The lovers: Luciana Domschke (Clara) e Ricardo Bittencourt (Sébastien)
excerpt
I am sure you remember
because it seems it was yesterday
we are in the elevator in the building where you live
I tell you what I said to my son before leaving: “See you later, I’m on my way, I’m meeting my Brazilian friend”
you laugh because you’re my lover and you’re French
and you come out with: The Brazilian Lover, that’s the title of the play, Eva
synopsis
O amante brasileiro is a play structured around an exchange of e-mails between two characters, Clara and Sébastien, Claude’s husband. Clara and Sébastien truly love each other. What they desire is harmony. If by chance either of them doesn’t know how to act to coincide with the other, he or she simply does nothing. Until finding out.
Kindness is the word that best suits these two lovers. Because true love – a rare flower – has friendship as its reference, and betrayal is as strange to it as is the feeling of having been betrayed.
Although the play was not written to teach this or that, its earliest readers saw in it the instrument of reeducation about love – and it is quite true that there are two lessons in O amante brasileiro. The first is that love is a rite that depends both on the word and the reality of the encounter – which the Internet favors but does not propitiate. The second is that love is only happy when understanding between the partners is placed above orgasm.
Only communion makes eternity resonate, as Clara says in one of her many e-mails to Sébastien, or rather, Sebastião, for though he was born in France he was rebaptized in the waters of Brazil.
The play is in four acts and has three actors. An actress in the role of Clara, a male actor in the role of Sébastien, and an actress in the role of Claude.
history
After publishing O amante brasileiro with Editora Girafa in 2003, Betty Milan adapted the novel for the theater. As soon as the first version of the play closed, the author received in her home in Paris the Teatro Oficina actors, on their return from the tour of Os sertões in Germany. The group used the opportunity to do a table reading of the text, followed by a cast party. The play was later read at Teatro Oficina on February 16, 2004, and at the auditorium of the Folha de S. Paulo on March 2, 2004, by Luciana Domschke and Ricardo Bittencourt, members of the Oficina, directed by Fransérgio Araújo. Also in 2004, the play was mounted at Teatro Oficina with the same cast and director. On that occasion the author, Betty Milan, played the role of Claude. The production was a critical success.
opinion
“The first reading of O amante brasileiro, the theatrical adaptation of Betty Milan’s novel, on February 16, was a historic night for Teatro Oficina, in which the mysteries of its longevity and eternal youth were revealed.”
José Celso Martinez Corrêa, February 25, 2004
“The third play by Betty Milan, it continues her search for a ‘Theater of the Voice.’ The author conquers the challenges of the genre, above all by her great command of language. Like a good psychoanalyst, she knows how to alternate abstract concepts with trivial facts, in a process of reconstruction of reality (which blogs have been generalizing) and the physical consummation of desire entirely replaced by the voluptuousness of the word.”
Sérgio Salvia Coelho, drama critic, Folha de S. Paulo, September 5, 2004