The joyful theater, the slight farce: drama, urbanity and critique in Gervasio Lobato

• Grant number: 15/05431-5
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Post-doctor
• Start date until: August 10, 2015
• End date until: May 09, 2016
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Literature - Other Vernacular Literatures
• Principal Investigator: Renata Soares Junqueira
• Grantee: Claudia Barbieri Masseran
• Supervisor: Maria João Brilhante
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Ciências e Letras (FCL). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de Araraquara. Araraquara , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal
• Associated to the scholarship: 14/12592-2 - The joyful theater, the slight farce: drama, urbanity and critique in Gervasio Lobato, BP.PD

Abstract

Gervasio Lobato (1850-1895) was one of the most popular Portuguese dramatists in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Alongside names like Marcelino de Mesquita, D. João da Câmara and Henrique Lopes de Mendonça, contributed to the consolidation of realistic theater on stages. His production could not be more varied: he was novelist, columnist, journalist and drama critic. As playwright wrote 25 original pieces (comedies and farces mostly) and over 115 translations or adaptations of foreign repertoire, especially the French. The Lisbon's most important theaters housed successfully stagings of his plays, which were often represented throughout the Portuguese territory, as well as in Madeira and Brazil. However, all this extensive dramaturgical production lies forgotten by the literary critic and his work, even though represented to the present day, received no further study. Redeem the name and part of the dramaturgical production of this author is the purpose of this research. Six original pieces of the author were selected as corpus for this work: The Countess Heloise (1878), The Bourgeois (1882), His Excellency (1884), Life Insurance (1885), The Police Commissioner (1890), The Feast of Balthazar (1892). The purpose is to perform a contextual reading of the pieces listed in the corpus, seeking to relate the dramaturgical text, the cosmopolitanism of the city of Lisbon, the theaters where they were staged and the critical reception of the spectacles. This paper therefore seeks to reread the Gervasio Lobato's work, rescuing the urbanity of the text, having as informative reference the producing of the dramatist as a theater critic in Lisbon's journals, especially his ongoing collaboration to O Ocidente, over fifteen years. We propose therefore an interaction with the Research Group Drama and Film (GPDC), which is based in Araraquara and which also we participate with the intention of providing subsidies for the articulation of the thematic project "Poetics of Modernity: Theatre and Other Arts" , under which we integrate the main theme "Theatre and Architecture". (AU)