A myopic boy with a strange ability to hear secrets spends his afternoons diving into a pool club. A woman receives a seamstress for swimming lessons – without a pool, they use small bowls filled with water. A man living with the loss of speech while rehearsing his speech and empty aquariums. A teacher prepares her student for a Swimming tourney for handicapped people. In this event, these unusual characters cross threatened by imminent rain and about to share a small tragedy.

Creating a web of narrative parallel stories but convergent, the text opens spaces of unreality in one day of four characters cores linked by a single theme: The inadequacy and loss of language. Blindness and other weaknesses of sight, disorganization of speech and aphasia or hearing loss of hearing join together in a subtle way – and without trying to create an inclusive or didactic spectacle – four imaginary universes, other forms of thought reflections, memory and cognition.

Cast & creative team

Director and Dramatist:
Leonardo Moreira

Cast:
Aline Filócomo
André Blumenschein
Daniela Duarte
Fernanda Stefanski
Flávia Melman
Luciana Paes
Mariah Amélia Farah
Otávio Dantas
Paula Picarelli
Thiago Amaral

Set Designer:
Marisa Bentivegna e Leonardo Moreira

Scenography Assistant:
Grissel Piguillem

Lighting Designer:
Marisa Bentivegna

Costume Designer:
Theodoro Cochrane

Seamstress:
Dizô

Hairdresser & Makeup:
Nael Qassis

Libras (Brazilian Sign Language):
Sônia Oliveira

Corporal Training (BMC):
Rodrigo Palma

Executive Producer:
João Victor d'Alves

Production:
Companhia Hiato

Nominations and Awards

CPT Award - Paulista Cooperative Theater 2009:
Nomination for Outstanding Author

CPT Award - Paulista Cooperative Theater 2010:
Outstanding Play Award
Nomination for Revelation Company
Nomination for Outstanding Visual Design
Nomination for Outstanding Author
Nomination for Outstanding Director

Shell Award 2010:
Outstanding Author Award
Outstanding Set Design Award
Outstanding Costume Design Award
Nomination for Outstanding Director
Nomination for Outstanding Actress

Secretariat of Culture of São Paulo:
Incentive to New Texts Award

Reviews

"Leonardo Moreira is a revelation that had already been announced earlier in his spectacle Cachorro Morto. If he's still there adapted a novel about an autistic child, in the new play he builds on human differences and limitations, generally treated as disabilities, to propose an original and open fable about what is weak and powerless in each of us. Starting from their own doubts, enlists the talents of ten actors of his generation to explore what is meager and little and smaller in all of them".

"Escuro marks the young maturity of a talented narrator. One who unites mills actor and dramatist clairvoyance to the director. Leonardo Moreira promises much, and, along with the collective that accompanied it, has the merit of having created a work must. Escuro marks the maturity of a talented young narrator. One who unites actor and dramatist engines with director clairvoyance. Leonardo Moreira is a promise, and with the cast, he has the merit of having created an unmissable work".

"... What Marisa Bentivegna's beautiful set of scenography and lighting allows is the composition of a series of mobile 'tableaux' , which presents dramatic situations on different perspectives without anxiety, like a photographic image that was slowly revealing to the spectator. The dominant image is the aquarium, which appears regularly, on a small scale, in female characters' hands and expanded in two longitudinal tanks that evoke the pool club and allow an enchanting set of lights and shadows, contrasted with its tones of gray by bright colors of rigorous and period Theodoro Cochrane's costumes".

Luiz Fernando Ramos - Folha de São Paulo Newspaper - december of 2009

"The young author Leonardo Moreira knows how to write for theater. His artful and intricate plot refers to American independent cinema; situations – that create and recreates nonstop – instigate and entertain. The exposure of misfits, the strangeness, the dumb and naive, of stutterers and twangs, everything indicates a genuine sensitivity, an artist look of the proper existence. And his direction points to the risk, and results in simplicity and inventiveness, with great finds. But the enchantment – and enchantment is the exact word – is present in characters and their actors".

Nelson de Sá - Blog Cacilda – Folha de São Paulo Newspaper