Honduras's Teatro La Fragua: The Many Faces of Political Theatre

The term "political theatre" conjures up many images: Aristophanes' comedies, Shakespeare's history plays, Ibsen's realist plays, Brecht's epic theatre, the Living Theatre's "rehearsing the revolution" environmental theatre, El Teatro Campesino's agitprop plays, Dario Fo's satires, Augusto Boal's Forum Theatre, and so on. Rooted in the specific and very difficult milieu of Honduras, the work of Teatro La Fragua demonstrates many different concepts of political theatre, from agitprop to religion as social teaching to the simple ideas of culture and heritage as political acts. La Fragua's evolving history offers insight into the changes that have occurred in Central America over the past few decades.

Since 1979, Teatro La Fragua ("The Forge Theatre," as in to forge a national, cultural identity) has tried to raise the cultural standard of living in a country that suffers from severe material and cultural poverty. The uniqueness of their infrastructure (run by a Jesuit missionary, with outside funding) makes it difficult to offer La Fragua as the model for popular theatre; nonetheless their work provides one avenue available to popular theatre groups.¹ Through their dramatization workshops, children's storytelling program, performance of Honduran folktales, dramatization of Central American history, and an ongoing tradition of cycle plays centered on the Christmas and Easter seasons, La Fragua has altered the cultural landscape of Honduras.²

The Honduran Context

Honduras has suffered a long history of dependence, underdevelopment, and economic exploitation, epitomized by its 20th-century status as the quintessential "banana republic." Likewise, the neoliberal economic policies of the 1980s and the globalization of the 1990s created a Honduras that enters the 21st century as a neo-feudal society. Foreign capital controls 80 percent of the economy; foreign companies control 50 percent of the arable land, and another 25 percent of the arable land is controlled by a handful of powerful ranchers. The new industry, the maquillas, or garment sweatshops, are located in tax-free zones. The result is that many Hondurans work for the transnationals or the landed elite. Others try to scratch out a living on small tracts of land ill-suited for agriculture. Not surprisingly, in the Western Hemisphere, Honduras typically ranks only above Haiti in terms of poverty and standard of living. Unemployment and underemployment range from 35 to 50 percent, illiteracy or semiliteracy hovers around 50 percent, and the minimum wage (which most do not make) is about $1,000 per year.³

Intertwined with the material poverty is a pervasive cultural poverty. Social scientists have long identified "the lack of a strong national identity" as one of Honduras's most deeply rooted problems (Barry and Norsworthy 1990:5). Typifying this identity crisis is the fact that prior to Hurricane Mitch, which in 1998 swept Honduras onto the front page even as it nearly washed it off the map, the most significant event in Honduran history in the second half of the 20th century was the Sandinista victory in Nicaragua. That event turned the country into the "USS Honduras": the U.S. used Honduras as the training ground for the Nicaraguan contra rebels. Approximately $1 billion of U.S. aid flowed into Honduras during the 1980s, with most of the money going to military projects or ending up in the bank accounts of corrupt officials. The living conditions for the majority of Hondurans worsened.⁴

The period also saw an influx of American popular culture. In mainstream media Hondurans are, for the most part, absent from representation.⁵ Television programming largely comes from the U.S. and Mexico. Popular radio stations alternate between U.S. rock/pop songs and non-Honduran Latino music.⁶ In response to this cultural crisis, Teatro La Fragua's mission is to give Honduras a culture created by Hondurans, thereby offering a source of pride, an avenue of expression, and a means of creating a national identity. When asked why they do theatre amidst such harsh socioeconomic conditions, actor Edy Barahona responded: "Theatre is our way of saying we are alive. It's a way of telling our people, Honduras counts; even if...