"Vicente and Antonio teach us that it is possible to live true to oneself and to a friendship."
The author of the play “Vicente and Antonio - The story of a friendship: Florestan Fernandes and Antonio Candido”, Oswaldo Mendes, describes how the idea for the work, which celebrates the centenary of the sociologist, came about.
By Oswaldo Mendes, author of the play “Vicente and Antonio - The story of a friendship: Florestan Fernandes and Antonio Candido” (watch at the end of the text)
Why Vicente and Antonio
When Florestan Júnior, in the complicit presence of Mário Vítor Santos at Casa do Saber, enthused me with the idea of writing a play about his father's friendship with Antonio Candido, I issued two warnings.
First, don't look for your father in the play. Only you knew him; he belongs to the private sphere of family relationships. Keep him to yourself. The play won't peek through anyone's keyhole. The Florestan Fernandes that interests the theater is the public figure, revealed in the stories, letters, and ideas exchanged with Antonio Candido. His legacy is what matters.
Secondly, theatre is not a sociological, historical, genealogical, or biographical treatise in the documentary sense. Theatre, and I hope the play reflects this, deals with people, human beings in their circumstances, with the joys, anxieties, achievements, anguish, and triumphs of each one. Like those experienced by Vicente and Antonio.
Months later, upon finishing the play, I realize that "whenever I reach the end, I haven't finished." Even more so in theater, where the text is intended not only to be read, but to come alive on stage and fulfill its ephemeral destiny there. With the play finished, it's possible to look at the result and say what it's about. What is Vicente and Antonio? It's the encounter, during a pandemic, of four actors, two young and two mature, conversing about the exemplary friendship of two intellectuals, whose lives, ideas, and stories are brought to mind. Simple as that. The hope is that, at the end of this conversation, those who watch or read it can learn a little about the two characters and, like the four actor friends, be entertained, moved, and stimulate their own imagination, sensitivity, and thought.
Finally, why Vicente and Antonio? Why not Florestan and Candido, as they were called by their contemporaries? Precisely so that this strangeness emphasizes that what matters is not their names, but the characters they built and what they left behind, even when no one remembers who they were anymore. Not to mention the theatrical factor of someone not being addressed by their own name, from childhood to adulthood. Vicente's tenacity in being Florestan is the synthesis of his trajectory, although he said in a moment of crisis that "no one chooses their own story or even writes their own biography." Wrong. Vicente and Antonio teach us that it is possible to live true to oneself and to a friendship.