Prof. Dr. Clovis Garcia – Emeritus Professor at USP
If someone set a goal for their life and got to achieve it, this someone was Osmar Rodrigues Cruz. That goal was to make popular theater come true, and its result was the Teatro Popular do SESI (Popular Theater of SESI), counting more than 40 years of existence, in which more than 30 years had Osmar’s resolute direction.
The expression popular theater can have many interpretations. The most usual are:
1 – a low price theater, low price tickets to a low acquisitive power population. The campaigns to
popularize Theater, official or not, follow this inclination;
2 – a theater which allows all population levels to access the world cultural heritage, what means,
in the Theater case, the offer of theater masterpieces to people in general;
3 – a theater which its dramaturgy is commited to social doctrines, having most of times its
artistic quality damaged due to its pamphletary dominance;
4 – finally, popular theater would be that one thought by people, the frolics and popular short
plays.
Osmar Rodrigues Cruz based his work on the first two meanings, taking them to the extreme: instead of low price tickets he adopted no cost tickets. During his administration of the Teatro Popular do SESI they were always free, although there were some objections. As a result of it, in forty years, the Teatro Popular do SESI – TPS has been seen by almost seven million people, what is possibly one record in Brazil, that was obtained by no other resident company. According to a research, between the SESI performances frequenters there were 72% were workers, 17% students, and 3% civil servants, what means that the TPS achieved real people, due to the goal resolution and to a perfect tickets distribution service. As far as the quality is concerned, during Osmar’s administration the repertoire followed was a high artistic level, no matter composed by Brazilian dramaturgy or universal authors’ texts. So, Brazilian theater plays were offered to people, many of them from classic playwrights, such as: Martins Penna, Joaquim Manuel de Macedo, Oduvaldo Vianna, Gastão Tojeiro, França Junior; great literary authors and eventually playwrights such as: Machado de Assis, José de Alencar, Gonçalves Dias, up to the most important modern playwrights such as: Plínio Marcos, Nelson Rodrigues, Luiz Alberto Abreu, Maria Adelaide Amaral, and some more. As far as the universal theater is concerned, the greatest names are present in the TPS repertoire, such as: Shakespeare, Molière, Schiller, Marivaux, Goldoni, Garcia Lorca, just to name some classics without excluding modern playwrights such as Clifford Odets.
So during the Osmar Rodrigues Cruz’s administration, which was initiated in 1959 when the SESI theater was still amateur while Experimental Theater, it achieved a Professional status in 1963 then as the Teatro Popular do SESI up to 1992, when the entity decided to reformulate its theatrical activities excluding Osmar, with unclear reasons up to now, the TPS ignoring 30 stagings with the main cast and 13 with an touring cast he consummated a monumental work. In any civilized country the author of this extraordinary accomplishment devoting a life to an extraordinary work achievement would have their names written on the national pantheon.