Volume iv, #3

Five years. We've very conscious of that figure as we go through the process of closing down the season, cleaning the building, taking inventory of our props and costumes, organizing the office, getting out this newsletter. With the close of this year teatro la fragua completes five years of operation. That has a certain solid and closed-off ring to it: the first stage is completed, the foundation is laid, and it's time to begin the real work of building upon that.

It has been a year of intense activity both inside and outside the teatro. You have probably read about the high points of the latter: the Pope's visit and his energetic call for the removal of all foreign troops from Central América, immediately rejected by the Powers-that-be; the economic depression that seems only to get worse and to which no end is in sight; the CIA's "covert" war; and the occupation of Honduras by U. S. troops. Many of the lesser details have certainly passed you by: the disappearances, the kidnappings, the murders, the astronomic increase in muggings and purse-snatchings and robberies that are the logical result of 70 per cent unemployment, the disintegration of an already fragile social structure as it is converted into a pawn in the suicidal games of the Big Powers.

Internally, the activity of the teatro has been considerably less violent but only slightly less intense. Along with the usual quota of failures and crises have gone a few successes: at one time or another during the year, we had five different shows mounted; we have established close relationships with the budding theatre groups throughout the country, and have managed to bring several of them here to Progreso; we have played various towns that we had not broken into before; and we saw the beginnings of a wider circle of influence when we hosted a first-ever play contest among the high schools of Progreso; we have dramatically expanded our paying audience and established teatro la fragua as a prominent fixture in the life of the city. Perhaps the greatest miracle of all is that we have survived economically in spite of total absence of support from Big Money: our only income has been from box-office and your contributions. A small step on the road to economic self-sufficiency. Thank you.

And meanwhile we have gone on living,
Living and partly living,
Picking together the pieces,
Gathering faggots at nightfall,
Building a partial shelter,
For sleeping, and eating and drinking and laughter.

--Murder in the Cathedral

The year began in Tegucigalpa: La Capital, the point where Honduras touches the International Order, whose civic hub is a pedestrian mall capped at one end by the Cathedral and at the other by the National Theatre. Around the mall, the only straight and level stretch in the whole city, cluster the international shops and restaurants, the offices of the transnationals, government buildings, embassies, the luxury hotels full of reporters and U.S. Military. From it the streets climb or drop off and twist around obstacles in a crazy maze whose only logic is that imposed by the hilly terrain to which they cling precariously. In January I helped direct a group of students from the National Academies of Fine Arts and of Music in Peter Weiss' Song of the Lusitanian Bogey. We opened in the National Theatre the first week in February and left the group on their own: they've continued playing throughout the country all year, including a highly successful run in la fragua in April.

The Progreso season opened in February with a show that has attracted attention as far away as Paris. In Loubavagu the residents of a small Carib fishing village use their own traditional songs and dances to recount the history of the Carib people and of their own village. It was a very splashy way to launch the season, which we followed up with a new version of La Maleta del Burumbúm, our great children's hit of two years ago, souped up with music from Dan McDermott. In March we remounted "Pincho" and "Las Dos Caras del Patroncito", the bread-and-butter of our travelling repertory, in preparation for an extensive tour of the banana camps in the Progreso area organized and financed by the leaders of a local union. All was set to begin after Easter; but the night of the Wednesday of Holy Week, as they were returning from a meeting in one of the camps, the union leaders were ambushed and shot by the military. My actors were afraid to do shows in the camps after that.

April brought Song of the Lusitanian Bogey to Progreso, and the beginnings of work on a Honduran adaptation of Waiting for Godot, a project which we shelved as being too ambitious for the moment, but which served as excellent training in language and rhythms. May was the month of our annual Major Reorganization (my euphemism for major crisis); work on an adaptation of Moliere's The Miser, which we also abandoned after a couple of work-in-progress presentations; and the working of new casts into our existing shows. June brought extensive try-outs of new actors, the start of rehearsals of the Just So Stories, and the Marines. We organized an extensive tour of Loubavagu in the Progreso area in July, opened the Just So Stories (which I described to you in some detail in tlf news iv-2), and the helicopters began to annoy us during rehearsals and performances. In August we brought to Progreso another group from Tegucigalpa and began rehearsals on what was to become Juegos del Destino ("Games of Fate").

Dan McDermott returned to the States in September and my sister Pat joined us; his music was replaced by her juggling as the integrating factor of Juegos del Destino, which finally opened the first week-end of October to the most packed house we've ever had here in la fragua. We polished it and re-worked the Just So Stories in almost daily performances throughout the month.

The peace and calm tonight is suddenly frightening. I guess it's because of the helicopters flying over all the time. It's more bothersome that they don't fly over all the time. The beauty of the clouds, the birds, the children playing, is suddenly shattered by the roar of a formation of helicopters.

--Pat's journal

November found us ending the year where it had begun, in Tegucigalpa in the National Theatre Festival, which we hope is now an annual event. the change in the atmosphere of the city was clear: a climate of nervousness and fear and militarism isn't exactly conducive to a very "Festive" environment. The natives have gotten used to the six-soldier platoons that patrol the streets at night ("Play it cool" seems to be the primary rule of survival in an occupied city), but I certainly haven't. The first echo of the thud of boots on the pavement; the crackle of a walkie-talkie bouncing off the adobe walls that crowd the narrow, contorted streets; the harsh glint of a street lamp reflected off an M-16: the whole body immediately springs to alertness and the stomach tightens; then intense concentration on whatever ordinary thing you can find to do; then relief as they pass without having noticed you.

The Just So Stories inaugurated the Festival and became an immediate sensation. The following day -- Thursday -- we were free to play tourist in the big city, and then Friday the fourth it was back to work with Juegos del Destino. The work is a collage of short pieces dealing comically with some of the pressing problems of the country (greed in business dealings, demagogic politics without content, unemployment) tied together by music and juggling and culminating in our adaptation of an acto by El Teatro Campesino, "El Soldado Razo" ("The Common Soldier"). Originally written against the Viet-Nam war, its message is simple: War means that my brother dies.

We beefed up our kazoo orchestra with musicians from Song of the Lusitanian Bogey and scoured the market for brightly-colored fruits that could be juggled and seen in the cavernous National Theatre; the constant olive-green presence on the streets did little to alleviate my "opening night in La Capital" director's nerves. When we started to drift back to the theatre late in the afternoon we discovered that our prop- and publicity-man had just gotten word that his father had died that morning. Death joined our cast as we got ready to do a show narrated by Death.

Nerves were taut and the first three sections of Juegos del Destino were rather sloppy. Due to typical last-minute crises the music ended up an improvised jam session; the novice actors weren't experienced enough to adapt readily to playing in a real theatre and got very confused in their spatial relationships; rhythms went to pieces, comic timing was practically nil; and greed, politics, and unemployment deservedly got few good laughs. Then one of the jugglers steps away from the rest and introduce himself: "I am Death, and I've come to tell you the story of the Common Soldier." And the glint off metal and the boots on the pavement, the helicopters and the M-16's, the five years and the floods and the fights and the flops, the presence of Death in our own theatrical family, a Friday night performance in La Capital: all fused.

Death shows us a series of very simple scenes of the last hours at home of Juan, a young recruit who "was killed a little while ago in the War." Mother cooks a farewell dinner, Juan goes to get his date, Father comes homes a little tipsy from celebrating with the boys after work, Juan announces to the family at dinner that he and his girlfriend have decided to get married "when I get back from the War."

Death: And suddenly the thought flashes through everyone's mind:
All: And if he doesn't come back?
Death: But they brush that aside.

Juan and his fiancée go off to a farewell party and the next morning the family sees him off at the bus station. The mood shifts abruptly to an exchange of letters between Juan at the front and his mother, in which he relates a dream he had the other night:

I went into this hut firing my M-16 because they had told us the village was controlled by the Enemy. I killed three of them right off, but when I looked down it was my little brother, my Papá, and you, Mamá.

Death shoots Juan, calmly walks over to straighten out the twisted corpse, and tells the audience: "Juan was killed in the War November 4, 1984."

From backstage I could hear a communal gasp followed by a couple of moments of total silence; then a sudden and spontaneous and sustained ovation that wouldn't stop and wouldn't stop. When it finally died down, the little coda and the curtain call seemed a bit superfluous. As I threaded my way through the streets after the show, the thud of boots rang on the pavement and the walkie-talkie crackle reverberated off the adobe walls and the glint off metal caught the corner of my eye. And I paid them no attention.

Only the artists are on the right path. It may be they can give the world some beauty but to give it reason is impossible.

--Georges Clemenceau

From all of us at teatro la fragua, our sincere prayer for a Christmas filled with joy and hope; and that the real peace of Christmas be with you through the New Year:

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

Peace,

Jack Warner sj

P.S.: The late E. F. Schumacher once wrote:

If education and the advantages that we have had from society are only so that we might form a sort of trade union of the privileged, then our soul is so burdened with darkness that life is not worth living. The requirements of these little people who can't help themselves are very simple. They don't have to go to the stars; they just want to know where tomorrow's meal is coming from. They want to have housing, they want to have clothing, they want to have a little culture.

teatro la fragua has been trying for five years to make a small contribution to this latter want. Root around in the trash for that return envelope you tossed away, write out a check payable to "Jesuit Mission Bureau, Inc." (4511 West Pine, St. Louis MO 63108), put the check in the envelope and the envelope in the mailbox and help us to guarantee a sixth season. Or can turn the page.

(All contributions are tax-deductible in the U.S.).