Freedom Hotel

Krueger 35 Grupo de Teatro Forja (Trans. Robert Krueger) FREEDOM HOTEL Translator's Introduction The Grupo de Teatro Forja (Forge Theatre Group) was formed in 1980 by union factory workers and allies in the "ABCD" industrial complex of Sao Paulo, Brazil, during the dramatic confrontation between tens of thousands of workers and the armed forces of the military dictatorship. The workers were victorious, carrying the momentum of the matalurgicos, steel and assembly workers, who in 1978 forced the state to lower its guns and negotiate a contract conceding many demands. More than anything, this courageous, illegal united front caused the abertura (opening) in the fourteen-year old authoritarian regime. Later, many establishment groups and parties took credit for this decisive break that led to the disappointing liberalizacao and redemocratizacao . Teatro Forja was formed by workers from the front lines, family members in the reserve forces, people from the community, and support groups among students, intellectuals and professionals. The mass movement surrounding them spawned comunidades de base that desired cultural and artistic expression of their whole reality and not just the demands of a strike. Initially, most of the members of the theater were illiterates for whom the collective process of inventing the play from its writing to final production— where creation and improvisation were forms of self-criticism—was a liberating education. It should come as no surprise that these cultural workers incorporated in their play many of the establishment's stereotypes of themselves and their world. But it has been the mistake of embarrassed sophisticates to dismiss this drama as unbearably unintellectual or as dreadful agit-prop. Certainly much of the play's material is found on television and in pulp. However, oppression and exploitation also produce stock character and coincidence. Many of the Forja people and their families experienced the suffering and joy they portray in the play. But they are not simple realists; they transform absurd and ridiculous coincidence into hilarious and shocking class juxtaposition . There is something new in the victims' treatment of cliché—the simultaneity of TV and stage scenes, for example, is used not only to show socioeconomic contradiction but, more importantly, to expose the ideological manipulation of people through such means as violence and television. And then there are the play's interludes of genuine popular and folk cultures strug- 36 the minnesota review gling to survive in the labor vortex of Sao Paulo that syphons streams of workers from all regions of Brazil. In 1982, the Forja group produced another play, Pesadelo (Nightmare), which was also very popular with the workers, even though, as its title suggests , it foreshadowed the extreme difficulties that the popular movement faced in maintaining its identity in the abertura's setbacks and cooptation. The Forja productions beg to be reread along with Eles Nao Usam Black-tie (They Don't Wear Black Tie) by the talented Gianfrancesco Guarnieri, inspired by the first workers' strikes in the early 1950s against the newly established foreign automobile industry in Sao Paulo. The 1978-80 strikes in the same grotesquely developed place, against the same but now even more multinational industry, had great impact. For the same but now more massive reasons that motivated Guarnieri 's acclaimed play, it was adapted for the famous Brazilian movie of the same title. These two plays in many ways derive from proletarian soap operas, that Brazilian television genre por excelencia that rivals such powerful traditions as carnival in mass entertainment and ideological control. But the reactions and controversy caused by Freedom Hotel and They Don't Wear Black Tie save these dramas from total absorption and cooptation by a culture industry that inevitably seeks to exploit the plays' weaknesses in technique and sentiment. Presently, Forja's fortunes seem to have fallen into the same painful dialectic as the abertura itself. But contemporary Brazil is a perfect demonstration of the fact that today even the most local phenomenon is more and more a dialogic of world forces. So it is with the political aesthetics of Freedom Hotel of They Don't Wear Black Tie they show us how a poor boarding house in a Sao Paulo slum becomes an autopsy of life in the large...