Peruvian poverty opens the eyes of two Kansas City playwrights
By ROBERT TRUSSELL – The Kansas City Star
Jeremy Lillig and Damian Torres-Botello thought they had a pretty good idea of what poverty looked like.
Torres-Botello, 30, had interviewed homeless people on the street. Lillig, 28, had ridden along with Kansas City police to a homeless camp under the 12th Street Viaduct. And a few years ago, they wrote a play, “Whispers From the Streets,” based on about 200 interviews with people in homeless shelters and soup kitchens.
But then they went to Peru to gather notes for another play.
For two weeks in July, the two theater artists who are dedicated to dramatizing social justice issues met people living at different levels of poverty in Lima and its outskirts. And they encountered conditions they were not prepared for.
They conducted seven formal interviews and met dozens of Peruvians living with no more than minimal amenities. Lillig said he couldn’t get his head around the dirt floors. And both agreed that they never got used to the omnipresent smell — a pervasive mixture of raw sewage, rotting garbage and frying meat.
“It seemed to me that we were getting a perspective on different levels of poverty,” Torres-Botello said. “So it kind of ranged from those individuals who had one- or two-bedroom homes to a family in the hills in a shack.”
Indeed, the South American country has a 44.5 percent poverty rate, according the current CIA World Factbook. Peru has enjoyed gradual economic growth in recent years, and the poverty rate has decreased correspondingly. But the English-language Peruvian Times reported earlier this year that 11 million Peruvians live in poverty, and 3.7 million of those are in “extreme” poverty.
The playwrights met people whose roofs were made of blankets and who got by on one meal a day. They saw neighborhoods where water was distributed from a rubber hose attached to a communal spigot.
They saw kids playing near raw sewage. They saw rows of primitive homes seemingly stacked in terraces in the hills above Lima.
But they saw something else, too — a sort of can-do community spirit that makes the best of a bad situation.“I was surprised they don’t feel sorry for themselves,” Torres-Botello said. “They don’t have that sense of sadness. Like when you see the Sally Struthers commercials, and the kid looks all sad and depressed — that’s not how they are. The kids are truly enjoying life. And to feel sorry for them would be almost insulting. … If you don’t know any other way to live, that’s your life. And it is what it is.”
Torres-Botello and Lillig come from a Catholic tradition of fighting for the cause of social justice, which a few years ago motivated them to start up the nonprofit Full Circle Theatre Company.
To fund the trip to Peru, they applied for a $2,000 grant from Sisters of Saint Joseph of Carondelet, a Catholic order based in St. Louis. They raised another $2,500 from private sources, including fees they earned writing and performing in a TV commercial for the José Pepper restaurant chain.
Sister Patty Clune, part of the order’s leadership, said the project dovetailed perfectly with the order’s values. It helped that Lillig was an associate of the Sisters. Associates, she said, are men or women who “feel a connection to the charism of the Sisters, but they lead their own lives. They share our values, and yet they don’t take any vows.”
“His project to kind of expand his study and research of homelessness fits right into what we’re committed to,” she said. “It was a no-brainer.”
The order also happens to have about 30 sisters in Peru, and they were instrumental in setting up interviews and serving as translators for Lillig and Torres-Botello, neither of whom speaks much Spanish.
Each took about 100 pages of notes, and they hope to have a finished play in six months. The challenge will be to write a five-character play that tells a dramatic narrative, unlike the “talking head” format of other projects.
The experience had an impact. Neither sees poverty as he did before the trip.
“It would be easy for us to come back and say Americans don’t realize what poverty is like,” Lillig said. “But it’s all relative. And that’s what we’re trying to focus on. Poverty here is bad because of the way our society is (and) poverty there is bad because of the way their society is. But to do a comparative analysis of the two, they’re worlds apart.”
In some ways, Torres-Botello said, the people are like people anywhere.
“There’s really no difference,” he said. “Just like here, they want to survive. They want to wake up in the morning and live another day.”
Lillig said the trip made him reconsider the concept of the “American dream.”
“It’s not really the American dream,” he said. “It’s just our version of the (universal) dream. Because they have it, too.”
Top photo by Shane Keyser – Kansas City Star
© 2009 Kansas City Star and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.
