Boal, Augusto

(1931–2009)

   Brazilian playwright, theater director, and theorist. One of Brazil’s most important cultural voices, Boal spent his early years in Rio de Janeiro. In the late 1940s he attended Columbia University in New York, where he was trained as a chemical engineer. Soon after graduation, he returned to Brazil to work with the influential Teatro Arena of São Paulo.

   Founded in 1953, with José Renato as its first director, Teatro Arena was one of several experimental troupes in Brazil that sought a more direct relationship with its audience to create a new social and political consciousness. By the late 1940s, companies such as Teatro Brasileiro de Comédias, O Teatro Universitário, Grupo Universitário do Teatro de São Paulo, Teatro de Câmara, and the Companhia Fernando de Barros had revolutionized the Brazilian stage. One of Teatro Arena’s plays, Eles não usam black tie (1958, They Don’t Use Tuxedos), by Gianfrancesco Guarnieri, garnered them the attention of the theatergoing public with its examination of the plight of the residents of the favelas (shantytowns). Like many of its contemporaries, Teatro Arena also emphasized the use of Brazilian Portuguese in its work, as opposed to the more formal Luso-Portuguese that had been considered de rigueur in Brazilian literary circles until well into the 20th century.

   Boal joined Teatro Arena at this effervescent moment in Brazilian life and soon made his mark. His earlier comedies, such as Sortilégio (1952, Sortilege) and Marido magro, mulher chata (1956, Skinny Husband, Nagging Wife) found appreciative audiences. A moreambitious work, Revolução na América do Sul (1960, Revolution in South America), also proved popular with audiences with its satirical depiction of the South American revolutions from a Marxist perspective. It was during his tenure with Teatro Arena that Boal began developing the theater aesthetics that would bring him the attention of theater practitioners worldwide. Building on the Latin American tradition of inviting audience discussion after a performance, in the 1960s Boal developed a process to bridge the gap between spectator and participant. As part of his early work with theater, audiences were invited to stop the action in a play at the point where the character was experiencing an instance of oppression. Following the suggestions of the audience, the actor would then improvise a response that in most cases challenged the oppressor. According to a biography of the author, during one of these sessions, “in a now legendary development,” a woman in the audience became so outraged when the actor could not understand her recommendations that she joined him on stage to act them out. According to Boal, this was the birth of the espectador-ator (the spect-actor) and the theory that through artistic collaboration participating audiences become cognizant that change is possible. Thus theater becomes an agent of social change and the means to challenge oppression.

   Following the 1964 military coup, Boal directed the hugely popular Shows opinião (Opinion Shows), which were staged by the group Opinião and which adopted a musical-revue format. Armando Costa, Oduvaldo Vianna Filho, and Paulo Pontes, among others, collaborated in this endeavor. Aimed at middle-class audiences of students and intellectuals, the shows featured singer Nara Leão, one of the undisputed queens of bossa nova. According to Nancy T. Baden, the musical format of the show signaled the increasing importance of popular music in political protest in the following years, when artists such as Chico Buarque, Caetano Veloso, and Gilberto Gil voiced their dissent. As a cultural tactic, supporters of the military regime adopted popular music. A significant form of cultural resistance, future productions of Shows opinião were banned by military censors. Although the consequences of the censorship, according to some scholars, were not immediately felt throughout the Brazilian theater community after 1964, Boal’s cultural activism did bring him to the attention of the authorities, particularly after the regime legitimized censorship in 1968. In 1971, after Boal directed Bertolt Brecht’s play, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, he was kidnapped as he walked home. He was imprisoned, tortured, and then exiled to Argentina. The news of his arrest spread quickly throughout literary circles in Brazil, signaling one of the most oppressive years of the dictatorship. Boal continued working in his theater theory and participated, in 1973, in adult- literacy campaigns in Peru, which helped him refine further ideas about the potential of theater to break centuries-long patterns of oppression. In 1976 he moved to Europe, eventually settling in Paris. In exile Boal published his first major work, The Theater of the Oppressed, in Spanish and French; the work would not be published in Brazil until 1988. The Theater of the Oppressed, in its title and orientation, references the work of his compatriot Paulo Freire (1921–1997), the noted humanist, educator, and secretary of education, whose seminal Pedagogia do Oprimido (1970), written during his political exile in Chile, proved to have enormous influence in Latin America, particularly among followers of liberation theology. In time, Boal would develop a complete system of exercises, games, and theater techniques grouped under the title Theater of the Oppressed, aimed at furthering the notion of art as a liberating experience and based on the rejection of the theatrical experience as a passive endeavor. Through its many manifestations, Theater of the Oppressed means to establish a human dialogue, in most cases facilitated by a coringa—a facilitator or Joker in the English translation—although in Boal’s work the term implies the neutrality of the card in the deck, not necessarily a comic performance. As a neutral participant, the Joker ensures that fairness is observed and that the logistics of the piece are followed.

   While in exile, Boal organized the first “International Festival of the Theater of the Oppressed” in Paris in 1981; soon he would have an international following of theater practitioners adapting his theories to local circumstances. In the United States, Boal’s theater theories were disseminated soon after the English translation of his seminal work was available. In 2008 the Department of Theater and Film Studies at the University of Georgia-Athens staged The Misadventures of Uncle McBuck, adapted and retitled, for copyright reasons, by the faculty member Robert Moser from the Disneyflavored As aventuras do Tio Patinhas (1968, literally, The Adventures of Scrooge McDuck); the staging was probably the first for one of Boal’s plays in that country. The author’s son, Julian Boal, a noted collaborator of Boal Sr., participated in workshops with the students before the production.

   In 1986 Boal returned from exile to Rio de Janeiro. He established the Casa do Centro de Teatro do Oprimido (CTO-Rio) and continued his work. A new stage in his career began in 1992 with his election as Vereador in Rio (the equivalent of a city councilman in the United States), which led him to develop new forms of participatory political theater. He was defeated in the 1996 elections but continued to advocate and lecture worldwide. Nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize on more than one occasion by his admirers, he was the recipient of several recognitions, among them a UNESCO prize and the title Honoris Causa from Queen Mary University in London. Augusto Boal died on 2 May 2009.