Vol. xxx #3

December, 2009

Earthquakes and Mexico dominated la fragua and Honduras in 2009. The teatro visited Mexico several times. The earthquakes visited Honduras.

The first earthquake arrived on May 28, a visitor who came and left quickly, a trail of destruction its signature. The second earthquake -- the political earthquake -- came and settled in, a couch potato relative of cigarette butts, empty beer cans and rude language. No word yet on how long that earthquake visitor will stay around.

Curiously enough, we had always thought of our area as being a non-earthquake zone, even though we are surrounded by areas (in Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua) very prone to earthquakes. Our children's school textbooks speak of the country as not belonging to the earthquake zone. But it turns out that we are on a fault which has been dormant for a century and a half and which suddenly decided to wake up and visit. The quake was strong but short, limiting the damage. The theatre building mostly withstood it, although the quake managed to find all the building's weak spots, snapping a number of beams which housed lively colonies of wood lice. We are still repairing the beams; the wood lice seem unfazed.

The greatest damage the quake visited upon us was the fall of one of the bridges in El Progreso that span the River Ulúa; you may have seen it, because the photograph of the resultant gap went round the world. This bridge fills a critically important role in the country, linking Progreso and the whole north coast to San Pedro Sula. To complicate matters, the quake weakened another bridge not far outside of Progreso, itself an essential link on the road to the capital, Tegucigalpa. Smaller tremors have been frequent since then, reminding us continually that we now have a new hazard to add to our list of resident and visiting hazards.

The year had started with no thought of earthquakes. February began with an evolved emphasis in our ballet school classes; our actors also started classes for kids in the three technical schools run by the Jesuits in and around Progreso. This built on an existing and vibrant resource, and gave the teatro a new reach into the community.

In March, Edy Barahona went to Waukeshau, Wisconsin, to give a workshop to theatre and Spanish students in Carroll University. The result of that was their staging in Spanglish of one of our pieces, Un Sueño Nuevo.

April brought the first of three trips to Mexico. While the fragua troupe was performing the Passion in various venues around Progreso, I visited Mexico to continue training groups on the techniques of Emergency Theatre. We have partnered with the Ministry of Culture of Mexico for several years on this, and on this visit I spent a week in Mexico City and another in Puebla.

In May we began the process of transforming short stories into plays. Our source was a series of children's stories by the Guatemalan writer Miguel Angel Asturias. Asturias is one of the most important writers of Central America; he is our only winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature (in 1967). These are a delightful set of stories which Asturias wrote for his own sons -- they weren't written for publication.

During this same time we were organizing our Temporada, or "season of artistic expression". We had planned for it to run throughout July and August. Our typical structure includes a mixture of our own pieces alternating with those of outside performing groups, with something different on the boards every week-end. The model? Old-fashioned summer stock, going back to my own basic training in theatre as a child attending the Muny Opera in St. Louis.

When the first earthquake hit in late May, however, we had to do rush repairs throughout June so the building could safely support the weight of audiences. As we finished those urgent repairs, the last weekend in June, the bridge on the road to Tegucigalpa fell. The same day a second -- this time political -- earthquake hit us: a coup d'état which has left the country in turmoil and which, as I write this, shows no signs of being resolved.

We had to postpone the Temporada at once -- curfews, states of siege and the other adjuncts of a volatile political situation forced people -- our audience -- off the streets. Without an audience, we had no shows.

So we visited Mexico. July, performance tour, and release from the suffocating political climate at home. We did four shows in widely different contexts. One took place in the Centro Cultural del Bosque in Mexico City (the complex on the edge of Chapultepec Park, the Mexican equivalent of Lincoln Center). We staged three others in very alternative open-air spaces -- one in Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl in Mexico City, and two in Agua Dulce, a township in the state of Veracruz. We topped the tour off with a three-day workshop in Coatzacoalcos, Veracruz. And a troupe of actors returned home exhausted but satisfied, only to plunge immediately back into the reality here: protestors were blocking the only remaining bridge on the road from the airport to Progreso, and we had to wait over three hours in the airport before we could get home.

We spent the subsequent weeks spinning in circles trying to rescue the Temporada. We could count on the mid-year recital of the ballet school the first weekend of August -- old reliable, it always sells every seat (to the aunts and uncles and cousins and grandmothers). But after that weekend? We felt silenced. Then the deciding vote arrived in an e-mail from the exiled Minister of Culture. He wrote:

I seem to remember that while Hitler was taking and burning Moscow, the Symphony insisted on playing their concert. Art must not slacken even for an instant in the face of Fascism; it is the antidote. I'm proud of the Jesuits in Honduras; they save what little I have of a sinner's faith. I would love to be with you were it not that I suspect I would cry seeing the ballet.

Our silence was broken -- better a truncated Temporada than no Temporada. With this decision to proceed, however, we had to rush to get it on track again. From refocusing the lights that the original earthquake had shaken into chaos, to printing sticky labels to revise our posters (which we had got back from the printer a couple of days before the coup, and which had already suffered the indignity of an earlier sticky label applied after we cancelled the first week).

The revised Temporada ran from the beginning of August through the first fortnight of September. As part of it, we opened the new Asturias piece we had been developing through all of this. We coupled Asturias with a short farce from Peru which deals with -- what else? -- a coup d'état.

Temporada complete, we dove directly into rehearsals for another Mexico tour. This visit enjoyed the main dish of a festival in Morelia, accompanied by shows at festivals in Colima and Mexico City.

This time we took two pieces. The first fit into alternative spaces. The second -- Art, Truth and Politics, our introduction to the work of Harold Pinter -- we saved for more formal spaces. We performed the latter in three beautiful theatres. As luck and earthquakes would have it, we staged the first of these performances on the very day that Manuel Zelaya, the deposed president, returned unexpectedly to Honduras and took refuge in the Brazilian embassy. It was a very emotional experience to do the Pinter under these circumstances -- not unlike the time in 2001 when we did Romero de las Américas in Cleveland, in the hours that the U.S. started bombing in Afghanistan.

So this year the sounds of hammers and saws join the strains of Christmas villancicos. We work to recover from our first earthquake's visit, even while we try to minimize the damage the political earthquake has brought into our homes. The final dance recital is almost ready, and we are doing Navidad Nuestra as we have done it the last few years, incorporating children and youth, building it into a town tradition. And the music of that tradition reminds us that we have survived to celebrate anew the vision of peace, a vision we hope visits very soon.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

Jack Warner sj