the grisliest morgue shots of people who have met violent deaths. Their other main titillating attraction consists of photos of scantily-clas local beauty queens, many of whom don't look a day over 14. People flock in droves to see the latest North American vigilante, Ninja or porno release, while those fortunate enough to own televisions seem to prefer English-language shows cabled in from the United States. Official government signs throughout the country, including ones for military checkpoints along the highways, feature dwarfing advertisements for Coke, Pepsi or various brands of cigrettes. Though travellers to other under-developed Latin American countries will find these elements of urban culture all too familiar, nowhere else do they reflect a country so lacking a sense of pride and identity, so exploited and manipulated by outside interests. Take, for example, a "Cultural Night" sponsored one Saturday night on San Pedro Sula's main plaza by the municipal government. After starting over an hour late, it featured an out-of-tune military band, a singing group that wouldn't have survived the most forgiving Open Mike night, a truly terrible and unimaginative puppet show and a shamelessly ill-prepared skit by a group of military cadets -- all of which the public received with polite attention and vigorous applause. Finally, when a wonderful eight-piece marimba-and-conga combo took the stage, most people walked away, totally uninterested. This, then, was the challenge facing La Fragua in its initial years. How to find an audience in this country where lack of education and years of foreign domination have created a cultural vacuum? How to "forge" -- as the company's name suggests -- a Honduran cultural identity? Barahona sees a connection between this cultural poverty and the types of governments Honduras has endured. "The less culture a country has, the easier it is to maintain an oppression. The de-culturation of this country goes back to the Spanish Conquest, and today it's kept up by the propaganda of consumerism coming from the United States. When Hondurans realize that they need to have their own culture, then they'll truly start to be free." "Of course," he adds with a laugh, "if you say these sort of things here, people call you a communist." If creating and disseminating culture in themselves constitute political statements, then La Fragua has always been political. However, with productions like Valdez's Las dos caras del patroncito, which deals with the complex relations between farmworkers and their bosses, the troupe has not been afraid to make clear where its sympathies lie regarding the major social issues facing the country. In the early 1980's, when Honduras was suffering from the repressions initiated by General Gustavo Alvarez and disappearances and cases of torture were widely reported throughout the country, the company's social commitment trod too heavily on the toes of some authorities. In one instance, during a performance inside a church, the company learned that the building had been surrounded by armed troops. After a tense wait, the troops dispersed, perhaps having made their point. In another case, a company member was arrested and detained for four days, for no apparent reason. The repression in Honduras, relatively judicious compared to the wanton terror sown in El Salvador and Guatemala, eventually subsided, although its threat has not disappeared in this country where political detainments and assassinations still occur. Fortunately, the company's growing national and international reputation, as well as Warner's elite status as gringo, offer a measure of protection. Though Warner shrugs off the dangers the company faces from government and military authorities, surely he must be aware of the fates of other socially-active priests in Honduras -- for example, the 1975 murder of two priests in Olancho, the 1985 arrest of Jesuit Father Juan Donald, and the 1986 torture of Father Eduardo Mendez. Though La Fragua's players are now less vulnerable to these abuses than many other Hondurans, the fact remains that their security is always uncertain. A shift in the political climate could pose new menaces, especially for a group led by a priest who has said that the gospels are "subversive." As the 1980's wore one, then, La Fragua found itself increasingly on more stable ground, politically and economically. Grants from the United States helped to keep the group fiscally afloat, since local receipts failed to provide a steady financial base. ("Truthfully, it's a one-in-a-thousand shot, but it's still my hope we'll be able to do that someday," Warner says.) Still, El Progreso became increasingly receptive to the company, to the point where the actors today can talk with pride about their work to friends and neighbors. The group managed to get more support from the El Progreso Chamber of Commerce. Newspapers in San Pedro Sula began to review La Fragua's work regularly, remarkable in a country whose tabloids feature little or no arts coverage. However, as actress Nubia Canales notes, "the small villages we visit always turn out to be our most enthusiastic crowds. They treat us like we're really important." These performances in the villages of the Honduran counryside, which remain a primary focus of the group's mission, are not without incident. Drunks and mentally ill campesinos have provided for humorous and scarey moments. "Once when we were performing in a small town, this very drunk man ran up on stage threatening us with a baseball bat," Barahona remembers. "Luckily, it turned out the bat was plastic. The police eventually escorted him away." Recently, La Fragua's work has extended well beyond the shows that constitute their two annual seasons. The theatre sponsors drama classes and workshops for young people. Currently, more than 600 youngsters are involved -- a huge number, given that a program of similar proportions in the United State would involve more than 15,000 people. It has also invited Honduran guest artists to perform in its theatre, including El Teatro Latino (puppeteers), Son Cinco (modern dance) and Guillermo Anderson (a singer-songwriter who fuses jazz and reggae with the rhythms of Honduras's Caribbean coast.). La Fragua, then, is making an impact. It's all part, as Barahona has written, of "creating an authentic Honduran culture . . . . Theatre's most important mission is that people soak up that culture." Other opportunities for the company have been more exceptional. Edward Burke, Ruth Shapiro and Pamela Yates's 1989 documentary Teatro! focused on La Fragua; the film won a silver Hugo at the Chicago Film Festival and, in 1990, was seen on public television in the United States, bringing the group's work to the attention of English-speaking audiences. In the wake of the film's success have come two brief tours of the United States, in the summers of 1990 and 1991, with performances in places like St. Louis, Kansas City, Denver and El Paso. For many members of the group, these tours have provided their first experience not only of life outside Honduras but also of attending professional theatre put on by other companies. There is little opportunity for play-going in Honduras outside the work of La Fragua and a few struggling companies located in San Pedro Sula and Tegucigalpa. As professionals who are paid to work a steady 8:00 - 4:40 day, five days a week, the La Fragua actors also enjoy a privilege unknown to many stage actors in the United States. Ironically, like the coffee and soft-drink exporters whose mansions line El Progreso's wealthiest street, the company has benefitted from the country's dire economic straits, since much of the group's funding comes in dollars, which currently enjoy great purchasing power in relation to the recently-devalued Honduran lempira. Consequently, the company can afford to pay its actors a decent wage in a country where the minimum wage earned only by those fortunate to possess a steady job in the official market, amounts to little more than a dollar a day. Still, La Fragua and its actors are far from rich. The company members scrape to get by. Though they make enough to live on -- no small feat in Honduras -- they have little left for extras. Barahona still takes occasional work as a truckdriver in order to support his family. The younger actors, without families to support, have an easier time of it. The troupe presently includes a total of 12 employees, not all of whom are performers; its numbers have fluctuated in the vicinity of 11. Conspicuous by their absence are women. The 18 year-old Canales is the only female member of the company, and her roles in the pieces are clearly secondary. Getting women to join and stay with the group has been an ongoing frustration for Warner. No woman has lasted a year in the group without quitting. "For a woman to be involved with something like this, it goes against cultural and societal norms at every level," Warner jumps to the defensive when asked. "My feminist friends question me about this all the time. It tell them, I wish I could get the women to stay. But it's been a struggle." "Young women are very dependant on their parents," Barahona says. "We live in a machista society. It's hard to find somebody who can get permission to travel with us overnight, to go on tour. People are suspicious of things like that. It's just not done here. Yes, we talk a lot about women's liberation, but in this culture we're still like little children taking our first steps." "Canales herself, who had been studying to be a secretary before joining the group, says she has experienced no such conflict or pressure. "I feel very comfortable here. We get along very well, nobody says anything about my being a woman. I'm proud to be the only woman in the group." Actresses have frustrated Warner in a number of other ways, though. "Honduran woman refuse to do the type of physical work we do here, especially the exercises," he says. This seems like a perplexing irony in a society where women daily toil in dank kitchens, scrub clothes on rocks in muddy rivers, carry heavy baskets on their heads for miles along steep mountain roads and struggle to hold together families plagued by absent, alcoholic and abusive fathers. Yet, from watching Canales work, it is clear that, for whatever reason, she is greatly inhibited about using her body as a performance tool. "At the beginning I was very nervous about using my body at all," she acknowledges. "I didn't take the dance classes. But, slowly, I began to feel more comfortable. First, it was just my arms, and then, slowly, the rest of my body. I've been taking ballet for more than a year now. I'm less tense. Whatever the reason for the actress's short tenure with La Fragua, their lack of depndability -- which has caused cancellation of a number of shows -- clearly has made Warner testy on this issue. Dependability has also been an issue with the men. Recruiting, Warner notes, requires a lot of caution. "When jobs pay so little, when life is so hard, there's a certain number of young men who simply don't want to work. They have no motivation. They'd rather take it easy. Why look for work? It's easier to wait around and hope a relative gets you a job in the post office where you can sit around doing nothing all day." This relaxed attitude toward work, toward life, pervades most aspects of Honduran life. In a country where the heat can be brutal and making ends meet is frequently exhausting, the ability to relax and be patient may itself be a matter of survival, born of a necessity that spells its own pessimism and doom. For the most part, the Hondurans seem to be a gentle and relaxed people, possessing a patience that borders on the metaphysical, in contrast to Salvadorans or Mexicans, who have the reputation of being more aggressive. In the afternoon heat of the old social hall, though, the muchachos of La Fragua are working hard, sweating together "to forge a national identity by means of a people's own expression. Can it be done? Can this ex-high-school teacher from St. Louis and his troupe of dedicated young performers, floundering economically and bombarded with tawdry products and images from the world of the gringos, find a cultural identity? It's a tall order to fill. Cultural identitites, if they truly exist at all, emerge over the centuries. "Theatre can do very little," Barahona admits. Surely, too, the irony cannot be lost on the troupe that their director, good intentions aside, stands as yet another example of the foreigner's central position in Honduran life. The fact remains, though, that teatro la fragua is realizing, through a daily toil measured in 13 years of commitment, many of the goals caputred in catchy slogans of the last three decades, articulated by dramatic theorists and theatrical pundits almost to the point of self-parody -- slogans which, possessing no real substance, have blown aimlessly and meaninglessly like discarded trash, carried only by the false wind of hot air. After all, teatro la fragua performs primarily for poor and working class audiences who otherwise might never see a play. It has dedicated itself to the principle: "If people can't come to the theatre, then theatre must come to the people." It has cultivated a form of performance that sees a relationship between theatrical and spiritual values, and performs for a community that sees no distinction between the two, like the audiences of the medieval passion plays. Finally, through its work it has challenged the values of the political and economic establishment in a land where doing so means risking political persecution. For these reasons alone, teatro la fragua deserves a standing ovation. BIBLIOGRAPHY Acker, Alison. Honduras: The Making of a Banana
Republic. Boston: South End Press, 1988. |
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NOTES
1. Wm. Stage, " Teatro!" Universitas 15.4 (Summer 1990) 13.
2. Alison Acker, Honduras: The Making of a Banana Republic, (Boston: South End Press, 1988) 15.
3. Acker 97-9.
4. Stage 13.
5. Edy Barahona, "Autoretrato," Conjunto 78: 82.
6. Stage 13.
7. Edy Barahona, "Autoretrato," Conjunto 78: 82.