“Think football,” my friend whispered to me as the lights went down for this year’s faculty production, Brazilian playwright Nelson Rodrigues’ “The Deceased Woman.” I could not have put it better myself. This witty interpretation of Rodrigues is football made theater. But we’re not talking “footbawwll” USA-style. “Deceased Woman” breaths confrontation and edge-of-your-seat intensity in the sharp, high-octane of energy soccer, or Brazilian futebol.
Rodrigues’ play, set in Rio de Janeiro in the 1950s, features three parallel and intersecting stories. Zulmira (Daphne Schmon ’09), a working-class, middle aged woman, is dying of emphysema and wants to arrange for herself the grandest funeral her town has ever seen. Her clueless husband Tuninho (Mike James ’07), meanwhile, fantasizes about winning piles of money betting on his favorite dark-horse “futebol” team. Mixed with this is the boys-clubby atmosphere of the town funeral home, run by Mamet-like, oversexed swindlers who spend their days convincing patrons to spend vast sums on the dearly departed. As the comedy progresses, these narratives become increasingly intertwined and complex, the final scenes crystallizing the tragedy underlying each.
Set, light, and costume design mirrored this emotional intensity. The play opens with Zulmira blown onto a stage covered in falling snow, her bright red umbrella and pink dress striking contrast against the white flakes. Marcela Oteiza’s sets were not so much spare as colorful and visually evocative, calling the eye to one part of the stage as if with a snapshot. Leslie Weinberg’s costumes were beautifully designed and similarly saturated, aiding director Claudia Tatinge Nascimento’s and assistant director Jess Chayes’s ’07 creation of vivid action sequences.
This theatrical interest in movement-based images reached its logical conclusion with the inclusion of cinema. “Deceased Woman” is introduced with an old black-and-white film clip of a futebol match and stills of Brazil projected on a movie screen at the back of the stage (featuring cinematography by Jeremy Marks ’07 and Alex Uhlmann ’07). The rest of the play develops this theme, introducing filmed characters with which the real-live actors interact. Costumer Leslie Weinberg (wearing what looked like a fruit basket on her head) and Wesleyan Theater Professor Yuriy Kordonsky hammed Zulmira’s flask-sipping, neurotic parents to Woody Allen-esque perfection in on-screen cameos.
What made Nascimento’s direction, as usual, so intelligent was that she found clever ways to weave the actors on and off-stage and into the audience without her choices ever seeming forced. This enabled the cast to really open up the already large playing space, turning the audience, in the final, crucial scene, into a sitting-duck stadium of futebol spectators.
Yet this play belonged first and foremost to its physical, sexually forthright cast. Because Nascimento and Chayes read “Deceased Woman” as a futebol-play, actors must be willing to move like athletes and get down and dirty—especially when the script features its two main characters in the divine act of taking a dump. They met the challenge. Actors Anthony Nikolchev ’07, Alexander Fishman ’07 and Jermaine Lewis ’09 looked divine in drag. Scene changes were finessed with actors leaping across the stage and blink-and-you-miss-it dance sequences. These physical nuances rounded out the performance and made it sing (sometimes literally, and in Portuguese).
Schmon was particularly impressive as Zulmira, maintaining intensity without sacrificing precision or character complexity. Schmon has incredible stage presence and took full control of the stage, interacting confidently with the audience. Her physical fluidity and line readings were spot on—funny without going over the top.
James’ Tuninho was equally skillful. You really felt for the guy, who just wanted to have sex with his uninterested wife and maybe win some money or recognition from his futebol-obsessed buddies. James mastered a cartoon-like process of coming slowly unhinged as the play progressed, Tuninho’s devolution thrust into overdrive by a surprise revelation near the play’s end (its too good to ruin, go read it yourself!).
As Timbira, the noir-ish, sex-crazed funeral salesman, Nick Gerry-Bullard ’06 was just straight up good theater. Gerry-Bullard has real flair for physical comedy and comic timing. Timbira was perhaps funniest of all: brusque and majorly shady, yet good-naturedly insecure enough to love.
Finally, kudos to Lily Whitsitt ’06, who nailed a slick, sexually aggressive body language for her cameo sleazeball-man-in-pants role. I guess it is really true what they say: there are only (cough) small parts?
Speaking of small parts, this is a play that could not have been mounted in the ’92. It needed the expanse of the CFA Theater; a space roomy enough for the actors to play games of pick-up futebol, run, jump, and dance, to project their voices to the back of the house, and make their carefully honed physical movements larger than life. This is what the script demands, and this is what the cast achieved, thanks to skillful direction and the actors’ own talent. Choices did not seem schticky or unnatural as so often happens, nor did the space seem too big, which it easily could have. The world of “The Deceased Woman” just happens to be one of very un-deceased, slightly hyperactive characters—and it quickly begins to seem normal that everything in this world is simply more intense than usual. We suspend our disbelief, and follow the bouncing ball, and it is maravilhoso.