Flash and Crash Days: Brazilian Theatre in the Post-Dictatorship (review)

English-language publications about Brazilian theatre are few and far between. The majority of books dedicated to the subject came out during the 1970s, and since then only two major titles have been published: Augusto Boal's Hamlet and the Baker's Son: My Life in Theatre and Politics (Routledge, 2000) and Severino Albuquerque's Tentative Transgressions: Homosexuality, AIDS, and the Theatre in Brazil (University of Wisconsin Press, 2003). David George's Flash and Crash Days: Brazilian Theatre in the Post-Dictatorship Period picks up where the earlier scholarship left off—with a major focus on the relationship between the stage and the military regime in Brazil—and provides the English-speaking reader with information about postdictatorship theatre. But while George considers the lack of recent works about the topic to reflect "an unstated assumption that theatre in Brazil thrives only under repression and dictatorship" (xv), I blame scholars and publishers who often overlook the artistic contribution of that major part of Latin America that is not Hispanic. After all, even in the seventies and during the worst years of the dictatorship, there were never as many books on Brazilian theatre for the American reader as on playwrights and directors from Spanish-speaking countries. Flash and Crash Days serves as a reminder that the Brazilian stage continues to thrive and produce vibrant theatre even though it remains as an almost unexplored field of scholarship and research.

George's book offers an exposition of different aspects or fields of Brazilian theatre today and introduces a number of theatre practitioners to the North American readers. Chapter 1, "Gerald Thomas and the Postmodernist Theatre in Brazil," discusses the emergence of the postmodern director in Brazil. George uses Robert Wilson as the prime example of an encenador, the term he uses to describe a director who assumes the authority of auteur of the performance text by fulfilling a tripartite role of director-playwright-designer. The main problem is that the chapter, which constitutes roughly one half of the book, focuses exclusively on the performances of Gerald Thomas. Thomas was brought up in Rio de Janeiro, Berlin, and New York, and received his professional training in the United States and Europe. It is very true that his performances created heated polemic in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, effectively contributing to revitalize the audience's engagement with the stage. But Thomas makes a point of presenting himself as highly individualistic and self-made encenador, and is often condescending to other Brazilian artists and to critics, so it is no surprise that many consider him to be an outsider who returned to Rio to demonstrate postmodernist performance to the less-enlightened. George himself seems to support this view of Thomas as an artist greatly detached from the Brazilian cultural and artistic context when he locates Thomas's work exclusively via European and American directors—Pina Bausch, Tadeusz Kantor, Peter Sellars, and Robert Wilson. A more balanced introduction to the Brazilian encenador as a creative artist who emerges not only from a formalistic concept but also from financial limitation (which has not been the case of Thomas's productions) and with emphasis on group theatre should include other reputable names. I consider that encenadores Antonio Araújo, Bia Lessa, Moacyr Góes, Gabriel Villela, and Ulysses Cruz, who are mentioned only in passing, are more distinctly national artistic voices, since they pointedly reflect and engage in performance the many issues that inhabit the collective unconscious of contemporary Brazilian society.

Chapter 2 introduces the reader to the less visible and at times neglected work of Brazilian women playwrights. George discusses in depth the works of two playwrights: Maria Adelaide Amaral's Querida Mamãe (Dear Mom) and Edla van Steen's O Último Encontro (The Last Encounter). The chapter serves to spark curiosity about these two women's writing, as very little of it has been translated to English. Amaral and van Steen...