It's been quite a week for the performing arts here in Fort Collins. I've been to three theatre pieces - on the Holocaust, death squads, and the evil banality of state-sponsored torture. Wheee!



First, about a week ago, I went to a unique staging of Samuel Beckette's Catastrophe. It is a short piece, inspired by the plight of Czech playwright Vaclav Havel, who was imprisoned by the Soviet bloc puppet government in the early 80's. For its 15 minutes or so, the staging consists of a prisoner poised on a platform and manipulated for the desired appearance by an officious bureaucrat and his fawning assistant.

The unique aspect of this production was the immediate re-enactment in Spanish, with mostly different cast members, and subltly different nuances.

The net effect of all this was multifold; first, it got across the idea that such abuses of degradation and torment could occur any time and any place. There was an inescapable parallel with the shame of Abu Graib that marked our own national descent into the realm of the despotism and wholesale discarding of our previous lofty and precious ideals. Remember the Civics Lesson post a while back?



Then, last night, I went to a one-person show staged by 'gender-jamming' thespian S. Bear Bergman. Called Monday Night in Westerbork, it is focuses on the time spent in a Dutch concentration camp by performer Max Ehrlich. Along with other Jewish or gay perfomers who had been rounded up to await processing at Westerbork for subsequent shipping to Auschwitz and extermination, Max created Monday night stage shows that pleased the camp commandant, and perhaps delayed some performers' departure for oblivion in the Polish death camp. Arbeit Mach Frei!



Finally, tonight, I had to choose between a lecture by S. Bear (from last night's performance), a talent show fund raiser in a beer hall, or an elaborate staging (with music) of vignettes from the live of three prominent Latinas. All of this was taking place in various parts of the University student union complex.

I chose Tres Vidas, the stage piece. A good choice it was, with a rousing portrayal of Frida Kahlo that made me nostalgic (again) for Mexican life, a piece on an Argentinian poet, and a most disturbing segment on Rufina Amaya, a Salvadoran villager who in 1981 witnessed a U.S. trained death squad murder every one of the 800+ inhabitants of her village of El Mozote, including her husband and four children. Somehow, she alone among them escaped attention of the soldiers for long enough to run and hide among some trees.

She believed she survived to tell the story of what had happened, and although for years the right-wing Salvadoran government and their American administration friends denied the truth of her testimony (claiming only armed leftists had been exterminated), thanks to the work of investigative reporting by New Yorker reporter Mark Danner, which led to the exhumation of the many hundreds - including bayonetted infants who were presumably not the enemy combatants the POTUS said they were - the world learned the truth.

Sra. Amaya died March 6th of this year, at the age of 64.

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There is a line in the S. Bear show, where Max gazes out over his camp audience (us), and asks, "What, all the plays about the plague were sold out?"

Indeed.

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