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Page 3 of 3 JUAN GONZALEZ: In your autobiography you call it Hamlet and the Baker's Son: My Life in Theatre and Politics. The title? AUGUSTO BOAL: Yeah, the title is because my father was a baker. I worked with him very much when I was a child. And because I am Hamlet. To be or not to be. I am a man of the theater and I work with people who are not in the theater. I work with the peasants without land. In Brazil it's a very big movement. Well, they don't, they are not artists. And I say, “Yes, you are.” Then I convince them that they are artists, and they are artists, and then they show their art. So I am always doing theater professionally because I want to show -- I think that everyone can do theater. Even actors. And theater can be done everywhere, even inside theater. So I want to be a director, because I am not an actor, and I want to use the theater in a conventional way also, but I am the other side what interests me more as citizen. Because I think that sometimes people say, oh, you are politically minded or not. It's not you as an artist. It’s you as a citizen. If I were not the man of the theater, if I were a dentist, a veterinarian, if I were a doctor, if I were a worker, I had as a citizen to take a part, to say, well, I believe in this, let's change things in that way. So to be politically minded is a necessity of the citizen, not of the artist solely.  JUAN GONZALEZ: Your life in politics, as well, you were a member of the Brazilian Worker's Party. That party is now in power in Brazil in the person of President Lula. Your sense of how Brazil, the most important country in Latin America in size and wealth and population, how, what have been the changes over the last few years under the Worker’s Party? AUGUSTO BOAL: Yeah, I don't agree that we are in power. We are in the government. And the government has not the power that it wanted. I believe that there are many things that Lula and the government is doing, which are extremely important. For instance, the treatment of the Hunger Zero, the program called Hunger Zero, in which they distribute, yes, it’s existentialism in some way, but they distribute money for people who are starving. And that's important. It's important even economically because the money that you give to a person who is starving is going to buy for -- he's going to buy food. It's not the same that if you distribute dividends, because it's going to be speculative money. So it's very important that program. And it's very important for the families that have not salary, not at all, that live with less than $1 a day. Suddenly they can eat beans and rice, which is the national food. That's good. I think that the external politics of Brazil is also extremely important what they are doing. Lula, a few weeks ago, organized a meeting between the Arab countries and the South American countries. We are having ties with Argentina, with Venezuela, with Uruguay, which are more progressive governments, too. So we are having contact with India. I think it’s very important not to have only bilateral relations with the United States but to have with other countries to expand our relations. This is extremely important. What I don't find so important, what I find is not sufficient is, for instance, the external debt. We have paid the debt several times already as interest. And the debt has to be verified if it really exists. When Getulio Vargas, decades ago, made an examination of the money that we were paying to the external banks, it was found out that we did not owe really not even half of what we were paying. And now the situation is the same. We don't owe what we are paying. We did not borrow that money. It was a dictatorship that borrowed. And not all, there are not evidence; there are not documents to prove that we owe so much money. So there, Lula has not touched this. He goes on paying. {mosgoogle left}And we know that the economy, there are absurdities that are taken for granted. For instance, what they call the risk country. It is the banks that lend the money. The banks decide if the country has a risk or not in a unilateral way. They decide that you are running the risk of not being capable of paying your debts. So they raise the interest. Instead of lowering, they raise. And then you pay. If you paid it was because you could pay. But they decide that you were a risk. Then you pay and even so, they don't give you back the money. So they decide you borrow some money, you don't know how much you are going to pay. [inaudible] And what I believe is that the debt cannot be paid because they are extremely big and they cannot be paid. They become a link of slavery. So we became a slave country. We are paying the banks. We are giving money to the bank. If we don't cut this bond of slavery we are going on all of the time protesting because the salaries are low, because education not enough, health is worse. And that is the part of the government that is not working. JUAN GONZALEZ: Let me ask you. We discussed earlier in the show and you heard the discussion on Bolivia, the enormous changes that are occurring throughout Latin America politically, compared to even ten years ago or five years ago, which Brazil is a part. These elections that are bringing to power much more progressive or at least rebellious governments, vis-a-vis the United States. What do you think is happening to the everyday Latin American in terms of the enormous changes over the last few years? AUGUSTO BOAL: I heard in the interview that you made a while ago a phrase that is very dear to my heart. He said, everything is possible. All is possible. That's what we don't believe. We don't believe. We believe that the things the way they are is the only thing that realistically we can -- the only way realistically we can think it can be, but it's not true. The truth is what we heard in this program: Everything is possible. And then if we have in our minds that everything can be transformed, another world is possible, like the forum, Social Forum, Porto Alegre said. We start preparing the change. If we believe, oh, that's the way it is fatalistically, then nothing is going to happen. I believe in transformation. I believe that -- we say in the Theater of the Oppressed that in the present we have to analyze the past. But we invent the future. It's not to analyze the past to contemplate the past and to say, Oh, in the past it was like that. It is to think about the future. And not believe that, well, that's the law or that’s the legality or that's moral because slavery was moral a century ago or more. Slavery was moral. It was legal. You could have the property of a person, of a human being. Then you have to transform it. One thing is moral. The other thing is ethics. They are not the same. Moral is the way things are. It's legality. But the legitimacy is an ethical drive. You have to think about another world in which there will be more fraternity, there will be more solidarity, and not so much competition, not so much “I want to be the first.” We have to be all the first, not only to run a race and be the first, and then look back and, oh, the other ones are far away. Good for me. No. JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, I want to thank you for being with us. Augusto Boal, the founder of the Theater of the Oppressed, which is now an international movement. He's here visiting in New York for a while. He's the author of several books, including his 2001 autobiography Hamlet and the Baker's Son. Recommend this article...
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