Volume iii, #1

The acacias are in bloom. There are tremendous floods in the south of the country and in Nicaragua, but they haven't struck us here on the North Coast. Yesterday the ceiba leaved.

(How's that for a lead? Enigmatic, drawing you on to want to learn more?)

The ceiba (generic) is a majestic tree of the cottonwood family native to Central America. It was the sacred tree of the ancient Maya of the region, sacred because it serves no practical function: its only function is its stunning beauty. THE ceiba (particular) is the one which shelters the approach to the front entrance of our theatre center here in Progreso, and which has become an integral member of our troupe.

In March, as the dry season arrives in full force, the leaves of the ceiba shrivel up and disappear. Then a couple of weeks later a pod appears. In the day the air is filled with cottony fluff; at night the pods pop and burst and drop and it sounds like a light rain falling inside the huge umbrella of branches. And then nothing.

In April the fields are dry....
It is the month when there are fires in the fields,
it is the hottest month and the pastures are covered with
red-hot cinders,
and the hillsides are the color of coal;
the month of the hot wind when the air smells of smoke
and the fields turn blue under the smoke
and the tractors turn over the clods with clouds of dust;
the beds of rivers are as dry as roads
and the branches of the trees stripped bare as roots;
it is the month when the sun is blurred and red as blood
and when the moon is enormous and red as the sun,
and far off in the night the bonfires burn like stars.

--Ernesto Cardenal

The first year I was here I was sure the ceiba had died, and I experienced something of that indefinable sadness of autumn that we experienced once as children, that sense of wonder in the face of the workings of the universe that seems to sleep and then atrophy as experience dulls our feelings, that sense that Hopkins captured so perfectly:

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.

This year the owl stopped coming to perch at night. One morning a couple of years ago, I awoke to find this very owl literally staring me in the face. It was huge. I was cagado ("Courage even in the brave sleeps before breakfast and I was never brave," as Graham Greene puts it.) I don't remember how he was delivered from the bondage of the building, nor who got him out, nor have I ever figured out how he got in (the iguanas and things like that, they can squeeze through without much trouble; but this humongous owl?). From that time on I watched for his arrival every evening, gliding silently across the sunset to take up his nocturnal post in the uppermost branches of the ceiba (which may well be the highest point in Progreso). This year when the ceiba shed its leaves he stopped coming. And his absence has proved more than an aesthetic loss: the mice and rats in our building have clearly taken advantage of every free moment.

But in May come the first rains, and with the rains you feel the life coming back into the ceiba although from ground level you see nothing different. Until suddenly one day this whole vast rondure of ribbing turns green, the whole tree at once, and the next day a solid green mantle covers the firmament. Yesterday the ceiba leaved.

The same rains that brought the ceiba back to life have caused devastating floods in the south of the country. "One man's ceiling is another man's floor." The acacias are in bloom, as are the first of a new crop of orchids around our main entrance.

Last night I sat in the audience (something I rarely have the leisure to do) and I took some time to breathe in the atmosphere. The ceiling fans were chugging away doing their best, but they can't put up much of a battle if a late afternoon rain hasn't arrived to cut the heat; everybody down below had his own improvised paper fan to help the effort. The mosquitoes and the termites (this is the time of year they sprout wings and regroup for new attacks) hovered around the stage lights, but seemed content to stay up there and not bother us in the audience below and as the show progressed they trickled away. Or perhaps we just got more accustomed to each other's presence and accepted a mutual truce, each staying for the moment within his own terrain.

(Lest anyone be misled, by the way, by a First World interpretation of the term "stage lights", I haste to point out that our stage lights consist of a few PAR reflectors shielded by paint cans painted black. A highly sophisticated system -- in comparison with the pair of Coleman lanterns that we use in the villages and other locales without electricity.)

There is something special about the night in the tropics; something that may be taken for granted by the native, but that for the non-native is always impressive. The night surrounds you, encloses you, engulfs you; the darkness is profound, filled with sounds that both menace and comfort. (Conrad captures that feel in page after page: remember those descriptions of the trip upriver in "Heart of Darkness", for example, or the night they tell the story of Lord Jim). The profundity of the darkness makes you even more aware of and dependent on the halo of light you huddle in, like the bonfire in "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" that keeps at bay the hyena circling on its fringes.

Last night I sat in the audience. The show is a new one that has been our major project so far this year: Misión a la Isla Vacabeza (Mission to Vacabeza Island). It's a fantasy that was originally intended for kids, and at first we were only giving it in the day for school groups. But as it has turned out, the show has been even more popular with older audiences, and this fact has turned it into the most popular show we've yet mounted: we opened it May 8, and in the weeks since have attracted approximately the same number of people here in Progreso as we did in the entire year past (how's that for audience development statistics, eh?).

Misión a la Isla Vacabeza is a fantasy-adventure set in the ancient Mayan empire: an attempt to help people find their own mythological roots. The history of the script sounds something like those textual-critical studies of Shakespeare's sources you do in graduate seminars. It started out as a script for children by Robert Bolt. Joseph Slowik, my director at Goodman, adapted and Americanized the script a few years ago for presentation in the schools of Chicago. We took that version as a base, adapted it to our practical situation (the original takes about 20 actors, for example; we have 6) and "Honduranized" it drastically, to such an extent that I doubt that Bolt himself would any longer recognize it.

The show has turned out something of a cross between The Royal Hunt of the Sun and Superman II (on an infinitely lower budget, of course) with a dash of the Popul Vuh (the sacred book of the Maya) thrown in for good measure. It has many obvious flaws and shortcomings: the costumes we've managed to throw together, for example, remind me all too much of the Grecian Urn "ballet" in The Music Man, and not all of our actors have sufficient experience and training to do justice to the multiplicity of roles they have to take on. But they make up for that lack by their real enthusiasm and love of the show, and their deep conviction that they're imparting a message that desperately needs to be heard and put into practice; a message that (in another context) Jorge Huerta put this way:

The Maya knew how
to love
They understood the nature of things
naturally....

The Maya, who understood
the creation of La Tierra
as contemporary scientists
now describe it,
knew how to love...

Si somos una familia
how can we ignore
our commitment
to that family?

Working like the Maya,
full of love and pain,
together we
could create a
better world.

The ceiba, the sacred tree of the Maya, leaved yesterday.

Peace,

Jack Warner sj

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