Experimental Plays in Portuguese

July 5th
Today was the day that we left for Rio de Janeiro! Unfortunately we were not leaving until 12:30AM…Classes seemed to go by slowly of course. In our Portuguese class we had our second test, this time a written one which was almost completely on the subjunctive. In our afternoon cultural class we further discussed the issue of immigration and identity specifically analyzing the movie we had all watched on the bus back from Paraty; Gaijin.
After classes Roxanne, Allison and I went to get acai at our regular fruit stand haunt in Consolação. The acai there is always such a good treat, we split a large bowl and I then had the energy to go home and pack my bags for Rio before returning to PUC to attend a play with our Portuguese professors. The play began at 9:30 and ended at 10:40. It was very interesting in that it is a non-traditional play. The playwright specialized in experimental productions and this play in particular was unique in that all the actors are blind and the play takes place in complete darkness. It took a while for everyone to get settled in their seats because we all had to walk in in groups of four holding on to each other’s shoulders following a guide down stairs and around rows of chairs to get to our seats. We were also each given a sector number so that if there was an emergency during the play and we needed to leave we could raise our hand and shout our sector number so that an usher with a flashlight could find us. I was in sector three.
        After everyone was settled the play began. At first I was not sure what was happening and I thought someone was having a panic attack due to the extreme darkness (this is the type of darkness that is so dark your retinas randomly fire and make you think that you are seeing light) because the first sounds was loud crying coming from all around. It turned out the play began with a funeral. It was very unnerving as in addition to being in the dark it was also theater in the round so the audience is really sharing the same space as the actors. We could tell they were right next to us but we could not see them. The story of the play continued with a husband grieving over the death of his beloved wife. His family is very worried that he has given up on living a life without her and they try several ways to break him out of his grief. In the end the brother-in-law and the father decide that they must tell the grieving husband that the wife had a lover in hopes that this will lessen his attachment to her memory. The son loses it when he hears and threatens to shoot himself if they do not say who the lover was, just at that moment a family friend comes in and the father says it was him. In a dramatic change of mood (it had been a tragedy) the grieving husband shouts for joy and hugs the family friend/fake lover because he now has someone to grieve with and reminisce about how great his dead wife was. The play was a great success. Even though it was experimental and shifted the audience’s perspective (i.e. the darkness and using smell(their dinner, the wife’s perfume) and touch(we got sprayed with water )to bring the audience into the production) it was still fun and interesting. It was also a good way to practice Portuguese because that was the only way we knew what was going on.
        There were nine people in our Rio weekend group; Victoria, Isabel, Isaiah, Angelika, Molly, Simon, Tanya, Christa and I. After the play, the Rio group met up in front of the theater to retrieve our bags (our professor let us lock them in her car during the play) and we headed to the bus station. Our transfer to the bus depot went smoothly; we caught a city bus in front of the school that went down Paulista to the green metro line which we took straight to the bus station. We arrived about 40 minutes before our departure and it turned out that our bus was delayed about 15 min. Once it arrived we all loaded up quickly and settled in for a not-so-bad night’s sleep (much better than on a plane, as the seats actually recline…) and we arrived at the Rio bus station at 6:30 in the morning just in time for the sunrise!