Assunção, Leilah (1943–)

Leilah Assunção (b. 1943), Brazilian playwright, author, and actress. Born Maria de Lourdes Torres de Assunção in Botucatu, São Paulo, Assunção holds a degree in education from the University of São Paulo and has studied acting, fashion design, literary criticism with Antônio Callado, and theater at the Teatro Oficina. Besides writing, she has acted in several plays and worked as a fashion model. In her theater Assunção reveals a humorous sensitivity for the middle class and their problems, and especially for women restricted in their environment and confronting a man's world. Although some of her works were censored in the years of military rule, Assunção's first play, Fala baixo senão eu grito (1969), a critical analysis of the heroine's life, won a Molière Prize. Margot Milleret describes Boca molhada de paixão calada (1980), perhaps Assunção's most political play, as depicting "a couple in their forties who re-create their past by acting out previous sexual encounters." Assunção is considered one of the most important playwrights in Brazil today, and is one of the few to live exclusively on the earnings from her writing, due in part to the popularity of her television scripts.

See alsoTheaterxml .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alcides João De Barros, "A situação social de mulher no teatro de Consuelo de Castro e Leilah Assunção," in Latin American Theatre Review 9 (Spring 1976): 13-20.

Margo Milleret, "Entrapment and Flights of Fantasy in Three Plays by Leilah Assunção," in Luso-Brazilian Review 21 (Summer 1984): 49-56.

Elzbieta Szoka and Joe W. Bratcher III, eds, 3 Contemporary Brazilian Plays in Bilingual Edition (1988), esp. pp. 211-216.

Ann Witte, "Feminismo e anti-Feminismo em Leilah Assunção e Millôr Fernandes," in Dactylus 9 (1988–1989): 15-20.

Margo Milleret, "(Re)playing the Brazilian Dictatorship," in Discurso literario: Revista de estudios iberoamericanos 7, no. 1 (1990): 213-224.

Additional Bibliography

Andrade, Ana Lúcia Vieira de. Margem e centro: A dramaturgia de Leilah Assunção, Maria Adelaide Amaral e Isis Baião. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 2006.

Silva, Magda. "Leilah Assunção: History and Feminism of the Sixties and Seventies in Brazil." M.A. Thesis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1995.

                                    Gary M. Vessels