Perspective

Boal's perspective is Marxist, and he writes from the perspective of South America, specifically Brazil and Peru. His experiments in theater are directly tied to a time and place, and that time and place is 1970s Brazil and Peru. He sees great suffering and oppression among people who live in extreme poverty, in a society of inequality. He believes that a revolution is inevitable and that the bourgeois are on their way out, living a dying way of life. He also sees theater as a tool to hasten that transition through the education of the masses, who will rise up when they realize that their circumstances are the result of the oppression of the upper classes.

Boal believes that traditional Aristotelian theater is oppressive, designed to instigate and reinforce the society's traditional values, and that this reinforcement of values suppresses revolutionary thought and feeling. He also believes that...