Exactly a month ago, the playwright José Celso Martinez Correa, known as Zé Celso, a true reference of the Brazilian scene, handed over the baton from the Teatro Oficina to the actor and his partner Marcelo Drummond, 60, at the company’s headquarters in São Paulo. “One day I will die, to ensure the continuation of the theater, I will marry Marcelo Drummond,” she then explained in an interview with this newspaper, two days before celebrating their loving union. But nobody expected that Brazil’s most important playwright would end so soon. He passed away this Thursday at the age of 86 after a domestic accident.
The fire, caused by an electric stove in the early hours of last Tuesday morning, burned 53% of his body. Since then he has been admitted to the intensive care unit of the Hospital das Clínicas in São Paulo. The information about his health was always linked to hope: “Although it is a serious case, we want everyone to believe deeply in Zé’s abilities, that he has the strength and will to live enough to overcome it” , doctor actress Luciana Domschke demanded on the Teatro Oficina networks on Tuesday after speaking to the medical team treating him.
Zé Celso was one of the founders of the Teatro Oficina in 1958 and has been at the helm to this day. These days I’ve been engrossed in the theatrical adaptation of A Queda do Céu (The Fall of Heaven), a book of discourses by Yanomami shaman Davi Kopenawa, recorded by French anthropologist Bruce Albert. Rehearsals had already begun and Zé even worked via video call with contagious joy and vigor.
The director of the Teatro Oficina is one of the most outstanding and avant-garde figures in Brazilian culture since the 1960s. The theater company he directed gained international recognition in 1967 after the performance of his version of O Rei da Vela by the writer Oswald de Andrade. It was the foray into the theater scene of Tropicalismo, an avant-garde cultural movement that emerged at the beginning of the military dictatorship (1964-1985) that proposed radical aesthetic innovations, combining traditional Brazilian culture with foreign trends of the time.
The actor never gave up his vocation to freedom and transgression, office theater was always politicized. Even during the years of Jair Bolsonaro’s government, which eliminated the Ministry of Culture, he lost neither the will to fight nor his optimism. “I told people: Let’s stop crying, let’s do Roda Viva again!” he said a few days before his fatal accident. Roda Viva was a key piece that consolidated the Teatro Oficina. It is the first theatrical text by the young Chico Buarque, who at the age of 24 commissioned Zé Celso to direct it. It premiered in early 1968, months before Institutional Ato No. 5 (AI-5), which began the most violent and repressive period of the Brazilian military dictatorship.
Zé Celso was among the people tortured by the dictatorship and forced into exile between 1974 and 1979. After returning to Brazil, he tirelessly continued the work and in 1984 the company was renamed Teatro Oficina Uzyna Uzona. “Uzyna is the serious side, rational and Uzone the free, poetic, disorganized, sexual side… A blast,” Zé Celso declared in May, looking full of life and joy, before heading to a physiotherapy session. The physical pain that limited him during those weeks didn’t stop him and he attended various premieres around the country. “Even though he was in a wheelchair, he got on stage. “He was weak, but with a radiant look, he told us about his current project, in which he would work with many indigenous peoples,” explains actor Thiago Meiron, who was in the audience at the premiere of Waiting for Godot in Belo Horizonte, last 12th of May. Also on the stage were the mothers of CUFA (Central Única das Favelas), invited by Zé Celso. For many it was the first time in the theatre. One of the fundamental missions of the Teatro Oficina is to bring stage ballasts closer to people of all walks of life.
“His countless struggles have always been a reaffirmation of yes against whatever tells us no. “The image of this 86-year-old man rehearsing on the computer is one of the definitive visions of art and passion,” says art director Thales Junqueira in one of the many tribute messages that circulated around the internet after news of his death. “Our phoenix has just left for the abode of the sun,” they say goodbye to the dreamy artist. “Zé is eternal,” they say, and the legacy he leaves to the Teatro Oficina goes beyond his body.
Located in the traditional Bixiga neighborhood in central São Paulo, the building has been a listed building since 1983. The Italian-Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi, who worked hand in hand with Zé Celso for years, was responsible for opening the building to the public. Outside, tearing down its walls. As his admirers say, the playwright transcends his physical life, he will continue to live in each of the sunbeams that penetrate the walls of the Teatro Oficina.
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