Vol. xxiv #3

September, 2003

Sometimes Kipling wrote for children,
and whoever writes for children runs the risk
of contaminating his image.
--Jorge Luis Borges

We hear the same lament everywhere: reading and writing are habits on the endangered species list in this era of television's hypnotic spell. But we know that there are few habits that can so humanize the human spirit like reading and writing can. It's not a fluke that we say that our culture, the best of it (and much of the worst, too), is the product of many books: the Bible, the Koran, the Mayan Popol Vuh, Homer and Plato and Shakespeare. So we have to be grateful every time a voice is raised to remind us how it was, what necessities and desires came together in that blessed moment that brought us the gift of writing. That is exactly what teatro la fragua is doing in the Just So Stories, a theatrical adaptation of one of the tales of the English author Rudyard Kipling (winner of the Nobel Prize in 1907), which narrates "How the first letter was written" and "How the first post office was established", and all the changes that those discoveries brought about in the rudimentary life of a group of cave-men, permitting them to cross the threshold where savagery ends and the sublime adventure of the human begins.

The Just So Stories were adapted in 1976 by Jack Warner and several of his fellow students at the Goodman School of Drama; the staging of the children's tale, which Kipling wrote in 1902, was produced in the Goodman Children's Theatre in Chicago under the direction of Joseph Slowik, the director who has had a strong influence on Jack's theatrical formation and work. I don't think I'm going out on an emotional limb if I state that teatro la fragua is a legitimate grandchild of that Polish-American director, theatrical disciple of Grotowski, another universal Pole. It's a family bond that reminds me of the old, unbeaten fisherman, with the eyes of a child, who opened up the secrets and marvels of the sea to the young Manolín, in that immortal tale recounted by Hemingway in The Old Man and the Sea. Joe's friendship and support (we all think of Joe as part of the teatro) continue to be an important reference point for the work of teatro la fragua in Honduras.

As has happened with many other persons, Jack Warner grew up on Kipling's narrations. The British writer with an Indian heart belongs to that generation of writers that we all read in childhood and adolescence, establishing a faithful relationship with their characters which time and even adulthood doesn't manage to dissolve. These are works that one always loves and prefers a bit more than the works of other writers, because reading them always takes us back to a time of profound and unworried happiness, when the spirit of exploration, invention and creativity still hovered over us. That's what Warner is implying when he states that of all the works he has staged in the many years of his theatrical career, there is one that remains a favorite and for which he retains a special affection: The Just So Stories of Rudyard Kipling.

As I write this I can't avoid remembering my own childhood experience with another book of narration similar to those of Kipling: Jules Verne's The Mysterious Island. Not long ago, in a lightning visit to my parents' house, I rediscovered on one of the shelves of the family library that now ancient edition of Verne's masterly narrative. Taking the book in my hands I felt the wrinkles on the yellowing cover and the accumulated dust of many years. On the first page, my name written in a forgotten handwriting and the traces of stickers whose glue had not resisted the implacable march of the years. But inside, on the pages of the book, the adventure remained fresh, eternally young and relevant. And I saw again that coming and going from one town to another that was my childhood, travelling to the east of my country El Salvador in the atmosphere where the threat of the civil war was always present. I was accompanied by my backpack, a few clothes, a couple of toys, and The Mysterious Island wrapped up in my sheets. I can still feel clearly the emotions of those nights of eager reading, and the smell of insecticide (my father sprayed ritually every night to ward off mosquitoes) pervading the dimly lighted room. With the passing of time I have learned to appreciate even more that narrative which with simplicity, congenial ingenuity and an overflow of brilliant invention, opened up for me the truth that life is like the mysterious island that Verne describes, where survival depends on basic values like companionship, curiosity, righteousness, honesty, and that heroism which is ready for any sacrifice in the name of friendship.

In the same way that a part of our childhood is branded with the mark of writers like Verne or Mark Twain, the infancy and childhood of la fragua was branded with the mark of Kipling and his Just So Stories. In 1979, three years after staging the show in Chicago, Jack Warner had completed his studies and had established residence in Honduras; that year he opened a first Honduran version of the Stories for a popular audience. teatro la fragua had only begun its wanderings a few months before, in what was at that time the wild and inaccessible geography of Olanchito and its environs colonized by banana plantations. Many communities in the mountains and valleys of northern Honduras lived an existence not far removed from that of the Tegumai tribe, the proto-human protagonists of the piece: a rudimentary life limited most of the time to the chores of basic survival, where the fires of invention and culture had not yet been lighted or stimulated. In that context the Just So Stories were an invitation to come out from the monotonous life of the cave and to discover the transforming power that reading and writing wield, and to stimulate in the population (especially in the children) the necessity of and the right to an education.

Twenty-four years later many things in Honduras have changed: electricity has come to places one would never have imagined, parabolic antennae reign over remote towns, there are more schools although in many there are still no desks or teachers; or a will to teach, not only for a paycheck but as a committed vocation. And in spite of this more "civilized" veneer, Kipling's message in the Just So Stories retains its relevance in a society where the empire of the image exercises its sweet tyranny, where the great majority of the population still lives in the obscurity of the cave, with no time to cultivate the spirit through culture and education.

Those who have seen the work, whether they be children or adults, share the experience of an eternal happy instant in which they can recuperate their childhood, to paraphrase the title of Fernando Savater's thought-provoking book. There are many things we have to recover in the tangled and confused world in which it is our lot to live today, and among those are the values of childhood. Perhaps we have to give up on innocence as being definitively lost, drowned as we are in the sea of images springing from our adult capacity for evil and barbarity, which are the main course served up by the media. And even more impossible to care for or preserve that innocence of childhood when in these Third World latitudes it is the first thing to be profaned; when many children are forced to trade work for play, to sleep in the streets, or are offered up as the latest trendy sexual delicacy.

When you see the Just So Stories the experience is something like the very therapeutic experience of playing with children; a simple, elemental and profound experience like when, at night, after a day complicated by the responsibilities and messiness of the adult world, you sit at the foot of the bed where a child you love is sleeping, and as you sense the child's presence (yawning, readjusting positions, dreaming of worlds unknown to us adults) an unexplainable sensation of peace and deep hope comes over you, an impulse that brings to the surface our best feelings and ideas; a few moments of luminous clarity of vision where something small and fragile inspires us to fight with all our convictions to create a better world. This is what the group of actors of teatro la fragua do and provoke every time they do a show of the Kipling piece: they get us to play and to dream with hope -- the only thing that gives us the freedom to play, according to Savater.

Guillermo Anderson, the outstanding musician and composer of the marvels and secrets of the Honduran Caribbean, tells the story of meeting someone who knew him only by having heard his songs on the radio. When they met personally the "fan" let out a bird whistle and said to Guillermo: Ah, you're the one who sings to the birds, clearly implying that with all the serious and urgent problems there are in Honduras (corruption, the drug trade, violence, poverty), here comes an artist composing songs about birds as a tactic to avoid confronting the country's real problems. Clearly Guillermo Anderson's is one of the country's most socially committed artistic voices, and his rhythms and melodies express the country's gravest problems (although to judge an artist for his political opinions -- as Borges points out -- is the most superficial criticism possible). But the problem with Guillermo's song to the birds (although in itself it is a ringing denunciation that gently calls our attention to the fact that we have to control our wild instincts to destroy nature) is that his temperament is rooted in the same source from which children's stories spring. And as a matter of fact the song pertains to a set of songs for children with a distinct ecological commitment -- songs for children that carry a strong message for adults.

In the opposite sense of that of Anderson's friend, a few days after the opening of the show in 1976, a Chicago drama critic called it "a small gem in a small house". But as Borges points out, anyone who writes, sings or acts for children runs the risk that the very fact of doing so contaminates his image. And in spite of his Nobel Prize, something like that has happened with Kipling, who for the Argentine writer continues to be a famous writer, but also a secret or prohibited writer, because his name is not pronounced with the same reverent tones reserved for other literary giants who didn't contaminate their image by writing for children or adolescents. Nonetheless, many of life's secrets can only be understood if we look at them with the eyes of children. The Just So Stories is a small work, like the children to whom it is directed; but this small theatrical gem has a splendor, that slippery and playful gleam of hope, capable of illuminating our hearts and waking that child hidden in all of us, and of awakening the small and simple human values of that child which have gotten lost in the confused mass of adult worries.

--Carlos M. Castro