Themes and Directions of the Brazilian Theatre: 1973-1978 (original) (raw)

1980, Latin American Theatre Review

Last August I returned to Brazil after an eight-year absence. Although I had kept in touch through reading and correspondence, the visit afforded me a brief but in-depth opportunity to get an overview of the theatre activity of the last five years. I saw and talked at length with such theatre critics as Décio de Almeida Prado, Sábato Magaldi, Bárbara Heliodora Mendonça de Morais, and Yan Michalski. The picture I gathered was curiously mixed, with both positive and negative trends. As always, the socio-political atmosphere had everything to do with the art of drama in Brazil. Despite an apparent effort during the Geisel regime toward some kinds of increased liberty (the end of press censorship, for instance), theatre censorship had severely hampered national dramaturgy. The Teatro Novo, the autobiographical theatre with strong existential overtones, which I have studied elsewhere, 1 had gradually faded by about 1973. The principal authors, José Vicente, Antonio Bivar, Leilah Assunção, et al., were responsible for only one or two successful works over the five-year period of 1968-1973. O Assalto, Fala Baixo Senão Eu Grito, O Cão Siamês were effective and powerful plays, although they had neither the architectonic qualities of the best of Jorge Andrade, nor the directorial penache of O Rei da Vela as presented in 1968 by José Celso Martinez Correa. The later plays by these young dramatists revealed their shortcomings as writers and their lack of background in the theatre milieu. They had not served an apprenticeship, as such leaders of the art as Gianfrancesco Guarnieri had at the Arena. With the possible exception of Leilah, whose turn to humor in for gin ho o Machão and later plays proved longer lasting, 2 José Vicente in Os Convalescentes (1970) and Hoje é Dia de Roc\ (1971) and Antonio Bivar with Longe Daqui, Aqui Mesmo (1971) revealed that they were playwrights with a single message.