Popular Theater
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Community theater can be an excellent
way to raise awareness about specific needs
of disabled persons or to gain greater
participation of local people in a community
rehabilitation program. It is also a good
method for educating people about important
preventive measures. Actors can be disabled
persons, parents of disabled children,
health workers, rehabilitation workers,
schoolchildren, or any combination of these.
No special place is needed. However,
some sort of raised area is helpful, with a
plain wall or curtain behind. But effective
popular theater has also been carried out
in the street, the village square, and the
marketplace.
Simple outdoor stages for popular theater.
The Measles Monster street theater
skit in Nicaragua. The head of the
monster is a mask painted on heavy
paper, glued to a cardboard carton.
For example, measles is especially dangerous
to poorly nourished children, leaving many
with blindness, deafness, seizures, mental
slowness, or cerebral palsy. Preventing
measles helps prevent disability. In Nicaragua a
group of health workers and local children put on a
street theater skit called ‘The Measles Monster’.
Popular participation is high, for as watchers gather,
the monster runs through the crowd looking for
unvaccinated children. At the end of the skit, when
all the children are protected by vaccination, the
children in the audience join the children in the skit
in beating-up the monster.
An unvaccinated child actor (wearing
a white ‘happy’ mask) is caught by
the measles monster, who closes his
huge claws around him.
Under the monster’s claws, the child rapidly
changes masks. When the monster uncovers
him, he is wearing a ‘sad’ mask speckled
with red spots. The child nearly dies.
The announcer of the skit asks the children in the audience why the boy was attacked.
They shout back, “Because he wasn’t vaccinated.” At the end, after all the children are
vaccinated, the loudspeaker asks, “Why can the children now overcome the monster?”
They shout back, “Because we have all been vaccinated!”