Monkey Business Theatre

Foreword. The Visitors’ Question

foreword The Visitors’ Question carter wilson for fifteen years, most of my opportunities to see the plays of the Monkey Business Theatre, Teatro Lo’il Maxil, have come about through the happy coincidence of being where the company was performing at the right moment. As a friend of cofounder Robert M. Laughlin and several of the original actors, I have always kept an eye on the performance’s effect on the spectators, whether the show is Torches for a New Dawn presented in the plaza of Zinacantán for Mayan schoolchildren or Rogelio Román Hernández Cruz’s The World Turned on Its Head acted before a glittery overflow crowd in the Salón Manuel Ponce at Mexico City’s Palace of Fine Arts. At the Theatre’s San Cristóbal de las Casas headquarters in 2000, one select audience was made up of eight or nine North American indigenous artists— actors, dancers, poets, and a director—traveling together through southern Mexico to better acquaint themselves with Mayan culture, ancient and present -day. The room was not large, barely space enough for the backdrop curtain, the stage action, and some hard wooden chairs for the guests. The show Monkey Business presented that afternoon was When Corn Was Born, which features the fearsome red-coated Earth Lord, a scorpion, and a scad of scurrying ants played by finger puppets, plus kibbitzing and a helping hand for the poor humans of the piece from two of the ancient Mayan gods, portrayed by actors’ voices and huge puppet heads peering down from above the backdrop. Several of the visitors had been trained in New York and were acquainted with the style of Ralph Lee, who had been coming annually to develop and stage a play with Monkey Business Theatre. In the discussion following the performance, the guests asked how much of what they had just seen was Ralph Lee and how much came out of the troupe’s own indigenous traditions. At first, the actors did not answer. The question seemed to have generated some tension, as though the guests had reservations about what they had [ x ] monkey business theatre just seen. Then company member Juan de la Torre made a short speech, pointing out that the Maya have preserved their languages and culture through the more than five hundred years since the arrival of the European invaders. And this they have done, he said, in the face of heavy opposition and disrespect, and with virtually no help from government agencies or other outside sources. Juan’s speech pleased the Native American artists. They began offering songs in their own languages as thanks to the Monkey Business actors, and then there was an exchange of handshakes and abrazos all around. Most people in the outside world are aware that the ancient Maya had a fully functional writing system based on glyphs, and many may know that the modern descendants of the Maya maintain a rich oral story culture. But they know less about Mayan literacy, written literature, and dramatic traditions, either in the deep past or the present. The following brief sketch of this heritage provides a good introduction to the Monkey Business Theatre’s first collection of plays, especially since, even though they usually perform in Spanish, Monkey Business is an important contributor to a vital movement to revive Mayan literacy and literature and to keep Mayan culture vital. — On a July day in 1562, less than fifty years into the Spanish occupation of the YucatánPeninsula,FriarDiegodeLanda,aFranciscan,hadfivethousandMayan idols destroyed at the town of Maní and burned the twenty-seven Mayan books he could lay his hands on. Though Landa could not read the texts, he was convinced they must be full of lies perpetrated by the Devil. At the time, Landa’s newly converted Indian flock “regretted” the destruction of their books “to an amazing degree,” as Landa noted. It caused them, he said, “great affliction.” The Mayan glyphic writing system was a key accomplishment of a civilization that was nearly two thousand years old when the Spanish came along. No one really knows how many people in the Mayas’ city-states could actually read and write, but archaeologists think maybe only 2 percent could write, most of them men, but some women as well. Nevertheless, the relatively small number who were literate were key contributors to social life and included not only ruling lords and ladies, but also the astronomers who interpreted...