Perseverant 20th-Century Theatermakers

 

[I always find myself stunned by how artists, especially theater artists, create under repressive regimes.  We’ve seen vibrant, expressive art—visual, musical, performance, literary—emerge from the Soviet Union and its satellites, military dictatorships, and religious autocracies.  Try as they might, the most tyrannical of totalitarian states haven’t been able to stamp out the artistic and creative impulse altogether.

[Of course, of all the arts, the performative ones are the most astonishing when it comes to creating works under prohibitive circumstances.  Books, paintings, and sculptures can be hidden away, spirited out of the country, and so survive and reach a public.  But a play, concert, or ballet needs an audience to live, and that generates exposure . . . and danger.  But it still happens. 

[Below are some stories of just that kind of creativity: artists who created under the most adverse situations.  It was impossible . . . but they did it.  And some of them suffered tremendously for it.] 

“MEMORIES OF SURVIVAL”
by Gabriela Furtado Coutinho

[This article is from the American Theatre issue of Fall 2025 (42.1).  It was posted on the AT website as “How to Survive a Dictatorship, the Theatre Artist’s Way” on 11 November 2025.]

Days in the lives of theatre folks around the world who persevered through oppression and resisted dictatorship with their art.

The present is never alone. Take comfort: There is future, and there is past. We walk, hand in hand, with ghosts of world stages: all the players who have exited, shadows of violence, sets in ruins. Memory and evidence.

If you press your ear to the plays of the 20th century, they’ll tell you secrets of human acts gone by and strategies to keep on. Among bloody slings and arrows of inhumane humanity are extraordinary scenes, real and imagined, of survival. At a concentration camp, a woman hides within a crate for 10 days to write a comic operetta, encouraging fellow prisoners to keep going. An everyday South Korean town square transforms from fear to ecstasy with the banging of drums, and grieving friends see their dead materialize. An iconic Brazilian theatremaker hatches an entire pedagogy from within the confines of dictatorship, going on to inspire oppressed peoples around the world.

Stories of surviving oppressive regimes feel heavy at first, tinged with the harrowing specters of fear and death. But these are the instructive, somehow hopeful histories I find myself gravitating toward again and again, in our time of enforced fear, violence, and starvation around the world. Humanity feels fragile, often. After hearing from international artists and reading first-person autobiographical accounts, I’d like to share moments that transcend fear. That feed feathery hope. Imagine yourself there: with Germaine Tillion in a concentration camp, with Augusto Boal in a prison cell, and with grieving friends and audiences who see theatre reanimate Gwangju and sustain souls even in death.

There is a reason why A Thousand and One Nights has endured as a centuries-old classic, categorically a fairy tale in spite of its deathly stakes. The protagonist must speak story after story to survive. With every story told, we too remind and convince ourselves to hold onto life for another night. Another story. Another play. Another night alive and ready to resist.

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in the camp, germaine tillion writes, ravensbrück 1944

Another counting. You line up with the rest of the women with blue-and-white-striped dresses and numbers and bloodstains and sunken eyes. Hope—that feathery, fragile thing—is what you need to survive. You search for it.

Levity has become your weapon and shield. You led the Musée de l’Homme resistance network and refuse to be tamed. Your inspiration remains your mother, an art critic who supported you through college and in defying Nazism. When she first saw you in the camp, she exclaimed, “Fabulous journey!” She’d glimpsed German cities in ruins; the European theatre of war was teetering. The war’s end seemed near.

[The Musée de l’Homme (literally “Museum of Mankind” or “Museum of Humanity”), founded in Paris in 1937, is a research center and anthropology museum that explores the evolution of humanity, its origins, and its future. Beyond its holdings, the museum is famous for having hosted one of the first networks of the Resistance during the German occupation of France (1940-44).]

Your training in anthropology helps. You shared with your mom all you knew of the camp; you gather fellow prisoners for storytelling. You often say: “Nothing is more terrifying than a complete mystery. If you can understand a mechanism that crushes you . . . that can become a powerful source.”

A woman falls in line with a loud thud. You don’t dare check if she’s alive.

You belong to Block 32, known for miraculous camaraderie. But there’s no new news of Allied liberation. Friends look frailer. “We must find a way to laugh at our lamentable state. It is our only lifeline,” you’ve insisted to your dear friend Anise Girard.

The guards herd you to forced labor. Your task today: sorting pillaged possessions from across Europe. Your hands run through fabrics, pearls, delicate engravings, the costumes and artifacts of lifetimes; your thoughts fly—

Theatre! That’ll be your survival strategy. You approach Anise: “Let’s not pity ourselves! Let’s write! Let’s sing!”

10 days. You need 10 risky days of support. A friendly prisoner oversees your work group, and the women eagerly embrace your project: a dark comic operetta illuminating this hellscape. They pick up your work, hide you, smuggle in paper and pen.

Squeezing into a wooden packing crate for entire work days, you write without water or food. Le Verfügbar aux Enfers, as the piece will be called, feeds you instead. Takes wing in quiet, cold darkness. Each evening you stow away to 32 and read what you have.

[The German word in the title, verfügbar, means ‘available’ or ‘unengaged’—in other words, “at someone's disposal.”  The whole French title translates as “The ‘available’ in Hell.” As Furtado Coutinho explains below, the reference is to prisoners not destined for other specific work and therefore free to be assigned the worst tasks called for at the camp. (A link embedded below, reporting on a translation of the operetta staged at the University of Southern Maine in Gorham on 24-27 April 2014, the English title is given as In the Underworld.)]

You center the writing around the verfügbar—the precarious class of prisoners not assigned specific work. New arrivals. Those awaiting reassignment. The unfit. Their fates: medical experiments, dangerous assignments synonymous with death, or one-way trips to Auschwitz gas chambers.

You distance yourself from the realities with humor. You know not everyone will appreciate making light of horror—but laughter is water, necessary for survival.

Your show begins with a Naturalist. He observes people in the Underworld . . .

No, that’s not right. In your anthropology, you believe in engagement, exchange, letting people lead! This play will let the women speak. They interrupt, explain, tell it themselves. The Naturalist questions, tries to regain control, but quickly the play belongs to a Greek chorus of prisoners. The “old rats” share camp secrets with the new.

You decorate your imaginary stage with irony, deadpan humor, jokes about your skeletal frames and the camp’s “excellent utilities”—especially gas. You imagine food into existence, even write a whole song about gastronomic adventures through France!

Each night at Block 32, a close circle makes suggestions and requests. Theatre liberates in community. This sharing alleviates, for moments, the ravenous weight of this Underworld. They memorize texts and laugh and laugh until their souls traverse beyond this place.

You can’t stage Le Verfügbar aux Enfers in full, but you share pieces and copies in confidence. It becomes a clandestine hit. You and your friends sing softly on the way to and from grueling work and beatings. The melodies derive from popular German songs, pleasing the guards, but you’ve changed some lyrics to French. Name their inhumanity. They don’t understand: You’re laughing at them.

You don’t know this now, but you will survive to show how, in your own words, “Indignation can move mountains.” You don’t know this now, but friends will smuggle out your operetta pages while you smuggle out film evidence of torture and experiments. You don’t know this now, but your mother, Émilie Tillion, won’t survive. Of 130,000 women passing through Ravensbrück, 40,000 will be murdered here.

[Ravensbrück was the largest Nazi concentration camp established exclusively for women, operating from 1939 to 1945 near Fürstenberg, Germany, about 50 miles north of Berlin. Over 120,000 to 132,000 women and children—mostly political prisoners, Jews, and Roma—were imprisoned there, enduring forced labor, starvation, and medical experiments, with tens of thousands dying.]

They—your mother, your friends—will live in the empty spaces of your pages, in that sound of inevitable laughter, evidence of how they fought to keep on.

Your work will be staged and translated in the 21st century. When time comes to take your bow and depart, your sense of duty—to act while there’s still time to prevent the worst—will live on. Stage and page give flight to memory, and your warnings and daybreak laughter ring from beyond the grave.

[Germaine Tillion (1907-2008) was a French ethnologist, a Catholic, and a member of the French Resistance in World War II, in the network of the Musée de l’Homme.  Betrayed to the Germans by a collaborationist priest, she spent time in Ravensbrück concentration camp from 1943 until her escape in 1945. During her incarceration, Tillion secretly wrote Le Verfügbar aux Enfers to entertain her fellow prisoners. (The link embedded in the operetta’s title above contains a list of many of Tillion’s publications, including the operetta and a number of texts detailing her personal experiences as an inmate.)

[Over recent years, I’ve posted a number of articles on ROT about performances—music, plays. cabaret—by concentration camp inmates for inmates:

•   “‘Prisoners in Nazi concentration camps made music; now it’s being discovered and performed’” by Jon Wertheim (2 March 2022)

•   "‘Performing for Survival – Cultural Life and the Theatre in Terezin’" by Bahar Akpinar (7 March 2022)

•   “The Last Cyclist” – Part 1 (2 September 2022) and Part 2 (5 September 2022)

•   “‘Minneapolis chamber group performs music written by Polish prisoners at Auschwitz’” by Fred de Sam Lazaro and Simeon Lancaster (17 February 2024),

[I also touch in this topic in my post “Theater: A Healing Art” (3 September 2023), and I invite readers to check it out.]

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augusto boal dreams of the oppressed and the free, são paulo 1971

Another night of rehearsal!

Each project draws you closer to the heart of the povo, the common people. Each play has a rawness. New nudity. You never know whether audiences will come armed, whether you’ll be arrested. The police tried once. A grenade has landed onstage. Neither finished the job. Graças a Deus!

You’re forming groups to create participatory Teatro-Jornal—“newspaper theatre.” This gives means of production back to audiences. News clippings, writings, anything can inspire them. Theatre becomes forum. You perform where police won’t suspect: behind churches, in unused classrooms, within homes.

Tonight at Teatro de Arena in São Paulo, after working on [Bertolt] Brecht’s [1898-1956] The Resistible Rise of Arturu Ui [Boal’s production: 1969], you’re rehearsing the musical Arena conta Bolívar [1971] for France’s Festival de Nancy. You’re grateful for this kind of international opportunity: It offers protection, possibility. The Brazilian government’s censors disappear whole pages from your works, but in rehearsal, words reappear.

[An authoritarian military dictatorship had emerged in the Federative Republic of Brazil in 1964 with support from the United States and ruled until 1985. Opponents to the military government, including artists, journalists, and other members of civil society, both inside and outside the country, were oppressed. In 1979, Brazil began a slow return to democracy, which was completed by 1985, after which civilian governance resumed. Brazil’s current constitution, enacted in 1988, defines it as a democratic federal republic.

[Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui [1941], subtitled “A parable play,” chronicles the rise of Arturo Ui, a fictional 1930s Chicago mobster, and his attempts to control the cauliflower racket by ruthlessly disposing of the competition. The play is a satirical allegory of the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party in Germany prior to World War II.

[Arena conta Bolívar (Arena faces Bolívar) was created by Boal during his time with Teatro de Arena in São Paulo. The play, along with other Arena works, toured in 1971 before Boal was forced into exile by the military dictatorship due to the play’s political content.

[The play used historical figures to discuss contemporary political struggles in Latin America. It tells the story of Simón Bolívar, focusing on his dreams of a united Latin America and his struggles against oppression. The narrative focuses on the political actions of the characters rather than just their psychology. Arena conta Bolívar was banned in Brazil, and for developing and staging this type of subversive theater, Boal was imprisoned in 1971 and tortured by the military police.

[The Festival mondial du théâtre de Nancy (World Theatre Festival of Nancy), founded in 1963, was a renowned biennial avant-garde theater festival known for pioneering experimental, fringe, and international performances. It shifted theater focus from text-heavy plays to physical, gesture-based, and political performance, running until 1988.

[The event famously broke from tradition, emphasizing movement, music, mime, and puppets on non-traditional stages. It served as a platform for radical, revolutionary theatre during the 1960s and 70s. It appears, however, that Boal didn’t bring Arena conta Bolívar to Nancy in 1971; his Teatro de Arena staged Arena conta Zumbi and Teatro Jornal (newspaper theater) that year.

[(Zumbi (c. 1655-95) was a leader of the quilombolas, Afro-Brazilian residents of quilombo settlements of left-behind and escaped enslaved people, and one of the pioneers of resistance to enslavement of Africans by the Portuguese in colonial Brazil. He’s revered in Afro-Brazilian culture as a symbol of African freedom.

[(Because Arena conta Bolívar could not be performed at home, it premièred in Mexico City in February 1970. Then Boal’s troupe toured it through Mexico, the United States, Venezuela, and Peru between 1970 and 1971.)]

The dead come back to life.

You direct direction in a directionless country. Actors rehearse resistance, combatting dictatorship head-on. Day and night, you work, tire, worry.

Your wife calls. Milanese for dinner! The world is wet and weary, but you’re coming home.

Then: Three men approach. Your arm: twisted. Your body: in their Beetle.

[From 1963 to 1987, the VW Beetle served as the standard patrol car for the São Paulo state police. Because of its presence in almost every neighborhood, it became a visible symbol of state authority and surveillance. Because of their reliability and commonality, Beetles were frequently used by security forces to transport detained individuals to interrogation centers.]

Then: solitary confinement. You’ve heard silence before, but this silence screams.

But . . . is that your friend’s song? A hallucination, already? No, it’s real: Dori Caymmi’s “É doce morrer no mar” has broken in to keep you company. A disembodied voice from another cell tells you that every night, these kidnapped prisoners sing. Tonight you don’t feel like joining them. You think of artists, the oppressed, the vulnerable, every individual who may have disappeared here. Your wife and child. Communities across Brazil.

[Dori Caymmi (b. 1943) is a Brazilian singer, songwriter, guitarist, arranger, and producer. His song here (whose title means “It is sweet to die at sea”) was composed in 1941 by Dorival Caymmi (1914-2008), Dori’s father, and Jorge Amado (1912-2001). The song is a tragic and beautiful ballad that captures the mystical and perilous relationship between fishermen and the ocean. It tells of a handsome sailor who departs at night but never returns, having been “taken” by a mermaid to sleep in the lap of the goddess of the sea.

[While “É doce morrer no mar” is a poetic ballad, its celebration of common fishermen and Afro-Brazilian spirituality stood in opposition to the military’s push for westernized, “modern” industrialization. As a symbol of cultural resistance and the political identity of its creators (Amado was a communist sympathizer and his writings were heavily censored during the dictatorship), the song was an unofficial anthem of an element of Brazil’s population.]

One, wronged, makes a very big crowd.

The guards question and question. You pretend torture doesn’t hurt. Confess nothing.

Time stretches. You stretch. They use pau de arara torture—the same that desecrated enslaved bodies forced from Africa onto this land. The land remembers. The oppressor too.

[According to Wikipedia, pau de arara “is a torture method in which the victim is bound by the ankles and wrists, with the biceps under a pole and knees over it. The pau de arara torture method was widely used during the military dictatorship in Brazil.” (Wikipedia also reports: “Pau de arara is a Portuguese term that literally translates to ‘macaw’s perch.’ The term originates from bird sellers' practice of tying the birds to a perch, where they also hang for transportation.”)]

But you’re of privilege. After seven nights, your military brother demands to see you, dead or alive. Word gets out. Theatres worldwide learn of your imprisonment. Arthur Miller [1915-2005; American playwright], Richard Schechner [b. 1934; American academic and theater director], Peter Brook [1925-2022; English theater and film director], Jean-Louis Barrault [1910-94; French actor, director, and mime artist], and more pressure the government. Theatre wants to free you.

Guards move you from isolation. You speak with other prisoners—povo of all walks. You’ve rarely seen left-leaning folks get along so well. You teach one another, imagine new world orders. Why wait to do all this? You learn, meditate, stretch muscles, muster strength to heal from torture. You wonder how long it will take. Maybe you’ll never be the same.

You’ve experimented with theatre for so long, but here you observe a distinct form of exchange: real, raw rehearsals for revolution. You are never the same.

You’re out within four months—could’ve been four years, or worse, much fewer, with “an invitation to the undiscovered country.” You reappear from disappearance. A blessing. You’re angry.

Then: exile. You are banned from your patria.

You do not know this now, but your mind has been pregnant with pathways to unanswerable questions. Over 14 cold, lonely years of exile between Latin America and Europe, you grow more resolved. Survivors of torture and imprisonment emerge with newfound capacities. Confinement makes you infinite. Within prison’s limits, you’ve pondered the limits of theatre and learned that containers cannot contain spirit. They embolden it. Theatre of the Oppressed stretches its feathery wings.

You don’t create it alone—it has been gestated and cared for by every audience and maker you’ve encountered. This theatre helps you escape to your freest self, continue Brecht’s work, embody Paulo Freire’s [1921-97; Brazilian educator and Marxist philosopher] vision in your framework and in the book Theatre of the Oppressed [Buenos Aires, 1974; New York, 1979], an answer to a question you’ve held to light and tucked into bed and prayed over: How is agency possible under oppression?

You write: “I, Augusto Boal, want the spectator to take on the role of actor and invade the Character and the Stage . . . This invasion is a symbolic trespass. It symbolizes all the acts of trespass we have to commit in order to free ourselves from what oppresses us . . . If we do not trespass we can never be free.”

You don’t know this now, but from Brazil to South Korea to Chile to Nigeria to the Philippines to Ghana to Thailand to the United States and beyond, Theatre of the Oppressed will free generations of souls you’ll never meet.

[Augusto Boal (1931-2009) was a Brazilian theater practitioner, drama theorist, and political activist. He was the founder of Theatre of the Oppressed and Forum Theatre. In 1971, Boal was kidnapped off the street, arrested, and tortured by the military dictatorship in Brazil for his subversive theater activities.

[He was forced into exile, spending years in Argentina (1971-76). Peru (1973), Portugal (1976-78), and France (1978-86) before returning to his native country shortly after Brazil’s democratic restoration. Yan Michalski (1932-90), one of Brazil’s most influential theater critics and a vocal critic of state repression during the dictatorship, called Boal the best-known and most respected Brazilian theater practitioner abroad.]

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a survivor sees the dead marry, 대한민국 1982

The sun rises on another day. Two years since you lost your friends to the peaceful protests-turned-massacre. Gwangju, once a “city of light,” has become the memory of violence, a site where thousands of students and families “vanished” overnight.

[On 12 December 1979. South Korean General Chun Doo-hwan (1931-2021) launched a coup and imposed martial law on the Republic of Korea. He ruled as a military dictator under a constitution of his own devising.

[On 18 May 1980, citizens and students in Gwangju, which has a long-standing reputation for its “independent spirit” and history of fighting against injustice, rose up against Chun’s military coup. The military responded with a brutal crackdown, using paratroopers and tanks to suppress protestors. Official government figures cited nearly 200 deaths, while local citizens estimated the toll closer to 2,000.

[Although crushed at the time, the uprising catalyzed a decade of pro-democracy activism that eventually led to free presidential elections in 1987.]

Instead of reaching for glasses this morning, you reach for sheet music scrawled on torn notebook pages. You don’t know how much art can do, but you’ll try. Yoon Sang-won [1950 -80; a South Korean activist and spokesperson for the citizen’s militia during the 1980 Gwangju Democratization Movement; killed on the last day of the uprising] didn’t get to do so much: marry, have children, sing, live. The least you can do is sing for him. Yoon and his girlfriend Park Gi-sun [1957-78; a prominent South Korean labor and student activist; died of accidental carbon monoxide poisoning] would have wanted theatre of the people or minjung kayo [genre of South Korean protest music], song. They’ll get both today in this musical memorial. You hope they will hear from their graves.

Trudging through Gwangju toward the cemetery, the miracle of music rises, raises the city to its feet. You peer into an alleyway, where drummers help onlookers feel their heartbeats. The cemetery performance will be just one of many theatre protests today. Madangguk (마당극), informal yard theatre, has become commonplace. Drums kick off the spectacle, until the storytelling erupts in audience participation. You’ve seen these clandestine performances in the shadows and margins of the city, behind churches, in unused classrooms, homes. But they’re edging toward the light. When the government leaves no room for justice, the underground theatres must rehearse it.

“You need to be history’s eyewitnesses,” Yoon told younger students before urging us to leave the Jeonnam Provincial Office. You went to warmth; he went to the undiscovered country, as martial law overpowered the remaining protestors, massacring innumerable civilians. When those friends couldn’t speak, publish, protest, they sang. You wonder if Yoon went down singing.

You haven’t sung since then. Avoided protest theatre, though your friends rave about Theatre of the Oppressed and about our Korean traditions of theatre for the minjung, the ruled masses, “the people.” Where have the songs gotten Yoon? How could you sing without your friends? Theatre’s feathery hope feels more like crime now. You didn’t stay with Yoon for Jeonnam, a pivotal moment in this fight against authoritarianism, and now you’re here. Why are you here? You don’t want to sing. But you must. With a few university friends, being wary of the military, you will bear witness to Park and Yoon’s souls joining in a “spirit wedding” through this heaven of a musical.

[During the Gwangju Uprising, the Jeonnam Provincial Office in Gwangju served as the central headquarters for the civil militia.]

Through theatre, the dead come back to live.

Dispelling-Wedding of Light will be short, by the looks of the sheet music. You’ll only be among the dead for minutes. Hopefully it will feel longer. You recognize Baek Ki-wan’s lyrics from his prison poem written at Seodaemun Detention. The young Kim Jong-ryul set it to music. You wonder how, in their grief, they managed to create.

[Baek Ki-wan (1932–2021) was a towering figure in South Korea's movements for democracy and national reunification. Known for his fiery speeches and unwavering commitment to the poor and marginalized, he was often referred to as the “conscience of South Korea.” Baek is most widely recognized as the original lyricist of “March for the Beloved,” the unofficial anthem of South Korea’s democracy movement.]

Park wouldn’t recognize everyone here. She’d been forced from university for supporting opposition to the Yushin regime. After a short yet full, fiery life in labor movements and establishing the Wildfire Night School for workers, she died of coal gas poisoning; she didn’t get to protest alongside Yoon at Jeonnam. Some wouldn’t know her at all. No one will know her anymore.

You reach the manicured plot where stones stick up their heads to watch the living. The grass isn’t green here in February. Finding the stones and living bodies you came to see, you realize you’re last to arrive. They begin.

Then it’s blurry. You raise sheet music closer, blurrier still. Your throat is pregnant with protest and possibility. You suddenly need to sing. Your voice soars beyond. You hear. You hear Yoon hearing.

You can share breath with your friend again.

Before you can process the piece or make out who bears this wedding witness, the final song comes. “March for the Beloved.” Minor key, almost militant march.

We will leave no honors, no love, no fame. We promised to keep working on…

The river and the mountain remember, despite the passing of years…

We are marching on; those who are alive, come follow us . . .

You don’t know this now, but South Korea will transition to democracy within five years. You don’t know this now, but this musical and song will play a role. Millions will sing it worldwide for histories to come, a national memorial and international protest prayer. When cold lips clasp halfway through the word freedom, other voices will join the chorus. When you can no longer sing, friends will do it for you.

For many years to come, people will celebrate this wedding-within-a-play. The future will attend a wedding of the past that never was but could have been. And somehow is. Is. 

[The Korean word in the heading of this section transliterates as Daehan Minguk, and translates literally as the “Great Korean Republic.” In real English, that’s the Republic of Korea, and the Korean is the official name of the country since 1948.]

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marching on, present, past, future 

Countless more still rally the people, not just in spirit but on Earth. Cecile Guidote-Alvarez [b. 1943; Filipina actress and author], creator of the Philippine Educational Theater Association [1967], is still creating and empowering artists. Wole Soyinka [b. 1934; Nigerian writer, playwright, and poet] still teaches; his words and presence alike spread a legacy of liberation and peace in Nigeria and beyond.

And we are with them, the survivors, while still among the dead—at the spirit wedding, within the gray cell, among women passing pages, fluttering between now and then and could be. We are here and we are disembodied, existing in the consciousness between words, where breath breathes breath to thaw theatre, and theatre thaws a collective memory. And strength. You are not the first; there is no first time when your creative ancestors surround you with a centuries-old chorus of answerless questions.

Grim, promiseless as the world stage seems, there have been artists who’ve emerged from crates, prison cells, even death. Shoulders adjust to liberated air, wait for the script’s punchline and your daybreak laughter.

You may not feel this now, but many march on. Ghosts stroke and clasp our hands. Scripts and songs speak their words. Break our silence. You may not believe this now, but we can follow them—they beckon toward life. You may not know it yet, but as you free freedom, these theatres of resistance will reach you. Free you, too.

Special Thanks and Bibliography

A special thanks to Hayana Kim, Jisun Kim, Kelsey R. Mesa, L’Association Germaine Tillion, Daphnie Sicre, Sierra Rosetta, and Emilya Cachapero for their guidance and hope.

Adamo, Elizabeth, “Germaine Tillion’s Colonial Writing: Complicity and Resistance” (2015). Africana Studies Student Research Conference.

Boal, Augusto, Hamlet e o filho do padeiro. E-book ed., Record, 2000.

Dae-ha, Jung, “Gwangju remembers special student-labor activist.” Hankyoreh, Hankyoreh Media Group, 19 Dec. 2013.

De Andrade, Clara, editor, “Remembering Boal through images.” Critical Stages/Scènes critiques, 2010.

Kim, Hayana, Embodying Democracies: The Gwangju Uprising, Women, and the Politics of Mourning in South Korea. 2023. Northwestern U, PhD dissertation.

Lee, Namhee, “Between Indeterminacy and Radical Critique: Madangguk, Ritual, and Protest,” from The Making of Minjung: Democracy and the Politics of Representation in South Korea, Cornell University Press, 2011, pp. 187-212.

Olson, Lynne, The Sisterhood of Ravensbrück: How an Intrepid Band of Frenchwomen Resisted the Nazis in Hitler’s All-Female Concentration Camp. E-book ed., Random House, 2025.

Ribas, Cristina, “The Aesthetics of the Oppressed: Political Memory and the Pedagogy of a Poetical Laboratory.” La Escuela, 9 Apr. 2022.

University of Southern Maine Department of Theatre, “In the Underworld: A Darkly Comic Operetta Program” (2014). Programs 2013-2014 Season.

Van Erven, Eugene, “Resistance Theatre in South Korea: Above and Underground.” TDR/The Drama Review, vol. 32, no. 3, 1988, pp. 156-73.

Yi, Kang-baek, Allegory of Survival: The Theater of Kang-baek Lee. Translated by Alyssa Kim and Hyung-Jin Lee, e-book ed., Cambria Press, 2007.

[Gabriela Furtado Coutinho (she/ela/ella) is the digital editor of American Theatre, as well as a Chicago-based actor, playwright, and poet.

[On Rick On Theater, Furtado Coutinho’s writing appears in "‘How to Survive an Election: Laugh With “POTUS,”'" 14 November 2024; “‘Tomorrow’s Tamoras and Titanias,’” 9 October 2024 (in “Theater Education & Training, Part 3”); and “‘Wish You Were Here: A Radical Access Roundtable,’” 6 July 2024.  (A more complete biography of Furtado Coutinho follows "‘How to Survive an Election.’”)