Silence Backstage

Maria Clara Machados's work will not end with
her passing. Maria Clara Mourthé, 42, her niece,
seems interested in continuing the work of her aunt
at the school-theater Tablado, which has taught
acting to more than 5000 students.

Alessandra Dalevi

She is the most important author of children's plays Brazil has ever produced. But she is more than that to the Brazilian theater, being responsible for the nurturing and formation of several generations of actors at Tablado, a theatrical group and school created by her. That's why there were so many celebrities and anonymous people, young and old, in the cemetery São Francisco Xavier, to say their last goodbyes to Maria Clara Machado, who died on April 30, in Rio, from lymphatic cancer. She would have been 80 on May 3.

The playwright learned of her cancer 18 months ago, and only stopped working two weeks before her death. The last show she directed, Jonas e a Baleia (Jonas and the Whale), written by Machado and her niece Maria Clara Mourthé, is still being shown at Rio's Teatro Tablado.

Actress, director, playwright, teacher, Machado was born in Belo Horizonte, capital of Minas Gerais, in 1921. She was 4 years old when her parents moved to Rio. Her mother died from complications of giving birth when Machado was nine. Neither she or her five sisters were told about the death. Their mother simply never came back from the hospital and her pictures and clothes suddenly disappeared.

Her father was Anibal Machado (1894-1964), author of A Morte da Porta-Estandarte (The Death of the Standard-Bearer) and João Ternura (Tenderness John), a great writer that Brazil has forgotten. She grew up in constant contact with her father's friends: artists, writers, painters, and all kinds of intellectuals (including poets Pablo Neruda, Manoel Bandeira, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, and Vinicius de Morais; writers Rubem Braga, Clarice Lispector; painter Di Cavalcanti and French actor-director Jean-Louis Barrault) who used to frequent her parents' home at Avenida Vieira Souto, in Ipanema.

Maria Clara's work will not end with her passing. Maria Clara Mourthé, 42, her niece who adopted the Cacá Mourthé sobriquet, seems interested in continuing the work of her aunt at the school-theater Tablado, which has taught acting to more than 5000 students. Among those who practiced their craft on that stage are the likes of Fernanda Torres, Leonardo Brício, Marcelo Serrado, Cláudia Abreu, Guilherme Fontes, Malu Mader, and playwright and actor Miguel Falabella. From previous generations there are Maria Padilha, Louise Cardoso, and Marieta Severo.

Maria Clara was still a little girl when she started playing and experimenting with marionettes. One constant presence among the puppeteers was a friend named Maria Antonieta Portocarrero, who would become one of the finest Brazilian actresses under the name of Tônia Carrero. In the '40s she directed marionette plays and wrote her first book: Como Fazer Teatrinho de Bonecos (How to Make Marionette Theater)."

Commenting on the death of her old friend, Carrero said: "She is more immortal than anyone of us. Maria Clara will stay."

Having won a scholarship from the French government, she went to Paris in 1950 to study theater. From there she traveled to London with another scholarship given by Unesco. In France she studied with mime Decroux and director Jean-Louis Barrault. She returned to Brazil in 1952. Initially she worked as a nurse and realized she felt great among kids. From this came the idea to create a theater group to perform children's plays.

She started an amateur theater group for workers, but he project didn't succeed since the workmen had no time for rehearsal. The failure, however, taught her things for what would become her enduring legacy to the Brazilian theater and culture: the school-theater Tablado (Stage). Fifty years later the experience is still alive where it began, at Patronato Operário da Gávea, on the south side of Rio. The Tablado has also become a school and passport to the novelas (soap operas) of Globo network, a most desirable acting career in a country where stage actors make so little and movie making has become so rare.

Machado's first play, O Boi e o Burro no Caminho de Belém (The Ox and the Donkey on Their Way to Belém), was written and staged in 1953. The following year saw her O Rapto das Cebolinhas (The Green Onions Kidnapping) performed. Maria Clara's most famous text, Pluft, o Fantasminha (Pluft, the Little Ghost), was written in 1955. Pluft has other unforgettable characters besides the hero who names the play. There are uncle Gerúndio, who lives in a trunk; the talkative mother ghost always chatting with cousin Bolha (Bubble); the little girl Maribel and the son of the Opera's ghost, who has become cellophane paper.

Pluft has become a child classic being staged all over the world. Among the 29 famous plays written and directed by Machado there are A Bruxinha que Era Boa (The Little Witch Who Was Good), A Menina e o Vento (The Girl and the Wind), O Cavalinho Azul (The Blue Little Horse), and Caça às Bruxas (Witches Chase). Although Pluft was her most famous work, Machado preferred O Cavalinho Azul (1960).

As an actress, Machado appeared in plays by Garcia Lorca, Tchecov, and Thornton Wilder in the first ten years of Tablado, but she eventually dedicated herself to playwriting and directing. In the '80s she returned briefly back to the stage playing in the comedies Arsênico e Alfazema (Arsenic and Lavender) and Ensina-me a Viver (Teach me how to Live).

Besides her children's plays, Maria Clara, who was never a mother but wrote inspired by childhood memories, also created five plays for adults and wrote 30 books. The playwright was called bossy and authoritarian by some who worked with her, but it seems now that her character and determination was decisive in preserving the Tablado experience for many decades. She had to approve everything and all changes, be it in the stage, in the building, in the way classes were ministered or in the bylaws that govern the Tablado organization.

"I am not an authoritarian kind of person, or a big mother," she told once a reporter, "but there is that time when you need to give a good scolding. Once, during the '70s, I went into the dressing room and the actors were smoking pot. Of course I prohibited them from doing this. Not for me, but for the institution."

Maria Clara used to wake up at 7 a.m. to walk on Ipanema beach, close to her residence. She walked alone, because it was "the time to think, to watch the sea." "Every morning I go out and observe the sea," she said. "The sea is there, and it will continue there. I am the one who is going away. I would love to be well prepared for death, but is anyone able to do this? Young people learn how to grow, but nobody teaches us how to be old."

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