São Paulo – While still little, Samir Yazbek would listen attentively to the stories his Lebanese mother would tell of her homeland. His mother’s beautiful reminiscences, and later on the diary she gave her son shortly before dying helped provide fodder to the imagination of the playwright, who showed from his first-ever theatre writings that he had launched his artistic career to pair up with good storytellers, which Arabs worldwide are known to be. Yazbek, an award-winning Brazilian theatre play author, sought references at his parents’ place of birth and its surroundings to create two of his plays, As Folhas do Cedro (The Cedar’s Leaves) and A Terra Prometida (Promised Land). Now, he is writing another play about the Lebanese scholar Gibran Khalil Gibran.
The play on the Lebanese intellectual will cover the period in which Gibran lived in New York, United States. Yazbek wants to show the difficulties encountered by a man when it comes to exerting his spirituality in a big city. “He was deeply shocked when faced with the city. He was fascinated, but at the same time he knew that it was a monster that might swallow people whole,” says Yazbek regarding Gibran. A dramatic reading of the text will be a part of the celebrations of the 130th anniversary of birth of the Lebanese scholar, and should be performed in the second half of the year at Sesi’s Avenida Paulista unit, in the city of São Paulo.
In As Folhas do Cedro, Yazbek recounts some of his family history as he narrates the memoirs of a daughter whose father, a Lebanese immigrant to São Paulo, left for the Amazon to make a fortune. The play is based upon the lives of Yazbek himself and his four brothers, who were raised by their mother in São Paulo while their father earned a living in Northern Brazil, a process that ultimately led to the separation of the couple. A Terra Prometida is the least Arab of the playwright’s plays, and it deals with the Middle East as it tells the story of the Jews’ quest for the promised land. It also touches on the Palestinian issue.
The Arab
Despite the facial features inherited from the Arabs, the storytelling skills, and his making poetry with words, Yazbek does not fit the stereotype of Arabs in Brazil, i.e. negotiating and talkative. He does not even speak Arabic. The youngest among his brothers, Yazbek interacted with his mother by the time she had command of the Portuguese language, and thus did not have much experience with Arabic, unlike his older brother Mustafa Yazbek, who is also a writer. The playwright went to Lebanon for the first time approximately three years ago, where he met several relatives and was well received. It was an opportunity, he says, to build his own Lebanon, because the one he used to live with in his imagination had been inherited from his mother’s memories.
Yazbek’s mother and father were born in Lebanon. The two married there and moved to Brazil with no children, first to the state of Paraná, where they had family. They spent some time in Colombia and then returned to Brazil, this time to São Paulo, where Samir was born. The father moved to the state of Amazonas after a work opportunity arose, and the mother stayed in São Paulo with the children. A son to an Orthodox Christian family, Yazbek became involved with theatre while still in school. In addition to his mother’s stories, he believes he was influenced to go down the artistic path by his oldest brother, a writer, and his sister, who would take him to the theatre.
When he became an adult, Yazbek did not wish to make a living out of writing plays. He started studying Physics at the University of São Paulo (USP). He also started studying Philosophy. But he discovered Sesc’s Centro de Pesquisa Teatral (Theatrical Research Centre), where he found his career guru, Antunes Filho, and he surrendered. He then studied Cinema at Fundação Armando Álvares Penteado (FAAP). Yazbek stayed with Antunes Filho at Sesc for eight years, and there he started writing his promising plays. “He had a passion for playwriting, for the word, and he would fill me with enthusiasm,” he says.
Success
Yazbek drafted other texts, but O Fingidor (The Pretender) was the first to become successful. Very successful. The play, about the poet Fernando Pessoa, won him the Shell Prize for best author in 1999. The text was selected for a federal government program and distributed to 475,000 Brazilian public school students, and represented Brazil in several international festivals. His following theatre plays were also met with acclaim, awards, and critical praise.
Yazbek’s O Fogo-Fátuo is currently showing, inspired by the myth of Faust, and he is in the process of writing Frank-1, based on the myth of Frankenstein. Only the character in Yazbek’s play is, instead of being ugly with a beautiful soul, is handsome but soulless. Fogo-Fátuo was co-authored by actor Helio Cicero, with whom Yazbek also maintains the theatre company Arnesto nos Convidou. Yazbek has also releases several plays as books, some of them abroad, and his plays have been enacted in foreign countries. One of his plays, O Ritual, debuted at London’s National Theatre after passing an international selection.
Yazbek also teaches classes at institutions such as Escola Superior de Artes Celia Helena and the eponymous professional school. He has taught at FAAP for seven years, and was an assistant at the USP’s Performing Arts course. Looking back and armed with the awareness that promising things lay ahead, Yazbek says: “I am privileged to have been through all this and having earned recognition. The support I have received enables me to keep going,” he says.
The playwright is now preparing himself for a Sesc program that will provide an overview of his work, featuring plays such as As Folhas do Cedro, Fogo-Fátuo and others. He has recently gone back to working as an actor and director of his own plays.
*Translated by Gabriel Pomerancblum
