The difficulty of communication, the desire behind words, the discomfort or disregard evoked by words, the competition by use of the words, the occupation of time with words… A crime, a dream, an opening, a relationship, a cancer... In a haze of transversal meanings which connects the crime to the relationship, the latter to the opening, the crime to the dream, the dream to the cancer – or perhaps, the bicycle accident to the crime -, we realize that there can be many answers. But we also realize that all of them can simply be metaphors for the same and so frequent contemporary impossibility: communication. Therefore we should take for granted the term “impossibility” only if we emphasize the term “communication” in its ideal meaning. The contemporary communication takes away from the informant the autonomy over the meaning of what s/he informs, but it does not take away the responsibility for this same meaning. Communicating, more than a possibility has become, in general, just an intention.
Understanding the many “pseudo-autonomous” meanings through the words, which carry an array of prior lexical meanings that cannot be ignored -, causes a discomfort that cannot always be well solved. And to realize that every comprehension is merely a point of view does not make us more comfortable in our relations.
For all of the above, the play written by Rijnders seemed profoundly coherent to its time. Pick up interested me by the many meanings and readings it unfolds. In Pick up, we find an expression for the fragmented-dialogs so common in quotidian relations, for the fast, short, referential information. We find an almost suspended expression of characters that are revealed by metaphors and the fractal relations they establish… characters who in their absurdity show us a part of our reality.


Pick up
Year of Production: 2001 (Dramatic Reading)

Theater: Memorial de Curitiba – Teatro Londrina. Dramatic Reading Series, August 29th, 2001.

Text: Gerardjan Rijnders
Translation into Portuguese: Pedro Marques
Adaptation into Brazilian-Portuguese and Direction: Cristiane Bouger
Dramaturgic Consulting: Margarida Gandara Rauen

Cast:
Dico Ferreira
Guta Ruiz
Andre Kruger (extra)


Pick up was a dramatic reading commissioned by Fundação Cultural de Curitiba, through the program Ciclo de Dramaturgia Contemporânea/Fundação Cultural de Curitiba/Prefeitura Municipal de Curitiba (Brazil).