The church quiets, necks crane and the same agile kids appear between the legs of adults seated in front. Over the shouts and snorts from outside, the gospel is played out.

Up in the mountains and in the valleys another crop is being readied for the harvest, a crop sown and nurtured by teatro la fragua. Chito and Oscar, Moncho and Obdulio, Rigo, Mario, Guillermo, Edy and Luis have tended this humble crop and are finding that the more it is shared, the more it spreads. Each season brings forth a greater demand for the fruits of the harvest. The gospel dramatizations have taken root.

Mass is over, Twenty-five teenagers take their places on stage and announce, "Now the birth of Jesus Christ took place in this way". A quick rearrangement leaves one group center stage.

"In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar" rings out a clean, newly trained young voice, shaky at first but gaining confidence as the eyes of neighbors, family and strangers gaze at this unfamiliar holy spetacle.

Those same nimble kids squeeze into previously undiscovered seams between front-row legs. And then John the Baptist emerges from the multitude, a rich swarthy-skinned prophet screaming "Brood of vipers" at the crowd. As Herod has John thrown into prison, a hush settles on the church.

And then the three boys from Las Deliciat (a village three hours from the end of all wheeeled traffic) step front-center in a deliberate, confident entrance. With a strong, disciplined introduction, three thirteen-year-old boys (Honduran sons of undocumented Guatemalan parents) with smiles as round and rich as their Mayan faces announce that an orderly account must be told, "that you may know the truth concerning the things of which you have been informed".

A spontaneous wall of human faces reaches in layers from the floor to as high as a teenager can climb on top of a pew: black and brown faces, gold teeth and no teeth, lined, wizened faces and shiny smooth faces all held rapt by a story two thousand years old, a story they had never before understood as a living reflection of their own reality.

The exuberance, the pride, the wonder in their own competence makes these three boys something more than they have ever dreamed, makes this gospel story something far greater than it has ever been for this illiterate congregation, and a sudden hush grabs the audience. The physical presence of three boys so full of joy and human decency, like a host of angels, takes hold of the people in the church and doesn't relent. This campesino audience has never known the human person (of any age) to be capable of such raw personal power, power that comes from energy, desire and hard work; power that emantes from the soul and not from a gun; the power of hope, not of fear.

Throughout the liturgical year, teatro la fragua hold workshops in parishes in the north of Honduras. Groups come to learn dramatizations of biblical texts for special season which they can take back to their villages with them, as well to gain the experience and training with which they can develop their own dramatizations of the weekly gospel readings throughout the year. As word spreads through a parish, each workshop draws new groups from villages that had previously been unrepresented.

Beginning in November, the workshops focus on the infancy narratives from Mathew and Luke. Groups arrive late Thursday afternoon in a parish assembly space and work through Saturday night with a director from teatro la fragua. Each group develops as many of the individual stories in the Christmas sequence as possible: usually three different stories for the better, more experienced groups, and one or two for the novices. These scenes are then combined into a narrative sequence which proceeds from a prologue of John the Baptist's preaching in the desert to the finale of Herod's massacre of the subversive children. Included in the sequence are the stories of Zechariah and Elizabeth, the annunciation, the visitation, the birth of Christ, the appearance of the angels to the shepherds, and the visit of the three wise men.

The climax of these workshops comes at Sunday morning Mass. Groups join together to visit the church of a town within the parish. In Honduras, a single "parish" usually encompasses a large area with as many as one hundred villages or more. On Sunday, the combined groups put on a full sequence of the stories learned during the workshops.

This sequence of stories mirrors the mystery play cycles of medieval Europe. "The Play of Daniel" and "The Play of Herod" were the earliest dramas to be done outside of the liturgy. These 12th-century dramas were meant to be done in church, but they stood on their own.

During Christmas season people did not have to work in the fields and so had time to spend preparing plays. Biblical scenes were recreated as tableaus on carts which traveled from village to village. For the birth of Jesus, for example, Joseph and Mary stood by the newborn babe. Gradually dramatic action replaced the more static tableaus.

The Christmas play sequence that teatro la fragua teaches is based on another 12th-century work, "Auto de los Reyes Magos" (Mystery Play of the Magi). Parts of this work are woven into the gospel stories to amplify chracters such as the Magi and the shepherds. Although the birth of Jesus is the central subject of the play, the drama focuses on what happens after the baby is born. The action begins with the shepherds or the kings coming to see the baby.

These gospel dramatizations are simple story theater which makes use of a narrator who comments on the scene that the people act out. Paul Sills developed the technique in Chicago for children's stories such as the Arabian nights. This technique works best with Mark's Gospel which contains more action than long speeches.

The visual style of these plays owes much to Medieval and Renaissance paintings which made no attempt to recreate a historically accurate picture of life in the time of Jesus. Peter Breughel, for example, in his "The Census in Bethlehem" portrays Mary and Joseph arriving in an obvious Flemish village of the early 16th century. He made no attempt to show Judea of the first century; his Bethlehem has children skating on a frozen pond.

teatro la fragua uses such paintings as visual reference for how to pose actors and create a picture that an audience which does not know how to listen can grasp on sight. At the same time, it also borrows the approach of these paintings and situates the stories in a contemporary Honduran village. And that makes the Gospels come alive.

In the town of Bonito Oriental a week later, twenety kids have come together to fine tune their scenes of Christmas. Oscar Cardoza, the best dancer of the company and a promising director, is working on the John the Baptist scene from the third Chapter of Luke.

A truckload of horses and cows guarded by half a dozen soldiers back up to the front of the church. Soldiers get out and walk, fully armed, to the doors and look inside. On the altar, two solider-actors question John the Baptist: "And we, what shall we do?" Oscar prudently shouts, "Cut" and starts working with John the Baptist on his character.

After a few minutes the soldiers get bored and drive off with their truckload of "requisitioned" supplies. Oscar resumes the rehearsal.

John the Baptist glares at the soldiers and replies to their interrupted question:

It is a hot, gritty theater, grown of the land. Its actors do not apologize for not being able to afford the luxury of wiping mud from their shoes, because they gain strength from that mud, from the air, the fire and the water. It is a raw, tough theater in a land inundated by hurricanes, bananas and poverty. It is an occasionally primitive theater, which has to compete for its audience with machete duels, floods, havests and the cultural illitereacy which policy makers in foreign capitals have legislated upon the country.

It is a tenacious theater, which refuses to concede defeat in the face of washed-out bridges, tenuous funding, blackouts and real personal risk. It is not theater for the delicately sensitive, nor for the easily daunted. It is teatro la fragua "the forge theater". As Isaiah prophesied:

And they shall beat their swords into plowshares,
and their spears into pruning hooks;
nation shall not lift word against nation,
neither shall they learn war any more.

Jack Warner sj