"Retro" seems to be the guiding star of Boston theatre for this entry. The Countess, by Gregory Murphy, makes its Boston debut with the Nora Theatre Company, a stultified drawing-room drama about a ménage between John Ruskin, his wife Euphemia Gray, and the painter John Everett Millais. The insertions and exertions of these desiccated denizens of the upper-class only satisfy the audience's taste for Masterpiece Theatre faux-drama, elevated language without any elevation.

Another "retro" retrofit was the Lyric Stage Company's "A...My Name Will Always Be Alice." Though competently performed, this grab-bag of old-style feminism is quaint without being endearing.  The rougher tumble of the dot.com-world and jagged-edged glass ceiling requires a new feminism, more akin to a fuller humanism, but "Alice" is, like The Countess, an appeal to nostalgia so that the aging boomers sitting in the seats do not have to confront the world that they have wrought. (The root of "nostalgia" is, anyway, about blunting the pain of the present by appealing to the comfort offered by some home in the past.)

We also get this month the usual dose of family dysfunction, with Fuddy Meers, Long Day's Journey Into Night, Nocturne (written by the critics-coronated wunderkind Adam Rapp), Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Beauty Queen of Lenane, Dinner with Friends, Death of a Salesman (the Brian Dennehy vehicle), and Macbeth to name a few.  The chestnuts get their due as well, with Annie, Annie Get Your Gun, Phantom, Hello Dolly, Evita, Fiddler on the Roof, Funny Girl.  Shear Madness and Blue Man Group appear to have achieved immortality, and a new staple has been added to the carriage trade, I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change (talk about retro!).  The big guns in town -- American Repertory Theatre and Huntington Theatre (under the new direction of Nicholas Martin) -- will be offering Antigone and A Fair Country, respectively.  Shakespeare comes into the city with The Falstaffiad (an A.R.T. fundraiser with corpulent bloviator Harold Bloom in the role of the corpulent bloviator, reading a conflation of Henry IV and Henry V). Richard III, The Taming of the Shrew, and The Merry Wives of Windsor (plus the aforementioned Macbeth) bare the Bard on the boards. Only the colleges and the local art-alternative group Mobius consistently offer material that begins to chew at the edges of things.

Boston will be getting two new theatres -- quite a feat in a city addicted to submerging highways and overbuilding on waterfronts. They will be appended to the current Boston Center for the Arts and be mid-size, able to house productions larger than the black box or 240-seat theatre currently at the BCA but not large enough to fill the Huntington's 900 seats.  By the way, the Huntington most likely will manage the new properties, and Artistic Director Nicholas Martin has said that he would like to use them to showcase new works.  Another art/theatre space might open up on that overbuilt waterfront, managed by the Institute for Contemporary Art. However, there are doubts about the ICA's ability to raise the funds, and the project is both going forward and on hold. The Nora Theatre and Underground Railway Theatre will also share a new theatre space in Central Square, Cambridge, thanks to a collaboration with Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which is renovating one of its properties in the Square.  Other changes: Eric D'Alessandro is leaving as Executive Director of StageSource (which links theatre artists to producers); Susan Hartnett, executive director of the Boston Center for the Arts, will be leaving.

But the theatre I really want to talk about is work that friends and I have been doing with the material of Augusto Boal, theatre that is sixty miles and light-years away from the industrial goings-on in the theatre district and elsewhere.

Theatre of the Oppressed with the Oppressed

Despite the long and varied career of Augusto Boal, many people in the United States who consider themselves knowledgeable about theatre are still not fully aware of his work, loosely gathered under a practice called "Theatre of the Oppressed."  That is not surprising -- Boal's approach to training and his vision of what theatre is supposed to do and be used for runs counter to the historical and aesthetic trends and production styles of American theatre.  To be sure, Boal's approaches are used in some American programs but often disconnected from his larger philosophical and political intentions, which makes them exercises for exercise rather than portals into the larger social and political dimensions of theatre.

But over the past year I have had the electric pleasure of working with a group of people using Boal's techniques with male prisoners at a "correctional facility" somewhere in the heart of the Massachusetts darkness. In short, we have been using theatre of the oppressed with the oppressed, and it has reminded us that "live theatre," when charged with urgency and a certain kind of patient desperation, is "live" in the sense that a grenade is "live" when the pin is pulled.

Boal began his theatre work at least 20 years ago in Brazil. He crystallized his ideas in his 1985 Theatre of the Oppressed, where he explained that the core of Theatre of the Oppressed (TOTO) is to use theatre, broadly defined, to identify situations of oppression (both external and internal) and practice ways to overcome them. His 1992 Games for Actors and Non-Actors, more or less the Boalian Bible, begins with exercises that train particpants' ability to connect with another in ways that physicalize situations of power and powerlessness. This training then gets directed into several performance modes, called Invisible Theatre, Image Theatre, and Forum Theatre. (Though listed separately, they are hardly ever separate during a Boal workshop.) These approaches, by and large, work on confronting external situations of oppression and practicing ways they can be changed.

Later, after his work in Europe, he extended TOTO work to look at internal oppressions, what eventually became known as "Cops in the Head" and "Rainbow of Desires." Since 1992, he has been an elected member of Brazil's Parliament, and he has used TOTO techniques to work with his constituents to draft legislation, "in which the citizen makes the law through the legislator." He explains this work this way: "Hamlet says in his famous speech to the actors that theatre is a mirror in which may be seen the true image of nature, of reality.  I wanted to penetrate this mirror, to transform the image I saw in it, and bring that transformed image back to reality: to realize the image of my desire. I wanted it to be possible for the spectators in Forum Theatre to transgress, to break the conventions, to enter the mirror of a theatrical fiction, rehearse the forms of struggle, and then return to reality with the images of their desires."

Coming to the Prison

My comrades -- Joyce, Maria-Beatriz, Geoff, and Dev -- and I had all been, in one or another, thinking about Boal at the same when we were offered an opportunity, through Maria's connection with Joyce, to work at a prison with a group of men who had been going through a program called "Growing Together."  Joyce, a minister who had been involved in social justice work for decades, helped put together and run Growing Together, which was based on the book Houses of Healing and was dedicated to teaching "emotional literacy."  Through a long and discussive process (the men had been in the program for two and three years when we first met them), the men had confronted many of the issues raised by their crimes, including anger, violence, confession, sorrow, restitution. The program had not only helped them face the fall-out from their own actions, it had also helped them weather the indignities of prison life itself without resorting to anger or resignation.  Joyce thought it might be helpful for the men if they had a chance to do some theatre work and invited us to be part of Growing Together. (Of course, we had to "package" the program a little to get it past the guardians -- we could not quite say, out loud, that we wanted to work with prisoners on practicing ways they could resist oppression. Corrections officials are humorless about such things.)

At first visit, we were not sure what to expect -- I particularly thought of Arlo Guthrie, in "Alice's Restaurant," sitting on the Group W bench. We waited in a cold reception room, all metal taken off us and stored in a locker where we had to pay a quarter for the key, while the officers behind the Plexiglas vetted our paperwork. Others sat in the room with us, all on various missions -- chatter was minimal. Then the thick electric door slid back, and we paraded into the "trap" -- the foyer between the outside and inside worlds. There we were stamped with an invisible ink and then ordered to walk through a metal detector where, in the center, we had to pirouette to be scanned from all sides.  One of us -- a random selection each time -- had to be strip-searched, which was done in a small windowless side room.  Only then, when we'd been reduced to their version of the essentials, scoured and noted, and taken through two more "traps," were we allowed into the first circle of those on the inside.

One more check-point, and then into the room, where 16 men -- all ages, all shapes, all colors, all human -- sat in a ring of  plastic chairs, waiting. The second circle -- the real circle.  And then began some of the best theatre work we have ever had the honor of doing.

Working with the Men: Part 1

I could go into long lauds about each of the people we have now known for just about a year, but I will try to capture, instead, something of their quintessence. Yes, they are "criminals," some of them having committed some very dark crimes.  Yes, they are "prisoners," owned by a correctional system with no real interest in their correction (this program, and all programs at the prison, are completely voluntary -- the state provides no resources for education or rehabilitation).  But unless they are the sweetest and most masterful con men ever to trod the earth, we have also found them generous and affectionate, and, in terms of the theatre work, open, charged, and connected right down to their guts.  Despite -- or perhaps because of -- their confinement, they come at this work with a force that many teaching instructors of sometimes disaffected or detached students would envy. In short, they are still human beings, no matter how hard the society tries to tell us otherwise.  Their "criminality" does not limit or delete their humanity.

Our work with them over the year has basically been done in three parts: 1) to introduce them to Boal and his techniques; 2) to work specifically on Forum Theatre; and 3) to work on Cops in the Head.  The third part is currently in progress and not completed, so I'll focus primarily on the first two parts.

In Part 1, we worked a lot with them about image and its power to evoke emotion and response.  Much of Boal's preparatory work with actors is "pre-word," that is, investigating how the "instrument" of the body conveys power and powerlessness even before a word of command or insult surfaces.  For instance, in one of his games, Image of the Oppressor, participants choose up in pairs, A and B. Each person thinks of an event when someone made them feel powerless, and with that event in mind, each person puts himself in the place of the oppressor.  Then A, using only his eyes, will try to get B to feel the powerlessness that A felt in that event, and B is to respond as truthfully as possible using only his own eyes, to what he sees in A's eyes. Then the "joker" (Boal's term for the facilitator, or, as Boal calls its, the "difficultator") will say, "Now add the face," and A will add the face to his effort to exude the power that caused the powerlessness, and B responds with his own eyes and added face.  The joker will then say to add a tilt of the head, then the shoulders, then arms and upper body, then the whole body (while staying in place), then moving and adding a sound, and only at the very end to add words.  After a few moments, the exercise is stopped and the pair reverses the process.

The effects of this game are powerful -- many on either side, powerful or powerless, will break it off because it gets very intense as images of fathers, abusers, football coaches, and the like come rushing to the foreground.  In the debriefing that follows, they understand clearly what Boal was getting at: one does not need words to press the boot into someone's face.  Images, poses, an unblinking glare -- they all can do the work equally well. And they also understand, as we explain it to them, that the game is to sensitize them to connect with the other actors on a stage in a scene, that information and intention can be broadcast by how and where one shapes his body and that they need to be aware of this in order to respond to it.

We also did lots of games just for fun and warm-up, like Bomb and Shield and Colombian Hypnosis, in order to get them out of their heads and voices and teach them about how to shape space to connect with other people.  I can honestly say I have had some of the loopiest and most kid-like enjoyment I have ever had as these men, supposedly hardened criminals, the dregs of the society, rolled on the floor, made animal noises, carried invisible weights, and otherwise acted like engaged fools.  In these unbuckled moments, as Boal intended, all the categories and judgments get hung to one side so that we can come to this theatre work with our humanity in full and flapping view.

We stretched this image-power work in several ways, usually by having them make sculptures and body-machines on topics they chose, such as injustice, invisibility, racism, dignity.  In these more formalized exercises, they would come up with jolting and piercing choices, things that none of us supposed "theatre people" would have thought of in millennia. In our last session before a summer break, we asked them, in the final exercise, what they wanted to say to each other that would carry them over the summer and help us re-connect when we got together in the fall.  They could use any image, and they had to connect a word to their image as they made it. A small time for thinking, then the floor was open.  And these 16 men, one by one, slowly and deliberately, sculpted a gift for each other and for us that in its simple yet fluted shape, the air annotated with a "peace" or "remember" as each man joined, left the space taut and thrilling all around us. Live theatre, yes -- full-bodied and unfractioned.

Working with the Men: Part 2

When we reconnected with them after a summer break, we wanted to bring them to Forum Theatre, Boal's method of using theatre to rehearse possible challenges to oppression. The image work in Part 1 were "snapshots"; Forum Theatre was the snapshots turned into film, into motion. Forum Theatre provided a natural follow-on to the work we had already done with them.

In Forum Theatre, a group of "actors" collaboratively come up with a story about oppression. The story need not be a "grand" story. A story about a brother and a sister who are treated differently when they want to do something outside the house -- the boy can go out unaccompanied but the girl must have a chaperon -- would provide a perfect core.

The actors then "rehearse" the story into a play -- without scripts, they come up with scenes, dialogue, action, and so on, all done collaboratively.  The only requirement is that the play have a clear protagonist -- the one who is being oppressed -- and clear antagonists -- the oppressors. The joker helps them shape and focus and, if the actors are stuck, can give them a "mode of rehearsal" to help get them unstuck -- speaking the lines faster or slower, doing everything in dumbshow or with great exaggeration, and so on. Then, when the scene is "set," the actors perform the piece for the audience.

Now, the "audience" in Boal Forum Theatre are not just spectators, not a passel of listeners, as the word suggests.  Boal calls the audience "spect-actors" (an obvious play on "spectator") because they have an important "acting" part in the process.  As Boal says, the intention of Forum Theatre is "to transform the spectator into into the protagonist of the theatrical action and, by this transformation, to try to change society rather than contenting ourselves with interpreting it."

After the actors present the scene once, they repeat the scene.  However, during this second go-around, any spect-actor can shout, "Stop!" and take the place of the protagonist.  The scene then goes forward, with the new protagonist bringing a "solution" to the scene to force it to a new conclusion. The antagonists, though, as Boal points out, are the conservative forces; their job is to make sure the scene ends the way it is supposed to end, as it was rehearsed. They try to blunt, deflect, or beat down the challenge brought by the new protagonist.

The protagonist has to play the game within certain limits.  The "solution" brought forward cannot be magical or completely unconnected to the action at hand; it has to arise, in some natural way, from the given situation. And if the solution the new protagonist brings forward does not work, any spect-actor can shout "Stop!" again and try something new, and the protagonist on stage must give way to the new protagonist coming on. This process can go on for as long as the spect-actors and actors want it to; Boal describes performances that go on for hours and hours.

Boal's intentions are clear with Forum Theatre, as indeed they are with all aspects of Theatre of the Oppressed: what happens on stage, in the safety of the theatre, can become what he calls a "dress rehearsal" for trying to make actual change in real life.  There is no guarantee that a solution hit upon by a spect-actor/protagonist will actually work in the real world; but, at the same time, the spect-actors and actors leaving the theatre at the end of the day can bring away fresh approaches to meeting their oppressive conditions and use these new ideas as a spark to craft actual strategies to free themselves.

In the prison, we took them through the entire process of preparation, rehearsal, and performance. First, we polled the group about themes they felt were important to address; the two they decided on was racism and the invisiblity of prisoners to the general population.  We then divided the entire group of 16 into two smaller groups of eight and gave each group one of the themes.  Then, each group of eight paired off, and in their dyads, they told each other a story, from their own lives, about some event of oppression that fit the theme. Then, still in their pairs, they had to blend elements from each individual story into a third story that did not belong to either man but came from their combined experiences. Two pairs became a quartet and they joined their two "drafts" into another combined story; and finally all eight took these two new "drafts" and refined them into a single story that had bits from everyone's experience but belonged to the group as a collaborated item.

Then we got them out of their chairs and into rehearsal, where they crafted all the dialogue, blocking, and narrative arc. After that, each group gave a "dress rehearsal" in front of the other group for critique, and then each group took the critiques back into the rehearsal process to refine the piece.  They took naturally to the process, being a pretty extroverted group of guys to begin with, pushing themselves to focus, acting as their own "jokers," coming up with clever solutions for knots or dead-ends, having no inhibitions about taking on any role (one man had to play another man's wife, and neither showed the slightest hesitation in putting on those masks), all of which showed a real affinity for stagework.  And finally, the performances themselves, where each spect-actor jumping into the place of the protagonist pushed the limits of the available solutions until ways emerged where a clear path to a greater freedom could be seen.

One example will have to do as a demonstration for the whole process.  In the piece on the invisibility of prisoners, there was a scene where three men (the prisoners) were being "processed" into the institution. As originally drafted, the scene was completely degrading; the prisoners were berated, insulted, minimized. But the various spect-actors who jumped into the scene found ways to resist the overbearing authority without bringing further damage onto themselves -- through a turn of phrase, a slightly straighter spine, an unexpected response that threw off the rhythm of deletion. They thus found ways to maintain a dignity in a place that originally gave them no options for that. In Boal's terms, they were able to use theatre to rehearse a solution to an oppressive situation.  There was no guarantee it would work in "real" life; but the act of rehearsing it changed the people doing the act, and that change could be carried forward into the world like a seed.

That day ended on a high and deep note.  Briefly, we had all been brought where live theatre can sometimes take us, where the ego disconnects and what we call our humanity or our essence or our better angels stand in easy and affectionate reach, not guarded, not dim, in common, in communion. In theatre we had not only found a momentary solution to each of the stories; in theatre, we had also found a momentary solution to our distances and fears.  This is, ultimately, what Boal wants his theatre practice to do: dissolve barriers to true connections.

Working with the Men: Part 3

Boal's early work in Latin America was often done under repressive conditions. When he came to Europe in more-or-less exile, he found a puzzle. In countries nominally democratic and unrepressive, people were still suffering various tortures and constrictions, with high rates of self-destructive behavior in the midst of affluent conditions. What was going on?

From this initial observation he developed a way to "tweak" TOTO to look at the "cops in the head" and the "rainbow of desires" we each have that prevent us from doing something that, objectively, we have every opportunity and skill to do. This will be the focus of the next phase of our work with the men.

(Not The) Final Word

Boal's work does not appeal to everyone. I have many actor friends who politely glaze over whenever I talk about this work to them, and some disagree with it completely, saying that theatre and politics do not, and should not, mix.  But for us, we have experienced what we feel is real theatre -- not the machinery of the "industry" but that sacred place we all say theatre both inhabits and protects, that takes the best of us (even at our worst) and makes the best out of it.

No doubt, what gives an added fillip of urgency and "edge" to the work we are doing is the location of our "stage," in the belly of the beast, so to speak. And our "actors" are not people who, at the end of the day, go home to check messages, set up new auditions, and fret about how they are going to make it in "the business."  They inhabit the lowest and most vilified rung of our society, forever branded as defective. They run the voltage of their very present-tense lives straight into the work we give to them.

To be sure, some of their enthusiasm for what we offered came simply from the chance to do something new to break the routine. But they also entered this process already engaged in their own version of Theatre of the Oppressed in the prison, only it played itself out as silent resistance or isolated patience or anything else that could help them maintain some sense of their own dignity and humanity.  What we offered was a way for them to take these sullen or inchoate or silenced "scripts" and give them air, light, and a hearing. We really did not give them something completely new; we just made a new vocabulary available and marked out some paths they could follow as they brought themselves up to the surface.

And this is not to say that we "saved" them, or that Boal saved them.  Long before we got there, these men had been on personal journeys to find their own honest redemption and to make amends for what they had done; this is what the "Growing Together" program is all about.  Even if the society at large will never really believe that someone who killed another person can be redeemed enough to be accepted back into the human community, these men believe that they will find the ways to come to peace with themselves and with those whom they have hurt.  What we brought when we brought Boal to them was simply another tool for them to use as they sculpt themselves into human beings.

Yes, some of these men have done terrible things.  But they do not stop being humans because of that, even if the calculus of the prevailing law-and-order mentality zeros them out and sums up that they have forfeited any affection from the society that has imprisoned them. In the oppressive conditions of the prison, our work can give them a few hours of lightness and help them to continue to calibrate their lives so that they can find a way to be human and stay sane. Again, this is not to deny what they have done, but it is also to recognize that they are not only what they have done.

Furthermore, given what we have read about the pathology of the prison system in this country, our work is a small way to put a brake on the incarcerated society America seems to be becoming.  (We consider gated communities as part of the prison society, only at the other end of the spectrum.) We could do this through policy work -- and we might.  We could do this through polemic and agitation -- and we might do that as well. But for now, given our talents and spirits, working with these men, using the gift of Boal's teachings, is our way of using theatre to make our common ground less vindictive, more forgiving, ultimately freer and fairer.

© 2000 Michael Bettencourt ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

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