In the fall of 1995, I took a class called Theory & Criticism. It was the capstone for my major in terms of complexity, thought and sheer volume of material digested.

The way the class worked, each of us selected a day and the readings for it and prepare to lead a conversation in the class, attempting to spur debate or moderate the conversation as it evolved. I selected the day that had two works set against one another: Aristotle’s Poetics and Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed.

If you come from a theater program worth its salt, Poetics is a common point of reference. TO, as those familiar with it refer to it, is a little less common, and was far less known to the wider theater community in 1995 than it is now. English language journal sources were sparse, and the web as a source for anything other than scientific-based research was still in its embryonic stages. As such, most of what I learned about TO came from Boal himself via his writing, and only as theory. (There had been some effort to put his theories into practice in his home country of Brazil, and in Germany, but papers about those efforts had not been translated into English at that stage.)

Boal, and that first book of his, struck a deep, resonant chord in me. In a nutshell, Boal sought to create methodologies that destroyed the conventional way people thought of theater. There was to be no actor-audience separation. There was to be no set script, just an issue and a common community. There did not need to be any trappings of a formal theatergoing experience – seats, tickets, tech. Even the space could be “found” or otherwise un-theatrical. Boal wanted to strip all of that away because, as he saw it, we were all – you, me, the person next to you in traffic – engaged in the act of theatre on a constant basis. His whole point with Theatre of the Oppressed was to draw attention to the ways in which this was happening and, after a fashion, deconstruct the social fabric to get at the underlying problem or issue, whatever it may be.

I was absolutely riveted by his notions. Along with my copy of The Empty Space, Boal’s book was, and remains, one of the few books I would rescue from a burning building. Ever since I really started having my own thoughts about anything at all, I really questioned the necessity of artificial barriers in any context. I came of age in the late 80s and early 90s, when barriers were coming down, in a very real and tangible way, all over the world. Why not, I wondered, continue that effort into the conceptual and rhetoical barriers that continued to separate us? MJS introducing that book to Theory & Criticism solidified those ambient notions in my head.

Boal’s career went on from there, where he expounded and revised his thinking through the 90’s as he sought to affect change and help others do the same. A branch of therapy evolved, dramatherapy, that has steadily gained adherents over the past two decades. Boal himself went on to devise a form called the Legislative Theater and was elected as a councilman Rio de Janeiro based on the principles of it. TO clinics, workshops and performances have sprung up all over the world and remain as important, if geographically sparse, extensions of his own work.

Boal died yesterday after a long battle with leukemia. He’s left behind a complex and fascinating system of theater that combines elements of sociology, activism, improvisation and psychology, one that requires of its practitioners a mastery of a vast array of skills, from rhetoric and diplomacy to issues-based knowledge and the ability to synthesize a coherent plot out of the spaghetti strands of reality that do not appear to be related.

Descanse em paz, Boal.