JUAN GONZALEZ: And was the Invisible Theater actors, or the core -- did you train more people to do it or was it basically a small core that went all around the country?

AUGUSTO BOAL: This beginning of the Theater of the Oppressed were both. There were people, citizens, normal citizens who wanted to make a theatrical experience, and some professional actors also. Today I work with both, but separately. I have worked with the Royal Shakespeare Company, working in place by Shakespeare to try to show them some of the techniques of the Theater of the Oppressed, interiorized techniques, no? But that’s something, and something else is to work with everybody because we believe that everybody can do theater. Everybody can do what one person can do. Everyone can do. But not the same way, not with the same skills, but everyone can do it with the same sincerity and same means of expression.

JUAN GONZALEZ: We're talking with Augusto Boal, the founder of Brazil's Theater of the Oppressed.

JUAN GONZALEZ: We're joined by Augusto Boal who is the founder of the Theatre of the Oppressed movement in Brazil and globally. Boal is the author of several books, including his 2001 autobiography Hamlet and the Baker's Son: My Life in Theatre and Politics. Welcome back so we can continue the conversation. Could you talk to us about the Forum Theater? What is the Forum Theater, and how did that develop?

AUGUSTO BOAL: The Forum Theater is exact the image of the mirror. We present the problem because sometimes we know what the problem is. All of us agree we have this problem. So, for instance, the workers that go to claim for better conditions of work or better salaries, or whatever. Everyone agrees. But how to do it, we don't know. So what we do? We present the play, whatever the theme is, whatever the problem is. We present the play, and then we look at like normal spectators. But at the end we say, okay, this ended in failure. So how could we change the events? Everything is going to change in society and our biological life. Everything's always changing. Nothing's going to stay the way it is. All is going to -- so how can we change this for better? And then we start again the same play and we invite the audience to anytime they want to say stop, go to replace the protagonist and show alternatives. So we learn from one another. You have in the scene the wrong solution, the wrong way. And then we try to see what is the right way. We don't know. We don't do the political theatre of the 50s in which we had the propaganda. You had an idea, you have a message. We don’t have the message, we have the questions. We bring -- what can you do? And democratically, everyone can say stop and jump on the scene and try a solution or an alternative and then we discuss that alternative and then a second or third, as many as people are there. So what we want is to develop the capacity of people to create, to use their intelligence, to use their sensibility, because we live in a society which is very imperative, who says all of the time: Do this, Go that way, dress this way, eat that. And we don't want the orders, we don't want the imperative mood. We want the subjunctive theater, in which we say, how would it be if it were like that? Then we ask, we bring questions. We don't bring certitudes, but the questions. The doubts are the seeds of certitudes. Then some certitude comes out. But it is from everyone. Everyone has the right to speak their word and to act their thoughts, not only to talk about, but to act their thoughts.

JUAN GONZALEZ: What has been the impact of Theater of the Oppressed on the established theater or artistic movements within Brazil and in Latin America?

AUGUSTO BOAL: Yeah, I started doing that in Peru, in reality when I was already in exile. I was doing directing the part of theater because the government at that time was a military government but strangely enough it was center left. And they wanted to make programs of literacy programs and I was in charge of the theater. So I started doing there. Now it's all over the world. We have in the web page, which is TheatreoftheOppressed.org. Not “theater,” but like the English write, “theatre,” not “theater.” No? Of the Oppressed. We have 48 countries but more than 70 countries in which they do Theatre of the Oppressed, but all of them in their own themes -- we don't tell them that you have to do about this or that. In India, they have an enormous movement. And what they do is about hunger. It's about unemployment. It's about the living conditions of their lives. But at the same time you have also in Paris. So in Paris they have street problems. In New York here, we have the Brecht Forum has a Theatre of the Oppressed Laboratorium. And what do they discuss? The problems of New York, the problems of the United States, the problems of the relation of the United States government, of the United States with the rest of the World, no? We have in Nebraska a permanent center. Also you have in Los Angeles. That's where I met Amy Goodman. She came to my lecture, and I went to her lecture. So we met there. So it's all over. It's very nice because it's a way of using theater in a dynamic way, not in a receptive way only, but in a dynamic way. To give you an example, which is a very beautiful example. We have many groups in Rio. We have groups of slums, of poor places, poor communities.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Favelas

AUGUSTO BOAL: Favelas, yes.

AUGUSTO BOAL: We have groups of teachers. We have lots of groups. And one of them is a group of housemaids. They are all called Maria. Maria this, Maria that, Maria something. They are called Marias of Brazil. And they are housemaids, real housemaids. They work like a housemaid and the only day free they have is Sunday, so they come to the theater and they practice the theater, they present their plays. And once they wanted to do theater inside the theater. They said, what you tell us is that we do theater. But we play in churches, we play in the streets, but not a theater. We want to go in the theater. And I said, “Yes, but if we go there we are not going to have the rituals of the theater in which you pay tickets. We will have to offer the tickets.” And they said, “No, but we want to see the curtain going up. We want to be in a real building.” And then we did that. They were very happy. It was a great success.

And at the end they came to tell me that one of them was weeping after the show. And I said, “But why? It was such a big success, they applauded so much.” I asked her, “Why did you weep?” And she said, “Look, it's very moving for us because we who work in house for the other people, we are supposed to be invisible. We should not appear. We should do everything, but not be present. And then today I was rehearsing and there was a man throwing lights on me and said, ‘Come here so that we can see your body.’ We are taught to be mute and there was a man putting a microphone here so that I could be heard.” And I said, “That's why you wept?” And she said, “No, no, it was in the show. I was playing there, I was showing my emotions, showing my thoughts and all that. And the family I work for in ten years, they were all there in the theater sitting silent, looking at me and in the dark. And I was there.” I said, “That's why you wept?” And she said, “No.” “So why did you weep?” She said, “Because when I went back to the dressing room I looked at the mirror, and there I was afraid.” I said, “What did you see in the mirror?” And she said, “I saw a woman.” I said, “But that's normal. If you look at the mirror you see woman. When I look in the mirror to shave, I see a man.” And she said, “No, but that was the first time I saw a woman in the mirror.” And I said, “But what did you see before?” And she said, “Before, I saw a housemaids, and now I saw a woman.”

So the theater, by the fact that you go there and you show your ideas, you show your emotions, you show what your desires are, give you the right to have your own identity and not to keep that identity they put on you. We all wear masks in society. In the theater you take off the mask and you are yourself. That's the great advantage of the theater, especially the Theater of the Oppressed, in which you can do that.