Krum

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HEAD OUT OF WATER

Strong noises outside. The planet shaking. Wars. Obscurantisms. Growing nationalisms. Exacerbated belligerence. Systematic attacks to differences. Denial of the other. Prejudices. Religious extremisms. Public lynching. Physical violations. Exterminations. Epidemic deafness. Cultivated ignorance. Obscene accumulations. Barbarie. Human societies debating themselves meaningless.

Meanwhile, each one’s life. The rituals of quotidian. The birth of someone. People that get married. The work. Home duties. The neighbors. The desire to win in life. The money. The lack of it. The bills to pay. To miss someone. The friends. The reunions. The necessity to leave. To change everything. To change skin. The desire to build something. The failures. The death of someone. The pursue of happiness and of a meaning for all of these.

Krum was written in the 70’s by Hanoch Levin, a young author influenced by Tchekhov and Beckett, in a recent country immersed in conflicts and contradictions. Only in the author’s life period, from 1943 to 1999, were seven wars. Second World War. Independence War. Sinai War. Six Day War. Yom Kippur War. Lebanon First War. First Intifada.

If the man is, in a certain way, the emanation of the landscape of his homeland, to Hanoch Levin the homeland landscape was the war. He started to write soon and in strong opposition to this state of things. In his first text, he creates a scene in which, a general amid the triumph of the victory in war makes a speech to the winners, but in the audience, there is no one. There are not, therefore, winners. They are all dead. His voracious critic to the State violence and the occupation by Israel of the Palestinian territories caused scandal and strong reactions.

There is in the Tchekhov of the meantime, Beckett of the post-war, Levin of the end of the XX century and us today, something in common. While the turbulent world distill its violence, people try to move on with their lives, many times without glow, confined in their homes or feeding expectations, consumption dreams, hope for better days.

Krum is a play with two funerals and two weddings. There are no great achievements, everything is ordinary. Between the two ceremonies we see, in a sequence of short scenes, the painting of the habitants’ life of a remote neighborhood. We laugh at them. It is a play about people. What is at stake is the human matter. Inhabit Krum’s world small beings, without shame of the world, living under a low ceiling. There is a look at the same time cruel and giving about minimal lives or, as in Tchekhov, about what exists of minimum in the human being.

“I can only keep my head out of the water”. It is what says, at certain point of the play, Krum’s mother. It is here that we are. We also, from our small world, trying to keep ourselves erect, trying to look further and, from there, to invent what doesn’t exist, to create what is not suspected.

That’s why we have decided to make another play. And that’s why we gather in theater and celebrate the collective. Renata. Grace. Cris. Inez. Danilo. Ranieri. Rodrigo. Edson. Rodrigo. Nadja. Fernando. Marcia. Felipe. Giovana. Isadora, Faliny. Patrick. Ticiana. Cássia. Eloy. Henrique. Nana. Luciana. Iuri. Everybody else… My deepest affection.

Marcio Abreu