O Jardim
Director: Leonardo Moreira
Writer: Leonardo Moreira
Cast: Thiago Amaral, Mariah Amélia Farah, Aline Filócomo, Rita Grillo, Paula Picarelli, Edison Simão, Fernanda Stefanski
Part of: Wiener Festwochen
Seen on: 27.5.2015

Plot:
One house, three generations: In the 1930s, we see a young man and woman, immigrants from Poland, going through the final stages of their break-up. 40 years later, he has lost most of his cognitive functions to dementia and his daughters try to prepare him for his birthday party. And yet another 40 years later, his granddaughter films her good-bye as she has to give up the house which has been resituted to a Polish family, for reasons unknown.

O Jardim takes a really cool concept and really brings it to life with interesting characters and great actors. I really enjoyed it.

As you can see on the image above, the stage was dominated by cardboard boxes which they used to divide the stage in three parts. The audience was also seated around three sides of the stage, corresponding with the cardboard thirds and they played every scene in every era three times, always moving along the stage. At the end everybody had seen the entire play, but in different order (I happened to be in that part of the audience that saw the play in chronological order).

It’s not the first time that I saw a play dividing the audience and taking them through the scenes separately (Hass, a couple of years ago, used the same idea, though they didn’t stick with it the entire time), but it never made as much structural sense as it did here – the way the past and the future both bleed into what you’re seeing at the moment. There are even moments of interaction between the separated scenes. It was beautiful.

But the concept was not the only thing that works about the play. The stories themselves were both touching and funny, and really beautifully acted. The only thing that I had a bit of a problem with was the treatment of the millennials in the last scene: that just felt too much like only making fun of them without really connecting with them.

Even though I didn’t like that too much, it didn’t mean that I didn’t enjoy that scene or that it ruined the play for me: it was only a slight blemish in an overall very shiny evening.

Summarizing: Wonderful.