Leilah Assunção

Background

Leilah Assunção was born on June 18, 1943, in Botucatu, Sao Paulo, Brazil.

Education

Leilah Assunção graduated from the University of São Paulo. There she earned a Bachelor of Science in 1964. Assunção also attended extra courses in theater at the Teatro Oficina in Brazil, and literary criticism in the United Kingdom.

Career

Brazilian-born playwright Leilah Assunção made a name for herself as part of a group of dramatists that in the late 1960s were referred to as the Teatro Novo. Often censored by Brazil's military dictatorship through the late 1970s, her plays, which include Fala baixo senão eu grito, Lua Nua, and Diz que eu fui pra Maiamum, focus on psychological rather than political themes. They often explore oppression and censorship as expressed through interpersonal and sexual relationships. Frequently this oppression and censorship are directed toward women. Additionally, Assunção is a contributor of short fiction to periodicals, including Status Literatura.

Assunção's first three plays immediately signaled to Brazilian audiences that she had broken with the mold of earlier, proletarian playwrights. Fala baixo senão eu grito, Jorginho, o machão, and Roda cor de roda focus on the world of the Brazilian middle-class. It paints a portrait of a suffocating, decadent social structure where traditional sex roles cannot be altered and required conformity to the status quo. Assunção's early works are pessimistic in portraying the lives of characters trapped in a stagnant social environment with no chance for escape or improvement. The playwright intimates that such conditions are not unwanted.

Assunção's most overtly political play, Boca molhada de paixão calada, focuses on her country's 1964-1979 dictatorship. It was produced on stage only after Amnesty Laws had lifted censorship restrictions imposed on the country's artistic communities. The play focuses on a married couple, Mila and Antonio. They come into conflict over the values of the social classes to which they belong. On the surface, working out problems faced in their marriage, Assunção's characters, on a deeper level, relive and rethink their sexual histories and their ties to the dictatorship as a means of freeing themselves. In exile during the decades when Brazil was under military control, Mila and Antonio now realize that as victims of the regime, they have been dominated by fear, and that constant fear has immobilized them from making commitments to people or ideals. Through their new-found passion, they find the strength to forgive the errors and concessions of the past and to reinforce their commitment to each other.

Besides writing, Leilah Assunção has acted in several plays and worked as a fashion model. She appeared in A vereda da slavação in 1963, and The Three-Penny Opera in 1964. Moreover, Assunção was a participant at International Women Playwrights conferences in Buffalo in 1988 and Toronto in 1991.

Achievements

• Leilah Assunção is best known as a writer and actress. She has been classed as among the two major women playwrights of Brazil. Besides, Assunção earned the Molière Award from the theatre critics of São Paulo for her work, Fala baixo senão eu grito, in 1969, the Sociedade Brasileira de Autores Teatraise Award in 1972, and the Ondas Award for television work.

Works

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  • Lua nua 1990
  • Memorias Sinceras 2020

Views

Leilah Assunção has rejected the idea that her approach in writing is feminist. Instead, she emphasizes the very human, social, and political nature of her plays. Although she began by focusing on the role of women in society, in an attempt to define their social identity, Assunção believes that she is much more involved in an investigation of what constitutes the essence of Brazilian national identity.

Quotations: "What are you doing, young lady! Pull your skirt down!' That's the first bit of censorship I got in life. Censorship is eternal, and it's been exercised by the man, the government, the Whites or the nation in power, at any given time in history."