British theatre was xenophobic and tunnel visioned . There was a resistance to using actors from other ethnicities, cultures, and races in production of classics. And a resistance to the non realistic plays like those of Brecht, Genet and Tennessee Williams"

In truth the Theatre of the Oppressed has no end, because everything which happens in it must extend into life….The Theatre of the Oppressed is located precisely on the frontier between fiction and reality – and this border must be crossed. If the show starts in fiction, its objective is to become integrated into reality, into life. Now in 1992, when so many certainties have become so many doubts, when so many dreams have withered on exposure to sunlight, and so many hopes have become as many deceptions – now that we are living through times and situations of great perplexity, full of doubts and uncertainties, now more than ever I believe it is time for a theatre which, at its best, will ask the right questions at the right times. Let us be democratic and ask our audiences to tell us their desires, and let us show them alternatives. Let us hope that one day – please, not too far in the future – we’ll be able to convince or force our governments, our leaders, to do the same; to ask their audiences – us – what they should do, so as to make this world a place to live and be happy in – yes, it is possible – rather than just a vast market in which we sell our goods and our souls. Let’s hope. Let’s work for it!

The Theatre of the Oppressed is theatre in this most archaic application of the word. In this usage, all human beings are Actors (they act!) and Spectators (they observe!).

The theatre is an attack on mankind carried on by magic: to victimize an audience every night, to make them laugh and cry and suffer and miss their trains. Of course actors regard audiences as enemies, to be deceived, drugged, incarcerated, stupefied. This is partly because the audience is also a court against which there is no appeal.

I wasn't experienced in politics. The revolution in Burkina Faso certainly galvanized us. Women began to take the forefront of the political scene, before no one thought about it, it was reserved for men. So no, I did a performing arts option at university. I met great authors. And from there came my inspiration to go into theater. It's the place for me, as a woman, to exist by speaking at a higher level on a stage. I find it's the place of truth because you can't cheat the audience. We can convey things that people can't say, suffering inflicted on us women who are always walled up, who don't dare to speak out. And for me, theater was a revelation, even if it wasn't easy at first, but it's been going on for 30 years! At first, even my family, community, friends and everyone condemned me and said: "Why don't you go and look for a job with your degrees?

To me theatricalism means dramatic embellishment: the art of the aposiopesis; the abrupt closing of a book; the lighting of a cigarette; the effects off-stage, a pistol shot, a cry, a fall, a crash; an effective entrance, an effective exit – all of which may seem cheap and obvious, but if treated sensitively and with discretion, they are the poetry of the theatre.

Theatre needs you to go to a vulnerable place to find authenticity and truth

I believe that in the theater you really can't do anything that doesn't have some political consequence. My work has been about finding my own voice and a way to express myself.

I'm not real. I'm theatre.

Theatre has nothing to do with buildings or other physical constructions. Theatre — or theatricality — is the capacity, this human property which allows man to observe himself in action, in activity. The self-knowledge thus acquired allows him to be the subject (the one who observes) of another subject (the one who acts). It allows him to imagine variations of his action, to study alternatives. Man can see himself in the act of seeing, in the act of acting, in the act of feeling, the act of thinking. Feel himself feeling, think himself thinking.

I can say that my collaboration with Theatro Technis was a serious milestone in my life. I had the chance to work with George Eugeniou a great director who taught me a great deal

On a political level, I just found that I was more excited by what my skill-set could bring to film and television. Asian [American] theater has stretched the boundaries a little bit, but at the time, [it] was much more involved in what I thought was an older form of expression. It was much more about identity plays, explaining who we were as Asian Americans through dramas. And that didn't interest me as much. I was interested in people who weren't going to theater, and reaching them. That always excited me more, and to this day, theater, though on a formal level is the ideal place for an actor, on some political level, I find it frustrating that theatergoers are mostly rich -- maybe that's unfair -- mostly white…

Theater of Cruelty means a theater difficult and cruel for myself first of all. And, on the level of performance, it is not the cruelty we can exercise upon each other by hacking at each other’s bodies, carving up our personal anatomies, or, like Assyrian emperors, sending parcels of human ears, noses, or neatly detached nostrils through the mail, but the much more terrible and necessary cruelty which things can exercise against us. We are not free. And the sky can still fall on our heads. And the theater has been created to teach us that first of all.

[On The Crucible] I was very moved by that play once again when the Royal Shakespeare Company did a production that toured the cathedrals of England. Then they took it to Poland and performed it in the cathedrals there, too. The actors said it changed their lives. Officials wept; they were speechless after the play, and everyone knew why. It was because they had to enforce the kind of repression the play was attacking. That made me prouder than anything I ever did in my life. The mission of the theater, after all, is to change, to raise the consciousness of people to their human possibilities.