excerpt
In the theater, nationality doesn’t matter, freedom reigns, and I will be far away from this theater of the insane that is life. Everyone contradicts himself and no one understands the other. Each one speaking a different language, a veritable Tower of Babel. What I want is to give myself to the drama of a real play and no longer to the drama of life. And onstage I will never again be taken for crazy for being free. I will simply be free.
synopsis
As the title suggests, the play deals with the life of Brazilian women living in Paris. The protagonist, Doroteia, interrupted her acting career in Brazil to marry François. She has a lover named Fio. Doroteia shares the stage with another Brazilian woman, Flor, the concierge who takes care of the building. Originally from Fortaleza, she does the cleaning of Doroteia’s apartment. Flor is married to Manoel, a Portuguese settled in Paris, and also has a lover, Mon Chéri. In an homage to comedy of manners and the burlesque theater, both women meet their lovers in the same place, the Hotel des Mauvais Garçons.
Although François and Manoel also have lovers, they do not appear on stage. The play therefore presents two triangles, each made up of a Brazilian woman in Paris, her husband, and her lover. But the vertices of these triangles have opposite signs or values, for François and Manoel display diametrically antagonistic behavior. François is a libertine in the classical sense and because of this defends freedom of action – his own and that of others – and is indifferent to the fact of his wife having other romantic partners. Unlike François, Manoel is a male-chauvinist alcoholic who calls his wife a whore and beats her at the slightest provocation.
The action of the play, the plot itself, corresponds to the manner in which the triangles come undone.
François leaves Doroteia to be with his lover. Manoel dies, after brutally beating Flor in a fit of rage. After Manoel’s death, Flor’s lover, Mon Chéri, disappears. Disillusioned, Doroteia accepts an invitation to play Sarah Bernhardt and resumes her acting career in Brazil. Thus she will no longer be the prisoner of the social role of wife and be limited to being only one, for she can multiply herself through the characters. Return to the theater means her liberation. The play rejects both the ideology of libertinism, which runs counter to love, and the ideology of chauvinism, which ignores feminine desire. It ends by making a counterpoint between life’s theater of insanity and the true theater that unveils a different scene and radiates light.
The play is in two acts and was written for five actors: Doroteia, a stage actress; François, her husband; Fio, Doroteia’s lover; Flor, her cleaning woman; and Mon Chéri, Flor’s lover.
history
Brasileira de Paris is Betty Milan’s first play written directly for the theater. It was written in 2005 and read on International Women’s Day – March 8, 2006 – at the auditorium of the Folha de S. Paulo by the cast of Teatro Oficina under the direction of Marcelo Drummond. There was a subsequent reading on January 23, 2008, at Teatro Oficina by a large cast under the same director.