The Juggling Jungle Traveling Gospel Show

They arrive at the church an hour early for a final dress rehearsal. The people of the town trickle in, some out of habit, some to find out what the ruckus is. Soon it is obvious that most of the village has heard that something is happening at the church, and the holy along with the curious begin to fill the pews and aisles. The noises of horses and chickens mix with the sounds of kids hawking oranges, and the overflow crowd spills into the street and ebbs back as the Mass breathes its natural rhythms. Kids sit on the window ledges, taking advantage of their agility and a little space. The ritual advances to the reading of the Gospel and a group files onto the altar and announces "Dramatización del Santo Evangelio." The church quiets, necks crane and the same agile kids appear between the legs of the adults in front. Over the shouts and snorts and crows outside, the Gospel is played out.

Christmas season. The rains in the north, delayed slightly by the unseasonably heavy storms that struck for 19 consecutive days in October, are carrying away the bridges. Sugar is becoming rare, and milk is scarce as the big dairies export their stocks. In the high valleys, the bean-picking is almost through, and in the mountains the coffee harvest is ready. Coffee pickers earn about 50 cents for a gallon of coffee picked, and a strong young man might be able to pick 8 or 9 gallons in a day. There is no mid-winter rest here in Honduras as there is in the lands to the far north, just as there is no wine and little bread: church traditions were born of European realities, and overlook the fact that "summer" here is the dry season, "winter" the rainy season, and can be completely different on opposite slopes of the same mountain.

The 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 spectacle. 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 John screaming "Brood of Vipers!" at the crowd. And as Herod has John thrown into prison, an empty hush settles on the church.

Up in those 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 it increases with each harvest, that the more it is shared the more it spreads, that each season brings forth a greater demand for the fruits of the harvest. The gospel dramatizations have taken root.

And then the three boys from Las Delicias (a village three hours from the end of all wheeled traffic, Honduran sons of undocumented Guatemalan parents) step front-center in a deliberate, confident entrance. With a strong, disciplined introduction, three thirteen-year-old boys 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."

Throughout the liturgical year, teatro la fragua holds workshops on dramatizing the biblical texts of the season, workshops that we give in the parishes in the north of Honduras, especially the Aguán Valley. Groups come to the workshops to learn dramatizations which they can take back to their villages with them, as well as to gain the experience and training with which they can develop their own dramatizations of the weekly gospel readings throughout the year. As the word spreads through a parish, each workshop draws new groups from villages that had previously been unrepresented. We call this ongoing project "ĦEl Evangelio en Vivo!" -- The Gospel: Live!

More vertical seams are found by another wave of kids anxious to taste their own potential in what their peers are doing on the altar. Horizontal seams are filled as seats of pews are used as foot-ladders, and then again as backs of pews are utilized. A spontaneous wall of human faces reaches in layers from 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, held rapt by a story two thousand years old, a story they had never understood in this way before, as a living reflection of their own reality.

We are currently in the midst of workshops on the Christmas infancy narratives from Matthew and Luke. The groups bunk down late Thursday afternoon in a parish assembly space and work through Saturday night with a fragua director. 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 "Prepare the way of the Lord" to Herod's massacre of the subversive children, and include 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 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, involuntarily seized by the power of electric performers. 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 emanates from the soul and not from a gun, the power of hope, not of fear. Raw unfettered Honduran power.

The climax of these workshops is Sunday morning Mass. The groups are split up according to proximity--to make sure that all can get home to their villages before dark--into two sets, each of which is to present the sequence in the church of a different town within the parish. This sequence then serves as a rudimentary cycle play modeled on the epic dramas of medieval Europe, which the groups can continue to get together and present on a rotating basis in their own and other villages in the area. (And as everyone from a beginning kindergarten teacher to the stage manager at Radio City Music Hall knows, the Christmas story can be cut and pasted into an infinite variety of collages, most of which are theatrically effective on their own terms).

In Bonito Oriental a week later, twenty kids from Las Delicias, Vista Hermosa, Carbonales and Bonito return for continued work on their gospel sequence and a fine-tuning of the scenes for presentation at Christmas. Oscar Cardoza, our Barishnikov who has blossomed into a promising director, is working on the John the Baptist scene from the third chapter of the Gospel of Luke. A truckload of horses and cows guarded by half a dozen soldiers backs up to the front of the church. The soldiers get out and walk, fully armed, to the doors of the church; on the altar two soldiers question John the Baptist: "And we, what shall we do?" Oscar in his prudence shouts "Cut!" and starts working with John the Baptist on his character.

The stories from the Gospels are marvelous sources for creating a community of theatres and dramatists. They are wonderfully written--one begins to appreciate that divine inspiration and artistic inspiration are close kin--and have proved to be perfect training grounds on many fronts. On the part of the novice actors, these stories are the basis for learning the rudiments of acting--speech, movement, expression--within the context of 5-10 minute works that can be presented every week at church. For the members of teatro la fragua, these workshops have become their laboratories as both directors and writers. They have learned to take a printed text and turn it into a dramatic presentation, recognizing the conflicts, the characters, the vanities and tragedies and laughter. And they have begun to add bits of phrasing, to place the narratives within a Honduran context, until their Honduran audience might see clearly the harsh decision a poor, eighteen-year-old Honduran Joseph faces when he finds that Mary is pregnant, and the joy brought by the angel's message that the child is of the Holy Spirit.

After a few minutes the soldiers get bored and drive off with their truckload of "requisitioned" supplies. Oscar resumes the rehearsal and John the Baptist glares at the soldiers and replies:

Rob no one, neither by violence
nor by false accusation,
and be content with your wages,
instead of extorting from the people.

There is a spontaneous pause and as one the actors look towards the doors. They suddenly understand a little more clearly the words of the Gospel and its ringing condemnation of those who would put the laws of military authority above the laws of God.

And so teatro la fragua has produced a new generation of actors, far more numerous and geographically dispersed than the first two generations. And the members of teatro la fragua move on, personally and professionally, to the maturity of parenthood for the older members, and adulthood for the younger, and begin to guide this new generation.

teatro la fragua lives with and of this new generation of barefoot, proud, indigenous dreamers, in the muddy roads, under the corrugated tin roofs and coconut palms, next to the pigs and chickens, goats, horses, dogs, oxen, iguanas and tarantulas. We're a hot, a gritty theatre, and we've grown out of this land. We won't stop to apologize for not being able to afford the luxury of wiping the mud from our shoes, because we gain strength and meaning from that mud, from the air, the fire and the water. We're a raw, tough theatre in a land inundated by hurricanes, bananas, contras and poverty. Occasionally primitive theatre, theatre which has to compete for its audience with machete duels, floods, harvests and the cultural illiteracy which policy makers in foreign capitals have legislated upon us. We are tenacious theatre, theatre which refuses to concede defeat in the face of washed-out bridges, tenuous funding, blackouts and real personal risk. We are theatre not for the delicate of sensibility, nor for the easily daunted. We are teatro la fragua.

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.

Our sincere prayer for a Christmas filled with peace and joy.
And may you help bring that peace to this world of darkness in the New Year.

Peace,


Jack Warner sj

Edy Barahona

José Ramón Bardales

José Obdulio Cueva Padilla

Guillermo A. Fernández

José Ramón (Chito) Inestroza

Mario Inestroza

Mike Warner