Volume 2, #2

I hope no one was misled by the stamps on the envelope: we have not gone into exile (yet). Mailing these in the States is budget cutting; sorry to deprive you of those pretty foreign stamps. In recompense, this letter should be reaching you much more hot off the press than is the wont; therefore you're going to be getting hot news our most recent activities. (Of course, you will probably be getting a bunch of typos and ink smudges too; that's the price you have to pay for hot news. I advise any of my ex-students who feels the temptation to return this to me full of little red circles and things like "Sp." and "Split infinitive" and "Clumsy construction" scribbled in the margin, that he either resist courageously or be prepared to suffer the most heinous curses a jungle witch doctor can hurl upon him.)

As I am writing this we are in the process of closing down operations for the year and taking vacation in December (which is also the school schedule here). There's no doubt that it's been an eventful year in terms both of the socio-political context here in Central America and of the development of the teatro. But in spite of all the mudholes, flash floods, impressment, shoot-outs, and almost everything else imaginable, I feel we can say for the first time that we have really finished a "season". And I can only thinly disguise my own glee at being able to announce to you that teatro la fragua concluded its "season" with a triumph almost beyond my own dreams in the form of a show for children called La Maleta del Burumbúm (The Suitcase of the Burumbúm) which we have been playing constantly to packed houses for the past two months.

Theatre for children has always been a special love of mine; in a country where half of the population is under fifteen years of age it takes on a special urgency. I have been able to harden myself to a certain extent to the teeming misery around me when it appears in the form of suffering adults. As Graham Greene says, I always have a return ticket; and with a return ticket compassion "becomes an intellectual exercise," something from which one can retain a certain emotional detachment. But when a peasant woman holds out to her baby, vomiting and defecating in advanced stages of malnutrition, and with desperation in her eyes begs, "Padre, help my child" -- well, I still find it a bit difficult to remain uninvolved.

Put another way: we all have our defenses to shut out the existence of human misery, most of which consist of closing our eyes and pretending it doesn't exist. Hopelessness then becomes a way of life for both parties. The highway from Progreso to San Pedro Sula is elevated above the surrounding flatland to protect it from the frequent floods. You pass through miles of lush green banana plantations, and then you round a curve and in front of you the city sprawls out on the denuded skirts of a mountain gray-green through the haze of the city's emanations; just at the edge of the city the surrounding land dips a bit more before it begins to rise, and right there on your left -- it's low enough you'll probably miss it until somebody points it out to you -- is an anarchic collage of discarded useless things (sheets of old cardboard; a few rotten, already thrown away boards; an occasional sheet of scavenged tin) arranged in cubes set upon a grid in the mud.

Still Life

In the saddest slum of San Pedro,
lives are played out in the shade of a highway
where buses glide like lost thoughts overhead
From the clutter of roofs sprout antennae
fed by a seethe of thick misery within.

This spider's quilt of questionmarks;

each crooked finger
tests the wind,
each predicts change
that just won't come.

--Tim Kaine

The difficulty with trying to glide by in the bus overhead is that once in a while one forgets and looks out the window -- to see children playing in the mud and garbage. At that point it's more difficult to cling to one's defenses and rationalizations. Graham Greene, again, has put it well: "Sooner or later one has to take sides. If one is to remain human."

Theatre for children is never going to lower the infant mortality rate. Theatre for children will not save (or even ease the pain of) that child dying of malnutrition, nor will it provide him shelter from the rain and mud. But it can fill another need perhaps it can even given him a spark of hope.

In American Dreams Studs Terkel quotes Ed Sadlowski:

Did you ever watch a guy grow when he's exposed to a new experience? He becomes addicted. He wants more. He starts reading the book, he starts doing this, doing that. Before you know it -- boom! -- it's like a flower, just opening up one night.

A kid off the street, you show him a tree or a flower, he'll say: "that don't mean nothin'." It does mean something. You look at any mill town in the history of this country and you won't find, to this day, flower beds or tree-lined streets. You won't find music-halls....

If the boss had his way, you'd never find libraries and books. They're dangerous. Shouldn't there be parks and theatres and libraries in my community?

Well, Ed, parks and libraries and tree-lined streets are not particularly in evidence; but I'm delighted to be able to report that the children of Progreso now have a theatre and that teatro la fragua has a blockbuster hit in La Maleta del Burumbúm. And you were right: the children of Progreso are addicted; a whole generation of recently-born puppies and kittens bear names like "Burumbúm" and "Fragua". Thousand of the children of Progreso have laughed.

This little success brings satisfaction, but it also brings home the fact that it so little in terms of the crying need around me. Even if we manage to find the financing to continue our children's season next year, will it mean anything in the midst of the "seethe of thick misery"? What hope is there in the face of the artillery of the commercialism of the consumer society? A television commercial for children's Christmas toys is not only obnoxious; in the face of real children starving it is a raging obscenity.

At the same time, the real meaning of the Christmas story suddenly springs into high relief. The Herods of today are eagerly contracting armies to murder the children; the revelers celebrating their frenzied rites in worship of the great god Money take little heed; the song of the angels stands as little chance as the cry of an infant of being heard above the din on the trading floors of the merchants of death. But a voice still cries out in this noisy wilderness:

The Spirit of the Lord has anointed me
to preach the good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim
release to the captives,
to set at liberty those who are oppressed.

The Oxen

Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.
'Now they are all on their knees,'
An elder said as we sat in a flock
By the embers in hearthside ease.

We pictured the meek mild creature where
They dwelt in their strawy pen,
Nor did it occur to one of us there
To doubt they were kneeling then.

So fair a fancy few would weave
In these years! Yet, I feel,
If someone said on Christmas Eve,
'Come; see the oxen kneel,

'In the lonely barton by yonder coomb
Our childhood used to know,'
I should go with him in the gloom,
Hoping it might to be so.

--Thomas Hardy

From all of us at teatro la fragua, our sincere wish for a Christmas filled with peace and joy and hope -- and even more, that the real spirit of Christmas may inspire you throughout the new year.

Peace,

Jack Warner sj