Decipher me or I will devour you

José Celso Martinez Corrêa, known as Zé Celso of the Oficina Theater, rose from the ashes several times. Whether rebuilding the Oficina after the 1966 fire or rising again after his imprisonment and exile in the 1970s, Zé Celso always emerged undaunted and combative.

Killed in a fire in his apartment two years ago, the director is reborn like a phoenix in the pages of the book O Devorador: Zé Celso, Vida e Arte, which brings together more than 40 essays, interviews and unpublished testimonies from people who lived with or were impacted by his work.

The great asset of this extensive volume is that it reveals a multiple Zé Celso, always reinventing himself, and whose interventions and concerns went far beyond the stage, consolidating him as a great interpreter of Brazil in the arts.

“Theater was the center of his activities, but from there, he advanced and influenced popular music, cinema, and architecture itself with the bold project of Oficina,” says journalist and researcher Claudio Leal, organizer of the volume and also author of some of the collected texts, in an interview with CartaCapital.

The book seeks to illuminate the artist's many facets and, in a chronological and thematic narrative, shows how Zé Celso revolutionized theater and the way we think about Brazil through political criticism and a continuous search for artistic and physical freedom.

This is not, however, a tribute book. Through theoretical essays, testimonies, and interviews with Zé Celso himself, the contradictions within the artist's constantly evolving thought are revealed.

"It would be reductive to write a book to celebrate his personality, because he was so controversial. The cast gathered to talk about him pays homage, but through critical discussion," says Leal, who sought to fill gaps in the discussion about Zé Celso, such as his experience in film and his exile in Europe and Africa from 1974 to 1978.

The writer Ignácio de Loyola Brandão and Zé Celso's brother, João Batista Martinez Corrêa, discuss the artist's youth in Araraquara, where he was born in 1937. Zé Celso claimed to exist culturally thanks to the suicide of Getúlio Vargas, in 1954.

The Devourer: Zé Celso, Life and Art. Claudio Leal (org.). Sesc Editions (520 pages, 130 reais)

For him, Getúlio's suicide, which generated popular mobilizations in support of his legacy, delayed the coup d'état by ten years, thus giving time for the emergence of artistic movements such as bossa nova, cinema novo, tropicalism, counterculture and Teatro Oficina, founded in 1961.

The early days of Oficina are recounted in an article by actor Renato Borghi. Caetano Veloso recalls the impact of the 1967 staging of O Rei da Vela. "It was impressive, because it was everything we dreamed of achieving in popular music," he writes.

Caetano also recalls that, in the show's program, Zé Celso included references to Glauber Rocha's Chacrinha and Terra em Transe (1967), which he thought were just in his head. Leal says that the staging of O Rei da Vela was a suggestion by essayist and theater teacher Luiz Carlos Maciel, initially rejected by Zé, who only agreed to perform it at Borghi's insistence.

Written in 1933 by Oswald de Andrade and never staged until then, the play reopened the Oficina in São Paulo and placed Oswald's anthropophagy – the swallowing of external influences in the creation of a Brazilian expressiveness – at the center of his authorial mark.

Leal also gave prominence to the people who, with Zé Celso, helped to build the Oficina, with testimonies from professionals in the scene (such as actresses Miriam Mehler, Ítala Nandi, Marieta Severo and Karina Buhr), music (José Miguel Wisnik, Gilberto Gil, Tom Zé, Júlio Medaglia, Jorge Mautner and Maria Bethânia), and cinema (Júlio Bressane and Rogério Sganzerla).

Bethânia says it was thanks to Oficina and Augusto Boal's Teatro de Arena that she realized her desire for performing. It was at Oficina that Bethânia met Fauzi Arap, who would direct her in several shows beginning with Rosa dos Ventos (1971), a landmark in the interaction between music and theater.

The set design for Hélio Eichbauer's O Rei da Vela and the project for Edson Elito's new Oficina, based on Lina Bo Bardi's conception, are also illuminated. For the organizer, Zé Celso envisioned a theater integrated into the city, without walls or physical boundaries. His vision resulted in a space with a retractable roof and immense windows that allow interaction with the outdoors.

The volume also features a generous booklet of photographs that illustrate the texts, spanning from his First Communion in Araraquara to his wake at the Oficina. One of the photos captures Zé Celso's work as an actor in the Os Sertões trilogy (2002–2007), in which he played Antônio Conselheiro.

For Leal, the director's last two decades, from 2003 to 2023, were dedicated to what he called "the theater of desmassacre," focusing on formative traumas in Brazil, such as the massacre of sertanejos by the Republican Army in Canudos – the subject of Os Sertões. In recent years, Zé Celso has been poring over A Queda do Céu (The Fall of the Sky), a nonfiction work by Yanomami shaman Davi Kopenawa.

The organizer believes that, if completed, this project, which would address the extermination of indigenous peoples, would give a new dimension to the portrayal of indigenous peoples in Brazilian theater. With its interruption, after the death of Zé Celso, Os Sertões will have been, in Leal's view, "the most comprehensive experience of his gesture of solidarity with massacred peoples." •

Published in issue no. 1373 of CartaCapital , on August 6, 2025.

This text appears in the print edition of CartaCapital under the title 'Decipher me or I'll devour you'