Theater for the Oppressed: Political Radicalism and Cultural Conservatism in Early 20th-Century Brazil

Long before the Brazilian state harnessed the power of radio and television to sway and instruct its citizenry, a wide range of Brazilians took advantage of a lower-tech medium to reach the “masses”: theater. While most Americans today dismiss theatergoing as an exclusive diversion—prohibitively expensive or esoteric, or both—my paper shows that numerous organizations in early twentieth-century Brazil imagined theater audiences as a broad public and worked to realize that vision. I hone in on São Paulo’s anarchist and anticlerical groups to explain how leaders within these overlapping circles deployed theaters as schools for propagating radical visions for urban, national, and global futures. Despite their revolutionary and, by many counts, egalitarian discourse, anarchist and anticlerical associations enforced European theatergoing standards that situated authority onstage and prized disciplined spectating—a stark counterpoint to Augusto Boal’s 1970s Theater of the Oppressed. I argue that, in the context of an increasingly regulated and contested urban core, adherence to hegemonic behaviors was a logical choice for organizers seeking to decouple their political assemblies from the perceived violent rabble and claim their right to the city’s spaces and social life. The reliance on theaters for radical politics ironically popularized a more conservative and racialized urban sociability, one that suggests a more widespread origin for what historians have in recent years called the whitening of Brazilian modernity.