Nelson Falcão Rodrigues (August 23, 1912 – December 21, 1980) was a Brazilian playwright, journalist and novelist. In 1943, he helped usher in a new era in Brazilian theater with his play Vestido de Noiva (The Wedding Dress), considered revolutionary for the complex exploration of its characters' psychology and its use of colloquial dialogue. He went on to write many other seminal plays and today is widely regarded as Brazil's greatest playwright.
Early life and work
Nelson Rodrigues was born in Recife, the capital of the Brazilian state of Pernambuco (in the Northeast of Brazil), to Mario Rodrigues, a journalist, and his wife, Maria Esther Falcão. In 1916, the family moved to Rio de Janeiro after Mario ran into trouble for criticizing a powerful local politician. In Rio, Mario rose through the ranks of one of the city's major newspaper and, in 1925, launched his own newspaper, A Critica, a sensationalist daily. By age fourteen Nelson was covering the police beating his father; by fifteen he had dropped out of school; and by sixteen he was writing his own column. The family's economic situation improved steadily, allowing them to move from a middle-class neighborhood in Zona Norte to what was then the exclusive neighborhood of Copacabana.
In less than two years the family's fortunes would be reversed spectacularly. In 1929, older brother Roberto, a talented graphic artist, was shot and killed at the newspaper offices by Sylvia Serafim, a writerSergio Menezes, De autora a personagem: Sylvia Serafim, escritora e assassina. PhD Dissertation, University of Sao Paulo: 2025 who objected to the salacious coverage of her divorce, allegedly involving an adulterous affair with a local doctor. At her trial Serafim admitted that she had intended to kill Rodrigues' father Mario, the newspaper's owner; unable to find him, she settled for his son instead.Robert Henry Moser, The Carnivalesque Defunto: Death and the Dead in Modern Brazilian Literature. Ohio University Press: 2008, , pages 1/2
Devastated by his son's death, Mario Rodrigues died a few months later of a stroke, and shortly after that the family newspaper was closed by military forces supporting the Revolution of 1930, which the newspaper had fiercely opposed in its editorials. The ensuing years were dark ones for the Rodrigues family, and Nelson and his brothers were forced to seek work at rival newspapers for low wages. To make matters worse, in 1934 Nelson was diagnosed with tuberculosis, a disease that plagued him, on an off, for the next ten years.
During this time Rodrigues held various jobs including comic strip editor, sports columnists and opera critic.
In 1941, Rodrigues wrote his first play A Mulher Sem Pecado (The Woman Without Sin), to mixed reviews.
His following play, Vestido de Noiva (The Wedding Dress), was hailed as a watershed in Brazilian theater and is considered among his masterpieces. It began a fruitful collaboration with Polish émigré director Zbigniew Ziembinski, who is reported to have said on reading The Wedding Dress, "I am unaware of anything in world theater today that resembles this."
In the play, which takes place after the female protagonist is hit by a car and undergoes surgery, the playwright revealed the mastery of his craft by overlapping moments in time and place in order to create a more dynamic vision of reality. The stage is divided into three planes: one for real-time action happening around the character, another for her memories, a third for her dying hallucinations. As the three planes overlap, reality melds with memory and delusion. The play has been described as a jigsaw puzzle—we are left to interpret the truth from the disjointed hallucinations of a woman lying on an operating table who mixes her life story with the story of a prostitute whose diary she once read. Slowly we discover the mystery of the woman's accident.
Family Nelson Rodrigues married Elza Bretanha Rodrigues (1918–2017) on April 29, 1940, in Rio de Janeiro (formerly known as Guanabara). They had two children; Joffre (1941–2010) and Nelson (1945). Nelson was a womanizer and left his wife to date freely.
Rodrigues had a long-term relationship with Yolanda Camejo dos Santos (1932–2018) with whom he had three children; Maria Lucia (1953), Sonia (1955) and Paulo (1957). Yolanda threw Nelson out of her house when she discovered that Nelson was cheating on her. Rodrigues suspected the two girls weren't his but believed the boy was his son, even dedicating his column on Ultima Hora newspaper to Paulo on the day of his birth. A DNA test was done in 1996 between Elza's sons and Yolanda's children. The DNA test confirmed Maria Lucia, Sonia and Paulo were Nelson's children.
Rodrigues became briefly involved with a married woman, Lucia Lima (1931–2009) who became pregnant with Daniela (1963–2019) during their relationship. The child was born deaf, blind and mute. The relationship deteriorated and Rodrigues moved out, but continued to support the child. No paternity test was ever done. He was involved with other women before he rekindled with his wife Elza in the late 1970s, around the time that divorce became officially legal in the mostly Catholic nation.
Writing
Nelson Rodrigues wrote 17 full-length plays, 9 novels and thousands of short stories. He was most influential as a playwright, and his plays include Toda Nudez Será Castigada (All Nudity Shall Be Punished), Dorotéia, and Beijo no Asfalto (The Asphalt Kiss, or The Kiss on the Asphalt), all considered classics of the Brazilian stage.
Rodrigues' plays were divided into three categories by critic Sábato Magaldi: psychological, mythical and Carioca tragedies. The latter plays, which include some of his later and best-known productions, are mostly tragicomedies where Rodrigues explored the lives of Rio's lower-middle class, a population never deemed worthy of the stage before him. From the beginning, Rodrigues's plays shocked audiences and attracted the attention of censors.
Rodrigues's third play (1945) "Álbum de família" (Family Album) chronicled a semi-mythical family living on the fringes of society and mired in incest, rape and murder. It was considered so controversial that it was censored and only allowed to be staged 21 years later.
Other important earlier plays included "Anjo Negro" (Black Angel), an explosive 1946 play held from the stage by censorship until 1948 that deals with issues of race and incest. In the play — which takes place in a semi-mythical setting, which is never identified Eudinyr Fraga, Nelson Rodrigues expressionista, São Paulo: Ateliê Editorial, 1998, , page 89— a successful black doctor marries a white woman and their marriage cannot help but reflect the dysfunctional race relations of society at large. The woman slowly kills their black children one by one, and the husband does nothing to intervene. When the doctor's white brother arrives, his wife sleeps with him in the hopes of having a white son.
In the 1960 play "O Beijo no Asfalto" (The Asphalt Kiss or the Kiss on the Asphalt), Rodrigues tackled the issue of homophobia. In the play, a recently married man comforts a dying stranger who has just been run over in a traffic accident. A newspaper reporter witnesses the kiss and spins a salacious story that the two were lovers. The kiss occurs before the play actually begins and, Rashomon-like, it assumes different characteristics according to who describes it. Slowly, the innuendos and lies begin to corrode the young man's marriage. The play was written in 1960 at the request of actress Fernanda Montenegro. Rodrigues reportedly wrote it in three weeks.O anjo pornografico: A vida de Nelson Rodrigues, Companhia das Letras (1992), p. 313- 314,
"Os Sete Gatinhos" (Seven Kittens) was described by the playwright as a "divine comedy." Determined to remind us that things are not always what they appear, Rodrigues created the Noronha family, a seemingly normal lower-middle-class Brazilian family headed by the family patriarch, a low-level employee in the Brazilian congress. As the action unfolds, we become aware that nothing is as it seems. Four of the five daughters are prostitutes, and the one teen daughter who is held up as the symbol of chastity by the family is no longer a virgin. Amid an atmosphere where seemingly realist outlook becomes unreal vulgarity - the mother writes obscenities on the bathroom wall, the father prohibits the family from using toilet paper - the family's many unspoken secrets climax into a gruesome last scene.Fraga, 147/154
"Doroteia" (1949), is one of five plays Magdali classified as mythical. It is a surreal play in which Rodrigues anticipates Ionesco and Beckett's theater of the absurd.Castro, O Anjo Pornográfico, p 218 Filled with guilt after the death of her son, Doroteia abandons a life of prostitution and seeks redemption in the house of her three cousins, all widows. The cousins disdain all sensuality and live a puritanical life of chastity and privations. To accept Doroteia, they impose one condition, she must disfigure her appearance and become ugly. In the play, men are completely absent, except for a pair of boots on stage meant to represent the fiancé of the daughter of one of the widows, Das Dores, who is actually the ghost of a stillborn child.
"Toda Nudez Será Castigada" (All Nudity Shall Be Punished) is a "Carioca tragedy' written 1965, and along with The Wedding Dress is one of his most-produced plays. It is the story of despondent widower Herculano who has promised never to remarry. His son, Serginho is the self-appointed guardian of his father's celibacy. When Herculano's brother introduces him to a lively prostitute and nightclub singer he is smitten and brings her home to live with him, unwittingly creating a menage á trois with his own son and wreaking havoc on the entire household. Much of the film's humor revolves around Herculano's need to make everything look right and proper to his bourgeois neighbours and friends. In 1973, the play was made into a film by the same name, which won the silver bear at the 23rd Berlin International Film Festival.O anjo pornografico: A vida de Nelson Rodrigues, Companhia das Letras (1992), p. 410,
In spite of his success as a playwright, Rodrigues never dedicated himself exclusively to the theater. In the 1950s, Rodrigues began publishing daily short stories as part of highly successful column A Vida Como Ela É (Life As It Is). Rodrigues wrote the column six days a week eleven years, writing an estimated 2,000 of these stories.A vida como ela e--: O homem fiel e outros contos (Colecao das obras de Nelson Rodrigues), Cia das Letras, back cover, The stories in the column became a laboratory for many of his full length plays.Life As It Is, Host Publications, p. iv, They have since been republished in several collections.
Rodrigues also wrote soap operas, movie scripts, and novels. In the 1960s and 70s, he became a well-known TV persona and sports commentator. His fanciful columns on soccer, where he melded scant commentary on the games' happenings with his literary obsessions and stock phrases, are said by Alex Bellos to have taken football-writing "into a new dimension".John Turnbull, Thom Satterlee, Alon Raab, eds., "The Global Game: Writers on Soccer". University of Nebraska Press: 2008, , page 121
During this period, Rodrigues relished his role as an iconoclast and had running feuds with major figures of the Brazilian Left and Right.
Death
In the 1970s, at the height of his reputation as a journalist and playwright, Rodrigues health began to fail because of lifelong gastroenterological and heart problems. Rodrigues died on December 21, 1980, at 68 years of age, of cardiac and respiratory complications. He is buried in Cemitério de São João Batista, in Botafogo. Ironically, the writer of tragic stories died a few hours before he won the lottery with his younger brother, Augusto and friends.
Controversies, literary and political