Ruth Escobar looked at a perfectly good theater in São Paulo in 1969 and said, essentially, “fuck this”, then proceeded to destroy it. Not metaphorically. Literally excavated the stage five meters down, erected a cylinder clear up to the fly loft, 20 meters of vertical madness, 86 tons of iron, elevators, cranes, suspended cages, gynecological beds that moved on their own like some dream of Cronenberg doing Genet.
And Victor Garcia , this mad Argentine genius who’d abandoned medical school and architecture, whose family never forgave him for it, who was 35 years old and already burning through his life like a meteor, Garcia understood what needed to happen. He’d grown up in Tucuman province around indigenous Indians, absorbed their magic, their sense of ritual tied to elemental forces. He studied biology and was obsessed with embryonic life, with creation itself. “I don’t know how to live day-to-day,” he said. “Living kills me.” So he lived through theater, the only place where his particular form of existence made sense.
For Jean Genet’s The Balcony, a play about whores and bishops and generals and the revolution happening outside while people fuck and perform power inside a brothel that’s really a house of mirrors where nothing is real and everything is, Garcia understood you can’t put this on a stage and separate the audience from the action because then you’re lying. You’re pretending you’re not complicit, you’re not the voyeur, you’re not IN the brothel yourself.
Garcia wanted the audience “suspended in a void, with nothing in front of it nor behind it, only precipices.” So he gutted that old São Paulo theater and made you sit on vertiginous balconies wrapped around this 65-foot pierced tunnel of plastic and steel, 86 tons of it, all handmade, artisanal, built from real materials because Garcia rejected anything fake. His collaborator Michel Launay, son of a blacksmith, welded together old hospital beds scavenged from basements in Coimbra, carcasses of wrecked boats found on beaches, sheep bones cleaned from slaughterhouse carcasses, rusted 2CVs transformed into mechanical bulls that bellowed. Nothing from a theatrical supply shop. Everything real, just repurposed, transfigured.
You weren’t watching theater in that space. You were dangling over an abyss watching actors cling to metal ladders, perform on platforms, scramble along the sides like animals driven insane in zoo cages. Garcia, mime and dancer by training, architect by education, anarchist by soul, created movement like a choreographer, but organic, visceral. He didn’t explain himself through language. He communicated through skin, through sensation. He wanted actors who could give everything, professionals or amateurs, didn’t matter as long as they could strip themselves bare and return to an Edenic state. Bodies without civilization. Flesh speaking directly.
And here’s where it gets real: this was 1969, under Brazil’s military dictator General Garrastazu Médici. Nilda Maria, the actress playing Chantal, the character who leaves the brothel to join the revolution, got arrested for actual anti-government activities. Her children were taken away, sent to Public Welfare. Art bleeding into life bleeding into art. Genet himself, who came to São Paulo in July 1970 to see what this wild man Garcia had done, had to petition the governor’s wife for their release.
The man who wrote the play watched actors perform his revolution inside a steel cage while the actual dictatorship disappeared one of his performers. You can’t write that kind of poetry. It just happens.
And Genet, who was nobody’s easy mark, who spent his life understanding that power is always a performance and revolution is always suspect, called this the best production of his text. The definitive one. An international reference for Genet studies. Peter Brook, who saw Garcia’s Yerma, called it “one of the greatest masterpieces he’d ever seen.” From a production that ran for 20 months, won 13 critics’ awards, and was completely, absolutely impossible to transfer anywhere else.
The thing that kills me, is that Garcia was this “citizen of oblivion,” as the writer Florence Delay called him when he died in 1982 at 48. He passed like a meteor. He hated theater tradition, hated its codes and fakery and the whole pretense of “craft”, he was an “organized anarchist,” a master of stagecraft who used his mastery to destroy convention. He worked from what he called a “secret alchemy,” loved geometry but hated rationality, created cosmic chaos that somehow organized itself.
This thing in São Paulo existed only in that moment, in that city, under that dictatorship, with those specific bodies in that specific space. Commercially unfeasible. Logistically insane. So only São Paulo saw it. Only those people, suspended over those precipices, got to experience what some Iranian professor later called “the Sistine Chapel of Theatre” when he saw the film, a film that a few private collectors guarded jealously for years… left invisible and hardly known.
Célia Helena, Jofre Soares, Ney Latorraca, Nilda Maria, and Garcia’s core collaborators, the French actress Michèle Oppenot, the Spanish powerhouse Nuria Espert who gave herself to his enterprises “with the energy of a Pasionaria”, all those actors didn’t just perform IN this structure, they became part of the architecture of transgression itself. Moving through those 20 vertical meters like human prayer, like obscenity made sacred or sacredness made obscene, which is the same thing in Genet’s universe.
Garcia wanted to mount The Balcony in France but couldn’t find a space at least 30 meters high. Many of his projects aborted, The Screens, François Villon, The Golem, a French Balcony. It took him seven years to mount Gilgamesh. He died planning Lorca’s The Public and Tirso de Molina’s Don Juan. He burned through his own life the way he burned through stages and convention and the patience of funding bodies who never quite understood what this Argentine exile, who felt himself stateless, a citizen of the world or of nowhere, was trying to build.
This is what happens when someone decides that the conventions aren’t just wrong, they’re offensive. When craft meets obsession meets a fundamental unwillingness to compromise with comfort. You destroy 86 tons of theater to build 86 tons of truth, even if that truth only exists for a few months in one city under a dictatorship that’s arresting your actors. Even if it kills you.
The audience sitting on those walkways probably didn’t know if they were safe. Good. Safety is the enemy of this kind of art. You’re supposed to feel like you might fall into the machinery, into the mirror, into the brothel, into the void itself. That’s the point.
And then it was gone. All that metal, all that vision, dismantled. Unrepeatable. Perfect.
I met Ruth Escobar many years later, when I was touring Brazil with Mabou Mines doing Gospel at Colonus and Hajj. By then she was a legend, a politician, a cultural leader who’d helped orchestrate Mabou Mines’ invitation. But more than that: she was the woman who’d had the audacity and the resources and the sheer fucking nerve to let Garcia destroy her theater. Who understood that some art requires destruction first.