A theater adaptation of Dalcídio Jurandir's novel Land of Wolves

Abstract

This scenic script is one of the results of a theater workshop which I performed from 2009 to 2014 with a group of teachers and students of a public high school in the neighborhood of Terra Firme, in the suburbs of Belém. We elaborated scenic scripts and made theatrical presentations of the five novels of Dalcídio Jurandir whose scenery are the suburbs: from Passage of the Innocents (1963) to Land of Wolves (1976). This novel narrates the life of the young Alfredo in the slum “Do not Panic”, which is the property of a family of landowners: the Wolves. In our adaptation we condensed the story of this novel of 300 pages in ten scenes in a total of 15 pages. We present the dialogues of Alfredo with the slum dwellers, his contacts with popular festivities, his escape to Rio de Janeiro and his return to the suburbs of Belém. With this novel and the previous four, Dalcídio Jurandir surpassed the tradicional way of representing Amazonia in the molds of regionalism. He became a forerunner of a new vision, which is global, showing the periphery of Belém as a paradigmatic case of our current world, which has been named, very properly, by the urban theorist and historian Mike Davis, as Planet of Slums (2006).