Excited about the potential for reaching working-class audiences, Vianinha and some actors left Arena shortly after that and moved to Rio de Janeiro, the place they determined to provide a theatrical revue concerning the Marxist idea of surplus worth. A Mais-Valia Vai Acabar, Seu Edgar (English: The Surplus Value Will End, Mr. Edgar) drew a whole bunch of college college students throughout rehearsals. That collective would change into the nucleus of the Centers of Popular Culture (referred to as CPCs), a large cultural and political motion that gathered younger artists and activists throughout Brazil between 1961 and 1964. In these years, Vianinha wrote plenty of theatrical items about probably the most pressing social points in Brazil, together with the focus of land possession, the shortage of entry to larger schooling, and the issues in regards to the communists’ technique of political alliances with industrialists. Most of such performs have been staged on the road and different unconventional venues, like labor union halls and colleges.
A army coup in 1964 put an finish to the reformist administration of President João Goulart and to all that political effervescence—together with the CPCs, whose headquarters have been machine-gunned and set on fireplace on the identical day of the coup. Backed by President Lyndon Johnson, the dictatorship implanted by the army had a quite anti-working-class nature and imposed wage cuts, extinguished social welfare applications, and attacked labor rights. Repression progressively grew, affecting labor leaders, peasant organizers, political activists, college students, and artists. Until 1985 when it ended, the regime detained, tortured, killed, and exiled 1000’s of individuals.
With the downfall of the CPCs, Vianinha joined a number of of his former colleagues and created Grupo Opinião, which made an effort to artistically tackle the a number of violations perpetrated by the army junta. At the identical time, he continued to work on his performs, reflecting on the historic processes that led Brazilians to dictatorship and blocked all makes an attempt of reworking the nation’s socioeconomic constructions. Papa Highirte is a central a part of such endeavor. The piece takes place in a fictional Latin American nation named Montalva, the place Juan Maria Guzamón Highirte, the previous dictator of (additionally fictional) Alhambra is now exiled. Throughout the play, he machinates to renew energy whereas, in parallel motion, a left-wing militant, Pablo Mariz, proceeds to avenge the demise of one among his comrades—Manito—within the fingers of Highirte’s officers.
The piece not solely offers with the worldwide and home political forces at play within the Brazilian coup d’état, however it additionally portrays the larger actuality of imperialism in Latin America. The populist Highirte, whose nickname is Papa—a transparent reference to Haiti’s François Duvalier, referred to as Papa Doc—had been backed by the armed forces and by an unnamed international energy. He was equally ousted by each of them and now desperately seeks to draw to his conspiracy a loyal common, Menandro, and a international energy delegate. That is how issues have labored in Latin America since 1954, when the CIA and the United Fruit Company deposed reformist Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz.
Maria Sílvia Betti, an knowledgeable in Vianinha’s theatre, affirms within the preface of the brand new version of Papa Highirte—launched in 2019 by Editora Temporal—that the United States’ diplomatic interference was the unifying ingredient that related the Latin American dictatorships within the Sixties. The ideological justification for such an intrusion was the combat in opposition to communism and the protection of the so-called free world. Betti, who can be a professor of Brazilian and United States theatre on the University of São Paulo, argues, “Based on such perspective, the United States’ policies for Latin America disseminated the idea that it was an attribution of the armies, under technical guidance of the United States, to secure the social and economic order.”