Drica Moraes plays a judge involved in motherhood conflicts in 'Inter Alia'

You can't blame the man who laughed out loud during his presentation to an audience of guests, on Saturday (25). The show is really light and fun in the first part, despite judge Jessica, played by Moraes, combining professional, maternal and domestic roles.

She is multifunctional, but she is on the rise at work, she is correct, empathetic towards women, welcoming, she has friends to dance with and exchange confidences with and she even has sex with her husband, Michael, in the role of Caco Ciocler.

With his young son, Harry -Caio Cesar Passos-, the relationship is typical. The boy doesn't want much conversation, finds his mother's worries boring and is treated like a "brother" by his father, who is more relaxed and less committed to everything around him.

The cast appears center stage raw, without any scenery, at the beginning of the play, and soon Jessica begins to tell the story of the turning point in her life. It is a direct narrative, in the style of Portella, award-winning director of hits such as "Tom na Fazenda", "(Um) Ensaio sobre a Cegueira", "O Motociclista no Globo da Morte" and the most recent production of "Fim de Partida", by Samuel Beckett.

While she speaks, the two men in the cast gradually set up the scene. The stage is transformed into a mix of courtroom and family home. There, Jessica experiences the pains and delights of her routine, with sporadic appearances from her husband and son, supporting characters in the plot.

Drica Moraes dominates the space with the new text by Australian Suzie Miller on the tip of her tongue and almost without pausing to breathe. She judges, sings, dances, sensualizes, pays attention to her son, knows that success can upset her husband, prepares a special dinner, guides and hopes for her child's happiness.

The turning point, in the second half of the show, comes after the young man's involvement in a sexual crime and is accompanied by uncertainty and questions. It is a life that falls apart and takes on an air of terror in front of the public, at this point won over by the charisma of Jessica and her interpreter.

Portella chose to cut the text, which is not presented in a linear way and has flashbacks all the time, with metaphors for the son who escapes his mother's control. There is the fateful maternal guilt and ethical conflicts between the competent and busy professional and the woman who protects the child.

The legal and feminist universe is the same as that of "Prima Facie", Miller's play that is a worldwide success. In Brazil, Débora Falabella's solo has brought around 150,000 people to the theater since its debut two years ago. The playwright, a former criminal lawyer, writes based on cases of sexual violence observed in the judicial system.

"The world of mothers is a world of questions. We don't have answers to anything. We live with doubts in a sometimes paranoid way", says Moraes, mother of Mateus, a 17-year-old teenager.

Despite recognizing the wounds left in the generation of young people who went through the pandemic and deal with the digital universe all the time, the actress states that her tendency is to believe that everything will work out. She experiences motherhood based on affection and conversations - those that happen and those that remain in the attempts.

In the case of the judge, there is a deep understanding of how laws work and how women can be victims even when they are not raped, as is the case with the mother of a rapist.

"This woman knows that laws are written by men to contemplate a male, white and heterosexual world", says the actress about Jessica's doubts regarding her son.

Moraes also sees a feminism in dramaturgy without pointing fingers in men's faces, with the public being invited to a conversation about the subject being discussed on stage. "No one is right here. It's the impermanence of ideas."

When reading the text, Portella says he was especially interested in the narrative dimension of the show, with the judge constantly commenting on her own thoughts and feelings in relation to what is happening.

The male counterpoint is also cited by the director as a differentiator. In partnership with Mina Quental, he created a scenario that refers to the constructions and deconstructions of men in a changing world, but still very misogynistic and violent.

Despite his youthful appearance, Caio Cesar Passos is 30 years old and needed to access memories from the past to build the character marked by legacies of decadent patriarchy.

"I look back at my 18 years and see how much I also swallowed certain things", he says about the phase of discoveries and experiences in family and among friends.

In his case, there is a particularity: his friends at school chose a military career, while he went to the theater. He dealt with the stigmas that accompany budding artists in a conservative environment, but he kept going.

Portella chose the actor after watching the show "Ugly", by the Rio company Dobra, about a couple surprised by a discovery in the images of an exam. Passos plays the mother.

A decade after leaving school, he saw his childhood friends in the audience for the first time. The soldiers sat in the front row and, at the end, praised the performance.

In the original text of "Inter Alia", the two men in the story had a more peripheral participation than in Portella's production, which featured dramaturgy by writer and journalist Bianca Ramoneda.

Caco Ciocler claims to have been moved by the female character's accumulation of tasks, something that is made explicit in the dramaturgy. "I just read it and said 'how crazy it is to be a woman, I don't have to take care of half of what she has'."

This awareness led him to the desire to occupy a place of service, realized on stage with the back and forth of the two men assembling and dismantling the set.

The actor is honest when talking about the feeling of failing as a father and stepfather, at times.