Theater gossip needs to be spread, said Denise Fraga at the end of the play, so here I am, one of the people present at the Sérgio Cardoso theater last Saturday to watch “Eu de você”; one of the components of that unique combination of individuals that later spread through the city, each one returning to his life, but taking something from the night. Taking something from the play, from Denise, from the meeting.
Because theater is meeting. Encounter and opening, opening and history, and Denise sewed together with her body and voice the stories of so many people, the woman in a hurry, the man who fell in love with the robber, the lost things that would pile up if possible, the pain of everyone who exists and that is accessed by looking into the eyes. That little glow, the beauty, the pain.
But the play was open: it spread throughout the audience, it continued, producing new stories, one of them there, in row G. Because we looked to the side and there was an old friend of ours, whom I met at sea and my partner on the street, and she met us before we met and we were a couple. She was there! Just her, who told me one day that, in a subway car, each time you find a unique and unrepeatable combination of people, a combination that she called a capsule.
Our theatrical capsule contained the dust of people that coalesced when laughing, looking to the side, crying. People. Going to the theater and meeting people is like breathing again, it’s like finally looking around, it’s like returning to the life that was already ours, we just didn’t have time to see it.
We left the play still in the play, taking the theater to the street, the pores open walking through Bixiga, us and the friend. The time capsule we offer each other: she told us about the last few years, the pandemic, her pain. We told ours, we didn’t know if we would be together afterwards.
But who knows?
She told us exactly what we needed to hear. The echo of the play, and the eyes that gleamed now were ours.
Looking from the outside, looking from the after, being narrated, the pain always fits. When it becomes history, it’s because it’s already fit, even if it continues to hurt. Even if everything is open, the pores, life, history itself.
Don’t dramatize. Do not dramatize outside the theater. Every thing its size. Don’t suffer so much for love.
And passion, said the woman at the next table, her deep, resolute voice, the bearer of the greatest truth in the world; passion — in the instant of silence we turn to listen with our eyes too: passion is a horrible thing.
And life is beautiful just because we leave the theater and hear a phrase like that in Bixiga, eating coxinha at a bar table.
