Rio Journal
by Lynn Lohr
Sean Boulton as Our Hero in Rio Journal
Poets and playwrights switch genres more easily than novelists and playwrights. I remembered this fact while devising a new play from the reporting, diaries, and correspondence of my late husband, playwright Lance Belville. Rio Journal premieres on Thursday, May 7 at the San Francisco International Arts Festival (SFIAF). The drama recreates Lance’s adventures as a foreign correspondent for UPI and ABC in Brazil under a military dictatorship.
Lamenting government censors in a letter to a fellow journalist in Paris, Lance wrote, “On December 13, [1968] when they closed the Congress, and abolished all rights, two or three smiling captains, waiting to look at my radio script. Cutting it unmercifully. I avoided words like ‘dictatorship’ that didn’t have a chance of getting through. Then they insisted I go on the air with what I had left. Writing those 35 second spots is like writing poetry.”
On-air journalism, plays, and poetry crystallize events and emotions with economy. While a novelist has the latitude to march the French army over the countryside for hundreds of pages, a poet takes us to Flanders Fields in a few lines, and a playwright fights WWI with six doughboys for a couple of onstage hours, tops.
Poets and playwrights understand compression—a few words left to the reader to visualize or the actor to literally embody. Haiku, for example, are only 17 syllables—an ocean or a lifetime in three lines.
As I sifted through Lance’s letters captured by carbon paper onto onion skin, recording Rio de Janeiro in the swinging 1960s, I puzzled over how to represent a legion of loves in only 75 minutes’ playing time. And then I found a letter as organized as a sonnet. One letter became an incantation for passions found and lost in a hectic and harried time. Parted from his truest amante, Sonia, by assignments across South America, a book contract, and Amazon expeditions, our hero closes a letter:
If I have the courage to say I love you and the honesty to say I cannot remember your face, I suppose I must say why I haven’t written. The book has turned out to be difficult and complicated. When you begin to take a man’s life apart you find terrible and wonderful things. You cannot help but take your own life apart in the process. And somehow Sonia’s face fades out and I have the feeling it is too late, because I’ve found that love can resist any crisis except the catastrophe of time.
These few lines give two actors a complete scene written in a rhythm they can recreate.
From Shakespeare to Sam Shepard and Aphra Behn to Maya Angelou, poets and playwrights have moved fluidly between genres.
Consider joining us for Rio Journal at Theatre of Yugen, NOHSpace, on 2840 Mariposa Street in San Francisco, either at 7 pm, Thursday, May 7 or 2 pm and 8 pm Saturday, May 9. For more information or tickets (which are going fast), go to https://www.sfiaf.org/sfiaf2026_belville-productions Early bird ticket prices end March 31.
