The daily struggles of an impoverished people are played out on stage; teatro la fragua, a Honduran theater group, gives them a voice.

Fr. Jack Warner, SJ, graduated from Chicago's Goodman School of Drama and went to Honduras in 1979, dreaming of how theater could help impoverished people there discover their own identity and power. "Art and religion spring from our need to be in touch with something beyond the littleness we feel as human beings," Warner says.

teatro la fragua, "the forge theater," was formed on a wing and a prayer. Most Hondurans had no experience of theater, but Warner discovered teenagers with the potential to be actors. He found a home in a large wooden building in the town of El Progreso. The company began the physical exercise and basic training actors need, as teatro la fragua was to be a professional company and its actors were going to work full-time.

They have created a variety of works: explorations of Central American history and traditions; dramatizations of biblical stories in a Honduran context; neomoralities springing from contemporary problems; adaptations of theater classics; and, overlaying all, an emphasis on theater for children. Their most recent work pairs a version of the Spanish classic Fuenteovejuna, which deals with the moral right of rebellion against unjust, oppressive authority, with a piece developed by banana workers under teatro la fragua's direction that expresses the justification behind the community's defiance of an eviction order of the United Fruit Company.

teatro la fragua conducts workshops in Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Cuba, Guatemala, and Belize, and it has toured in the States, Mexico, and Colombia. Its work continues to reach a worldwide television audience through a documentary, TEATRO! The dream of a people finding a voice through theater continues to spread.

On top of the hill the wind blows briskly. I see the mountains across the valley; the stretch of the Ulúa River shines silver-brown in the late afternoon light. Between me and the river stretches the city of El Progreso, its dirt, disorder, and poverty muted by the distance. The flaming orange of the acacias and the green of the coconut palms mask many of the city's scars. Roads, oddly, take on a certain reason, occasional parallels and right angles making a seeming order of the chaos of winding mud paths and gravel roads.

The Rio Pelo rushes from a gorge in the mountains behind, tumbling below me as it flows over ledges and into the city, becoming muddier and more sullen as it slows and settles into middle age in the valley in front of me. Most washing has been finished, but I can still make out waders, bathers, and fishers in the river below, all taking advantage of the cleaner upper reaches of the river where it pools between chutes and falls on its way to the valley. A bus can be heard sucking vigorously against the mud, and two hawks speak to each other across the valley while vultures glide above me, below me, next to me. This subtlety of form is in stark contrast to the misshapen figures squatting over the dead dog on the roadside, ripping flesh from its corpse. These vultures are El Progreso. In the low sun's light, soft mists appear between the green below, further obscuring the reality, an impressionistic painting of ovens in a death camp.

teatro la fragua lives down in those muddy streets, under the tin roofs and coconut palms, next to the pigs and chickens and goats. It's a hot, gritty theater that can't afford the luxury of wiping the mud from its shoes, one that actually gains strength and meaning from that mud, a fusion of two of the primeval elements: earth and water.

Time to go. The actors should have everything set up by now and be doing a run-through. I walk back to the truck. I look at the huts on the hillsides across the hollows of the streams on their way to the river below. These shacks, mud-floored and as inhabited by chickens and pigs as by human beings, hang on hillsides in a childlike ignorance of gravity, precarious as snow on tiled roofs under a winter sun in other climes. The paths twisting through the hills are steep, the stream a few hundred feet straight down. Why do we bother to do theater in a place like this?

What is art? Is great art timeless? Is it universal? Is great art that which can be loved and appreciated by those willing to study and understand it, in China as much as in Argentina and in successive centuries? Is there a difference between great art and average art, and between good art and bad art, or is art art only if it is great?

teatro la fragua's particular emphasis on introducing children to theater is Fr. Warner's way of offering them a "spark of hope."

Why do we do theater in a place like El Progreso?

When I reach the truck it's almost sunset, and a light rain begins to fall. I look back to the hills and see in full sun a one-cloud storm pounding my observation perch of the afternoon, producing a rainbow, a huge and almost complete arc. I can pinpoint its base; it doesn't end in the remote distance but at a specific point a couple of football fields away.

The Toyota starts without any problem. It's an easy half-hour drive on a paved road.

It's an old saw in the business that all you need to create drama is a plank and a passion. But a bridge is of immense value, new brake shoes for the twelve-year-old truck would make more certain the arrival of the planks, and a little gas for the generator would help illuminate the passion.

Why bother to do theater in a place like Honduras?

They're about to start when I arrive. Three actors, two musicians, bare stage. A deliberate entrance, a strong introduction, and the sudden hush of an audience involuntarily seized by the power of electric performers. The physical presence grabs the room and doesn't relentÑmost of the audience has never known the human element to be capable of such raw personal power, power that comes from vision, inspiration, and much work. Raw, unfettered power that emanates from the soul and not from a gun. The power of hope, not of fear.

The audience at first is not sure of this presence. A nervous uncertainty grips the crowd; the actors feel it, and their rhythms are rigid. Then the children save it: the honesty of children who don't know their hope has been hocked to a foreign lender.

An icy-clean four year old's laugh slices through the night; the scald of oppression eases, and adults join the little girl. Actors struggle to maintain character; one musician can't suppress a grin as the single shiver of laughter continues above the rest. A child has saved it. A four year old has revealed an impulse in every person, has taught her parents, her superiors, the basic lesson of life: joy is the first rebellion against oppressors, the wildly revolutionary act, a defiance of all authority that says life will be suffering. Laughter is this girl's Boston Tea Party, her cheerful denial of Herod's power. This is raw, gritty, tough theater in a land beset by hurricanes, deforestation, corruption, and poverty. Sometimes primitive theater, theater that finds it as important to train its audience as it does to train its actors; theater that competes for its audience with cockfights, machete duels, floods, harvests, and a cultural illiteracy that has robbed these people of their proud Mayan heritage. Tenacious theater that refuses to concede defeat in the face of washed-out bridges, tenuous funding, and moonscape highways. Theater not for the delicate of sensibility nor for the easily daunted.

The rain starts just as the show ends, quickly strong, breezy, with lightning, people shuffling to any shelter. In the darkness the rain is invisible until car headlights cut through the dense rush of water. As the car nears, the drops become distinct, individual kernels of liquid popcorn exploding on the shiny road. The car passes, and the rain again is an invisible presence, heard on the tin roof, felt with each gasp of night air, but unseen. By the time the actors have changed and packed up the gear, it has diminished to a light mist. The drive home is cool and refreshing.

Why do we do theater in a country as desperately poor as Honduras? Why do we do theater in the midst of all the needs that are so obvious? Theater is never going to lower the infant mortality rate. Theater will not save (nor even ease the pain of) a child dying of malnutrition. Theater is never going to change the world. But a child's laugh reminds us that theater can fulfill another need perhaps as desperate: theater can make a child laugh. Perhaps it can even give a child a spark of hope.