Vermelho Melodrama

Awarded Best Performance at the 2019 Prêmio Braskem de Teatro, where it received six nominations and also took the trophy in the Special Category for the costumes and props by Luiz Santana, Vermelho Melodrama (Red Melodrama) dives into the melodrama genre and, from its typical constructions, raises questions about the melodramatic dimensions of our own reality. Based on a text by playwright Gildon Oliveira, adapted and staged by Jorge Alencar, the play, produced by Dimenti Produções Culturais, premiered in 2019 and was revived seven years later, in 2026, when it received seven nominations for the Prêmio Cenym de Teatro Nacional.

Unconfessed secrets, love triangles, and inflamed passions intersect with the melodrama of political events in Brazil and around the world. The central story, inspired by the famous “ketchup crime”, which took place in the interior of Bahia in 2011, revolves around the orphans Lúcio Mauro, Carlos Manuel, and Lurdes Maria, who were raised as siblings. The dramaturgical engine is a letter that was never delivered to its recipient, holding a revelation that could change the fate of each character.

As the main narrative unfolds, the cast comments on the scenes, reads letters, and makes associations with real-life situations, with films, texts, and other artistic creations: in a dynamic between living the plot and talking about the performance experience itself, emotions are amplified and place feeling ahead of purely rationalist thought. Quotations from Clarice Lispector, Isildinha Baptista Nogueira, Linn da Quebrada, and Georges Didi-Huberman raise questions such as the right to love in contemporary times.

The original text, Vermelho rubro amoroso… profundo, insistente e definitivo!, is like an ode to melodrama for detailing its architecture meticulously. A dramatic genre that established itself in French theatre at the end of the 18th century, characterized mainly by direct access to the spectator’s sentimentality, melodrama, since its birth, has had great popular appeal by mixing dramaturgy, music, pantomime, bodily narratives, vaudeville, and light comedy. Widely present in Brazilian culture, melodrama is highlighted in the play as a current phenomenon that crosses, in various ways, our subjectivities: affections, values, thoughts, singularities.