Lessons from Students about the Brazilian Dictatorship

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Consuelo de Castro's play A Prova de Fogo (1968) communicates the student experience during the dictatorship to students of Brazilian theater today allowing for a sense of participation in the struggles for gender equality and political action. In spite of the passage of time, students can identify with the characters when they apply specific reading approaches outlined by Juan Villegas. There is a dialog then between the play's focus on Brazilian student life in the sixties, the play's critique of sexual politics, and the response to the play in the classroom. From the safe distance of more than thirty years, Brazil's dictatorship again has become a subject for scholarly examination as can be witnessed by the recent panels at the 2001 convention of the Modern Language Association. While for many the best response to the horrors of the past is to leave them there, this attention seems warranted since there is much to be learned from the dictatorship about the history of the country and the development of its national literature. As a researcher and instructor of theater, I recently tested the classroom, rather than the conference panel, as a site for discussing the dictatorship. In this context it is difficult to create an environment conducive to analysis about plays written during the dictatorship since most of them portray violence and inhumanity. In the exchange with students, I learned important lessons about theater and about teaching the dictatorship that my own research had not revealed. This essay will develop a conversation between my analysis of the play's critique of gender and power relations and my students' insights based on their readings and imagined dramatization of those two themes.