Uma nova linguagem para a telenovela (Entrevista com Lauro César Muniz)

Abstract

Lauro César Muniz talks about the beginning of his career, about the amateur theater days, and about his beginning in professional theater. He explains his failed attempt to participate in the "Teatro de Arena" group and about his performance in USP's Escola de Arte Dramática (EAD). He reports on how censorship during the military regime rendered his work in the theater impossible, leading him and other dramaturges to search for the television alternative. Talking about this experience, he reveals the Brazilian soap opera trajectory, most especially in Rede Globo, the birth of new authors, the boom in the 1970's, when the mode reached its peak, allowing it to be critical even during the dictatorship, and the surfacing of the farce and fiasco in the 1980's. In the 1990's, according to him, after the fall of the Berlin wall and the advent of globalization, the world became a supermarket that includes the soap opera as a product, something that indicates the need to recover the soap opera's artistic dignity and quality. Muniz concludes by telling how, when confronted with the public's changes in expectation, the Globo dramaturgy nucleus intends to confront the competition of the new directions opened by other channels, recovering the author's importance and producing shorter soap operas.