What if God was one of us? - São Paulo

Dan Stulbach and Irene Ravache in Meu Deus!

On Friday night, we went with friends to the play "Meu Deus" at the Teatro FAAP. FAAP stands for Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado and is a school of higher education.  I can never pronounce the acronym correctly: I try to say "FAH-pee" and it's "FAAA-AAAHHHH-pee". Trust me. Get it right or suffer BH correcting you diligently several times. try it now out loud "FAAAAAAAH- pee". Hope you are not on the bus. You are getting strange looks.

It's not my favorite theatre in São Paulo--it's a long line of chairs and they are shallow, making you crane around the person in front's head. But they've had some good plays.

Our friends are avid theatre goers. A British/Brazilian couple, they moved back to Brazil last year after five years in the theatre mecca of London. About once every two months, my friend sends out an email with a list of plays that she would like to see and invites us all along. And she buys the tickets. There is no excuse for not getting out and about when it is essentially handed to you on a platter.
The theatre offerings here are varied and, for the most part, excellent. We tend to go more to drama and comedy than to the big musicals (okay, in fact I have never seen one of the big musicals). Tickets here for good seats are amazingly inexpensive, especially in comparison with the big shows. Last Friday's show was $60 reais (US$27) for fifth row center tickets. If you want to see One Direction (I don't), you are going to pay $250 reais (US$100). Perhaps I should compare on an hourly basis--most rock shows are two hours or more. Most plays are an hour and a half, or less, with no intermission. Maybe I shouldn't compare at all these oranges and apples.

Most plays here start at 9 or 9:30. It is extremely late for me (oh my God, when did I become old?)--my excuse is that by the end of the day, my understanding of Portuguese goes down, and I have a harder time following intense dialogues. This happened on Friday night--the play was 80 minutes and for 60 minutes, I was with them. At 10:30, things started falling apart--especially when my Bible background was clearly lacking.

The premise of the play was God being depressed and seeking the help of a psychologist. The actors were well-known (to Brazilians) and excellent. God completely cracked me up. Yes, maybe there were some obvious pratfalls--every time the psychologist declared "Oh My God", he would answer "Yes?" or "Thank God", he would answer "you're welcome". It was funny and mostly light, with sadness lightly touched as the psychologist's autistic son appears from time to time, and glimmers of the psychologist's difficult family life shine through.

I recommend seeing the play if you are in São Paulo and your Portuguese is up to it. I "met" two more actors, Dan Stulbach and Irene Ravache, who I add to my short list of favorite Brazilians along with Antonio Fagundes (not in the play) and Claudia Raia (ditto). If not, the play is often staged in English as "Oh God!". Recently it was at Ithaca College in New York and in Boston at Boston University. 

The Israeli playwright is Anat Gov, who died in 2012 at the age of 59 after a four-year battle with cancer. I hope she's having some good conversations with God right now. It all reminds me of that song most famously sung by Alanis Morisette (but also Joan Osborne), "What if God was one of us?"


If God had a name what would it be?
And would you call it to his face?
If you were faced with him
In all his glory
What would you ask if you had just one question?
And yeah, yeah, God he is great
Yeah, yeah, God he is good
Yeah, yeah, yeah-yeah-yeah
What if God was one of us?
Just a slob like one of us
Just a stranger on the bus
Trying to make his way home
If God had a face what would it look like?
And would you wanna to see
If seeing meant that
You would have to believe
In things like heaven and in Jesus and the saints
And all the prophets
And yeah, yeah, God he is great
Yeah, yeah, God he is good
Yeah, yeah, yeah-yeah-yeah
What if God was one of us?
Just a slob like one of us
Just a stranger on the bus
Trying to make his way home
Trying to make his way home
Back up to heaven all alone
Nobody calling on the phone
Except the Pope maybe in Rome

-songwriter Eric Bazilian