Augusto Boal enters the story of modern theatre the way a spark enters dry grass: not politely, not quietly, and not with any respect for the comfortable boundaries that keep “art” safely separated from “life.” If you look at the twentieth century’s theatre revolution as a long argument about what theatre is for, Boal is the figure who steps forward and says: it is for people who are not in the room yet. It is for people who don’t have tickets, who don’t have time, who don’t have training, who don’t have permission. It is for the ones who live under rules they did not write. And because of that, he becomes one of the crucial bridges between the rehearsal room and the street.

Boal was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1931, into a Brazil that was simultaneously urbanizing and stratifying, modernizing and brutalizing, a society where wealth and power ...