Vol. xxix #3

December, 2008

El Progreso huddles on the banks of the Ulúa River, one of two rivers that define the valley in which we live; two rivers that meander leisurely through the lowlands on their way to the sea, some 60 kms. to the north. The Ulúa was to be the setting for the teatro's newest work this year; instead, she became the raging, merciless Diva in a story she authored.

We had been commissioned to do a didactic ecological piece that would help in the effort to organize communities along the river to prepare themselves to confront the natural disasters that occur periodically in this high risk zone. By chance, in January I read Jared Diamond's excellent study Collapse; this gave me the framework from which to understand what has happened in these areas which were thriving banana plantations during much of the twentieth century, but which are now areas of an ecological collapse that fit perfectly the scheme that Diamond defines.

Our season started typically enough with the beginning of the school year in February. Task number one: get the ballet school going. Since Holy Week and Easter fell very early, we decided to stage only the short version of El Asesinato de Jesús. For this we used (aside from our regular actors) the group of children who had formed the cast of Navidad Nuestra last year. The season of El Asesinato was considerably abbreviated in comparison with other years; but the brevity was compensated by the fact that a large group of children and youth acted in the piece and have learned sections of the work for future years.

And my Ulúa research continued: I rediscovered O. Henry's Cabbages and Kings, which gives a vivid portrait of the foreigners who began to invade the country in the last decade of the nineteenth century, the time of the consolidation of power of the banana companies: the new pirates, as O. Henry characterized them.

After Holy Week and the Asesinato season, Edy Barahona took charge of the group to restage a program we created in 2007, More Honduran Stories. It's composed of two stories, The Lorax of Dr. Seuss (which treats the dangers of deforestation) and Further Adventures of Tío Coyote and Tío Conejo. This program would be on the boards while we were working on what turned out to be Ulúa: Episode 1.

At the same time, I went to Mexico to give a workshop: a project that has been going for several years now of teaching our techniques of Emergency Theatre (the style of theatre we developed as a response to Hurricane Mitch 10 years ago) to groups working in Mexico. The last two years have centered around groups in Yucatán and Quintana Roo, but have included people from Chiapas, Mexico City and Sonora. In that context we staged the creation sequence of the Popol-Vuh, the sacred book of the Mayas. And I saw that this sequence would evolve to form part of our new creation.

When I returned from Mexico, the Cuentos were up and running, and we concentrated on reworking Harold Pinter: Art, Truth and Politics: both of these we would do at the end of April in the National Theatre in Tegucigalpa as part of a theatre festival. By this time I had decided that the structure of the ecology piece would be a biography of the Río Ulúa.

But as we got working on it full-time in May, we quickly saw that the idea of a biography is an epic endeavor that gave us far too much material; we had to find some other way to structure it, and think of the biography as a long-term goal. We had the Popol-Vuh, we had a pair of pre-Mayan myths about the origin of rivers and the naming of the Río Ulúa, we had material from O. Henry and Pablo Neruda and other sources but we needed a way to tie things together. Edy found a model in the archives, a script dealing with climate change. It was a not-particularly-good classroom script, but it gave us the structure: a TV series (remember Fame?). We were now working on our pilot, Episode 1.

We opened the piece in June, and dedicated that month to doing it in those high risk communities toward whom it is directed. And as "Tony Sparrow, the Pirate of the Ulúa" says at the beginning:

As you can see, we are trying to stage a play about the history of the Ulúa River, that great serpent that is the base of our livelihood in this area. We've learned lots of interesting things in this project; but you'll have to wait for Episode 4 to see my pirate.

Among those many things we discovered was one relating directly to our focus: I had always thought that Progreso had been founded as a commercial center for the banana plantations. It WAS that, but there was a previous step. The original settlement was made to harvest trees: what had been a luxurious tropical forest was laid bare by the foreign "pirates", clearing the land for the banana plantations. That intensive deforestation plus a century of single-crop agriculture have taken their toll on the river and on the land, and the river is now harvesting its revenge.

Meanwhile, Edy had been organizing our Temporada, the "Season of Artistic Expression" which we do every year. Using a model of summer stock repertory, we try to have something different on the boards every week-end, as a way to build a paying public (from among the professional classes in the city who can afford to pay) as well as to give a space to other regional performing groups. This year we had groups from Tegucigalpa and Guatemala, a puppet troupe from Spain, our old friend the singer/songwriter Guillermo Anderson, one program from our ballet school; and Ulúa premiered as the teatro's own offering.

Then in September, as we kept abreast of the news of the world economic crisis, we got started on Harold Pinter's The Dumbwaiter. But as soon as we opened it in mid-October, the Ulúa River reclaimed its leading role.

The second fortnight of October marked the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Mitch; Nature surprised us with tropical depression #43 which caused heavy rains and intensive flooding throughout the country, especially in those very communities on the banks of the Ulúa River. So we went into "Emergency Theatre" mode, and did shows in the shelters for those who had been displaced by flooding.

And so we tumble toward the end of another year. The final dance recital is almost ready, and we are doing Navidad Nuestra as we did it last year, incorporating children and youth, building it into a town tradition.

Art = knowledge and insight = pride and identity = action/change.

On to Episode 2.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

Jack Warner sj