A visita do presidenciável ou os morcegos estão comendo os abacates maduros (1984)
Created during the Diretas Já movement for direct elections in Brazil, this play is a parable of the political moment the country was facing. It tells the story of an old couple who has lived in the same house for the past twenty years, and how the house deteriorates day after day. The couple embodies the conservative middle class that supported the Military Coup in 1964, but that two decades later lost their privileges and went to the streets to fight for Diretas Já. Intertwined with parallel stories, a couple faced with eviction, a torture scene, and the judgement of a policeman, the audience sees the house literally fall apart in front of them. In the final scene, when the Presidential Candidate arrives, a giant hand appears to hand him his Presidential Sash, and the building collapses in shards, leaks, and dust.
O amargo santo da purificação — Uma visão alegórica e barroca da vida, paixão e morte do revolucionário Carlos Marighella (2008)
O amargo santo da purificação tells the story of Brazilian Marxist revolutionary Carlos Marighella, a central figure in the struggle against both dictatorships the country faced in the 20th century — Getúlio Vargas' Estado Novo in the 30s and 40s, and the Military dictatorship established in 1964. This allegorical and baroque vision of his life, passion, and death revives a popular hero that the dominant sectors tried to erase from National History for decades. Starting from his origins in Bahia, this street production presents his youth, his poetry, the resistance to the Estado Novo, his imprisonment, the new Constitution, the outlawing of the Communist Party, the armed struggle against the Military Dictatorship, and the ambush that ended in his death in 1969. The text is written collectively, based on Marighella's poems transformed into songs. Through masks, visual elements from Afro-Brazilian culture, and an aesthetics based on the films of Glauber Rocha, Ói Nóis brings to the streets of the city an epic approach to the aspirations of freedom and justice of the Brazilian people.
Zé Celso Amnesty Session (2010)
In 1974, José Celso Martinez Corrêa was arrested by the military dictatorship and taken to the DOPS—the Department for Political and Social Order—where he was brutally tortured and put into prison. Thirty years later, the theater director filed a requirement for official pardon and compensation with the Amnesty Commission. This commission had been created by law 10.559 of 2002, an addition to the infamous law 6.683 of 1979, which granted general amnesty to all who committed political crimes under the dictatorship, both in the military and in the resistance.
In 2010, the Amnesty Commission held it's 35th public session at Teatro Oficina, to read and vote on Zé Celso's requirement. The official theatricality of the law was combined with O Banquete, a play by the group, and the audience was received by a Serbian-Croatian song, followed by the washing of their feet by the cast in character. The rapporteur for the case was attorney and actor Prudente José Silveira Mello, who read the report in a suit and barefoot, on the set of the play.