A memória presente: estudo da dramaturgia de Antonio Callado (A Cidade Assassinada) e Jorge Andrade (Pedreira das almas)

Abstract

This study aimed at analyzing the dramaturgy of the authors Antonio Callado (1917 - 1994) and Jorge Andrade (1922-1284). From the first, we considered the part entitled A Cidade Assassinada (1954), and from the second, Pedreira das Almas (1957). In this work we pay special attention with regard to the context in which the plays were written, in the 1950s. We emphasize that the A Cidade Assassinada went public in honor of the four hundred years São Paulo city, and Pedreira das Almas, commemorating the tenth anniversary of the TBC Teatro Brasileiro de Comédia (Brazilian Comedy Theater). Antonio Callado records in his work, the close relationship it maintains with the highlights of the historical process in Brazil. In A Cidade Assassinada the playwright contextualizes the year 1560, Brazil colonization period. The play has as the protagonist character João Ramalho, who has the support of her daughter Rosa Bernarda to protect his main symbols of memory, the city of Santo André da Borda do Campo and the pillory, which he created. The playwright Jorge Andrade, coming from a family originally from west of São Paulo, suffered by the coffee crisis, as well as the consequences of the measures taken by the government at the time. Through the process of rural memories that belonged to his family, the playwright highlights the melancholy face of multiple losses caused by historical changes. Jorge Andrade contextualizes in Pedreira das Almas the revolt of the Liberals held in 1842 and the decline of the auriferous veins in the interior of Minas Gerais. It presents as main character Urbana, who with her children Mariana and Martiniano, shown against the ideas of Gabriel, who intends to lead the people from the city of Pedreira das Almas to the plateau, where there is the promise of progress. The matriarch Urbana faces Gabriel and state forces in defense of the permanent memory of their ancestors in that city. We observed that both playwrights express a significant involvement in relation with culture and memory of their ancestors and country. Theirs dramaturgy, although contextualize different periods, converge in a celebration of memory, which initially manifests as individual, in other words, in the family, but that during the action, taking proportions of collective memory, the one that according to Halbwachs (2006), is laced to memory of the group, integrating the memory of the wider society.