O Pagador de Promessas no contexto do drama/teatro brasileiro moderno: discussão sobre a tragédia nacional - popular

Abstract

This study intends to analyze the critical reception to O pagador de promessas who takes this text by the aristotelian paradigm of tragedy. Through a historical-critical review about Brazilian modern theater and drama, this play is located next to national-popular trend, appointed as counter-hegemonic in the pursuit and consolidation of a national theater, between the late 1950s and mid of 1970s. Amid the artistic diversity of this period, this text can be argued between Peter Szondi’s theory about crisis of the drama, understood as one in which the themes that emerged from the development of capitalism and its contradictions no longer fit the old Drama – the so-called bourgeois drama or absolute drama – and precipitates a new form: the modern drama. In this form of drama, from dialogue emerges a narrative elements incorporated into the dramatic structure. It also intends to discusses that even if the Dias Gomes’ play apparently has the formal features of ancient tragedies (as the tragic closed conflict, unity of action, time and space, remnants of the choir, immoderation and catastrophe), these elements are in confrontation with the epic already quite evident, such as the inability of understanding between two Brazils, rural and urban, materialized in the dialogues that become, in that way, “unproductive”, opening space for the question that looms large in our argumentation.