Nelson Rodrigues and Brazil as it is

Thesis points out how the playwright created a language that reflects the paradoxes and contradictions of national formation

Nelson Rodrigues and Brazil as it is

Thesis points out how the playwright created a language that reflects the paradoxes and contradictions of national formation

Tension gripped the Teatro Municipal in Rio de Janeiro on that night of December 28, 1943. The audience, who had been reading enthusiastic reviews in the newspapers for months anticipating the new show, did not know what to expect from that premiere. Behind the curtains, an equally anxious cast was concentrating on bringing to life the production by Polish director Zbigniew Ziembinski. The task would not be the most conventional. The exhausting rehearsals lasted for months and the conception of the play required innovative work in scenography and lighting. The effort was necessary because the reality, hallucination and memory of Alaíde – the protagonist of the play “Vestido de noiva” – would be together on stage, in an aesthetic resource that was unprecedented up to that time.

Three acts followed one another and, at the end of the show, the theater erupted in applause and ecstasy. The audience didn’t know it, but they were celebrating the birth of a new paradigm in Brazilian dramatic arts. In the shadows of one of the boxes, the creator of this drama combined the ecstasy of success with the frustration of not being in the spotlight at that moment. According to the biography written by journalist Ruy Castro, no one in the cast, technical team or director of the play thought of drawing attention to Nelson Rodrigues’ presence in the theater. According to the playwright himself, he felt like “an outsider in his own glory.”

This paradox, that of “being an outsider in one’s own glory,” became a hallmark of the playwright’s entire work. With a scathing view of Brazilian society, Nelson made ordinary people his heroes, the Rio de Janeiro suburbs and the intimacy of homes his stage, and the tension between moral constraints and conventions and the most sordid repressed desires the material for the construction of his “Brazilian-style tragedies,” a concept formulated by Mariana Toledo Borges, now a PhD in literary theory and history from Unicamp, to interpret the author’s entire theatrical work. A work that emerged at a time when modern European playwrights, such as the Danish Henrik Ibsen and the German Bertold Brecht, were deconstructing the genre.

The characteristics of Nelson Rodrigues' theater were innovative not only from the perspective of dramatic arts. His works offer a critical reading of the formation of society and, although marked by conservatism, take viewers out of the comfort of their armchairs, making them think about how much the moral framework of the traditional Brazilian family, which does not survive behind closed doors, reveals about a country where a type of conservative provincialism persists. This is the interpretation of Borges, who, in his doctoral research, analyzes in detail the theatrical work of Nelson Rodrigues, seeking to understand the traits of Brazilian society and culture sedimented in the tragic genre. The research was supervised by professor Fabio Akcelrud Durão.

Every Brazilian will be punished

The raw and unvarnished universe of Rodrigues is inspired by the reality experienced by the playwright himself. Born in 1912 in Recife (PE), Nelson Rodrigues was the fifth of 14 children born to Mario Rodrigues and Maria Esther. In 1916, the family moved to the North Zone of Rio de Janeiro. In the suburbs of Rio de Janeiro, Nelsinho grew up in poverty, surrounded by neighbors who sometimes helped each other and sometimes invaded each other's privacy, and surrounded by death, from the deaths of neighbors' children who did not survive the first days of life to the thousands of victims of the Spanish flu in 1918. From a child's perspective, he realized from an early age that the life of the average Brazilian, living in the suburbs, differed from the dream promised by modernity.

Over the years, Mario Rodrigues managed to establish himself in the Rio de Janeiro press, first as a journalist at Correio da Manhã and later as the owner of the newspapers A Manhã and Crítica . Besides providing stability for the family, these ventures led his children into journalism, as was the case with the future playwright and his brother Mario Filho, who modernized the country's sports press and whose name became the official name of the Maracanã Stadium. However, until the 1930s, Nelson and his family would suffer a series of setbacks, including the assassination of his brother Roberto, the death of his father, and the closure of Crítica by the regime of President Getúlio Vargas – not to mention the several times the then-young man needed medical attention due to recurring tuberculosis.

Seeking a way to pay the bills and taking advantage of the repertoire accumulated during his years as a journalist, Nelson ventured into the world of theater, which until then had been dominated by light comedies of French influence and musical revues. Before the success of “Vestido de noiva” (1943), he wrote “A mulher sem pecado” (The Woman Without Sin) (1941), which received a lukewarm reception due to the production being made at the time. His efforts to support himself would often be reflected in the plots of several of his characters. Within this journey, Brazilian archetypes that carry within themselves dualities would be present, such as the “soft scoundrel”, the “resentful spinster aunts”, the “upper-class lady on the promenade”, the “honest adulteress” and the “virtuous prostitute” – making paradoxes explicit. “I realized that there is an idea of ​​Brazil submerged in these dialogues [of the works], which basically boils down to the violent friction of opposites that cannot be reconciled, leading to tragic catastrophe”, comments Borges.

Nelson Rodrigues wrote his plays during a time of intense intellectual production focused on understanding the country, its formation, and its identity—something latent in Brazilian intellectual circles since the Modern Art Week of 1922. In this context, works such as the Anthropophagic Manifesto (1928) by Oswald de Andrade, Casa Grande & Senzala (1933) by Gilberto Freyre, and Raízes do Brasil (1936) by Sérgio Buarque de Holanda emerged, laying the foundation for our socio-historical and aesthetic formation and the development of critics like Antonio Candido and Roberto Schwarz.

The author of “Vestido de Noiva” (Wedding Dress), however, differs from his contemporaries in that he views modernity with profound pessimism. “Nelson disagrees with the modernist thinking of the time, which was enthusiastic about the idea of ​​a ‘country of the future’ and a supposed break with European paternity towards supposed progress,” explains the researcher. On the contrary, his universe is dominated by characters that reveal the tortuous formation of Brazilian society, marked by provincialism and the illogical coexistence of antagonisms, leading the writer to create a unique tragic form. Although conservative in his pessimism regarding modernity, Nelson does not place hope in tradition, neither in moral tradition nor in aesthetics. For the playwright, we emerged in a crooked way and are doomed to collapse. “This is a unique, very singular stance. It is not even possible to say that Nelson makes an emphatic criticism of all this.”

Family tragedy

Two themes constantly run through Nelson Rodrigues' work: sex, used as a metaphor for human impulses repressed by moral conventions, and the obsession with death, sealing the tragic fate of his characters. Thus, the playwright addresses incestuous relationships, as in “Álbum de família” (1946), the various facets of an influential bookmaker in “Boca de Ouro” (1959) or even the desire to move up in life through marriage in “Otto Lara Resende ou Bonitinha, mas ordinária” (1962).

Despite dealing with marginal characters, Rodrigues’ plays converge towards tragedy, a genre that has been consecrated since Greek theater and in which there are themes that are both local and universal, and heroes with character flaws that lead to their downfall. However, the Brazilian author’s tragedy adds a layer of meaning to the traditional genre when it creates the mythology of the suburban Brazilian. “Nelson creates characters who act heroically, but who inhabit the periphery of capitalism. They are moralists, but also murderers,” explains the researcher.

Borges argues that Nelson Rodrigues creates a “Brazilian tragedy,” inserting typical traits of our society into his plots and characters. “Regardless of the way the story is staged or the universalism of the themes, there is a dynamic of Brazilianness that remains.” In addition to the characters’ internal contradictions, the author works with the social contrasts of Rio de Janeiro at the time, which persist to this day. The provincial and moralistic types of Méier and Tijuca are contrasted with elite figures from the supposedly cosmopolitan and liberal South Zone.

Although he takes a close look at the country's social and moral contradictions, Nelson, as Borges' research makes clear, does not intend to construct a realistic scenario. The themes of his plays make explicit everything that bourgeois morality wishes to hide, to the point that it is possible to establish parallels between the scenes in Rodriguian and those that would serve as case studies for psychoanalysis. "His characters struggle between absolute modesty and absolute savagery. These are the types of conflicts that would later become the object of psychoanalysis," explains the author of the thesis.

The study of Nelson Rodrigues' tragedies shows that, by looking at the family environment, the playwright criticizes the formation of Brazilian bourgeois intimacy, based on an aristocratic and patriarchal heritage. On the periphery of capitalism, this is a portrait of a country that modernized itself in the wake of European references, giving rise to a society of erratic protagonists. “These are bourgeois characters acting heroically in their unimportant lives,” summarizes the researcher.