Plínio Marcos: Reporter of Bad Times

On December 16, 1966, the theater world of Brazil was both shocked and moved by a low-budget production held in a café. Dois Perdidos numa Noite Suja (“Two lost men in a dirty night”), produced and acted in by its young author, Plínio Marcos de Barros, took São Paulo by surprise. The author was not new to the theater. An ordinary man whose plays are written in the crude and simple language he learned on the piers of his native Santos, Marcos had been associated with drama there since 1956, when he joined the Clube de Arte, an amateur organization,