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!?., ::;;::-. .. - ,..".!■ ,.|.|.;."- I New York Play Review AND THE WIND BLOWS * whan* **** NEW YORK, May 1. — Every now and then, through the seep of travel and the will to report good things, news of Brazil - ian writers comes as far north as New York. One hears of a woman in her 50s who is a novelist of renown and prowess in her native country, a woman writing beautiful prose and powerful prose about the people of her land. One hears of surging, forthright poets at work in the Portuguese tongue of Brazil, men and woman alike writing lyric, liquid forms. And, rarely, of the play-wrights, though there are several of consequences just as Mexico or Spain have their dramatists of talent. Here, for some reason, we tend to draw from European sources, the French, the German, the Italian and, of course, the British. We neglect the artists of our hemisphere and treat them as though they were in some vague, amorphous beyond, unreachable and not to be communicated | with. Happily, part of that circumstance is I now torn away and we have "And the Wind Blows," a work by Edgard da Rocha Miranda. Is this a towering play we ought I to have seen long ago? No, it isnt. By strict standards it is not even a very good play, since it sprawls and discards from J and performs other awkward feats, but it holds in its simple, direct and sturdily honest recital of events in a tiny village inhabited by almost primitive people. What is the base problem? This: They are poor, they are ravaged by a drought and they have no priest to comfort them in spirit if not in substance. A motoring Monsignor suffers a breakdown on the road, his car helpless. The faithful, sincere peasants see this an an act of God designed to bring them a sign that all is well and will get better. The Monsignor is annoyed by them and their poor hovels, but as their tide of faith and willingness to lift themselves from despond rises, he begins to feel j the Tightness of things and goes along with j them in their escape from abysmal wretch- I edness. This is no profound theme, nor is the portrait of a cynical and impatient priest new in theatre. That the simple can raise themselves to divine heights given an incentive is not new either. But where this playwright excels, as all around him signs of his inability to cope with play structure, is in sincereity and directness. He causes you to see and feel and smell, even, this pathetic village as its burgeons under the presence of something they believe in. Luis Martinez has directed with the same kind of honest feel for the work at hand and the result is a vastly interesting if imperfect evening at St. Marks Playhouse. Tonio Selwart is the Monsignor, the saving grace in spite of himself, and most credible all the way. He has superb support from Miriam Cruz, Joe Bpley, Paul La-Bossiere as a physician looking down upon it all and Stanley Greene. This is a weld of per f romances, one reaching into the other and the whole j emerging as a happy feat of casting. Since we do not often get Brazilian works and since this is an indicative one, it is suggested that with its flaws as they are i you see it.
