Luis Bellassai’s play “108” has been shown in Halifax, Vancouver and soon Toronto. However, it has yet to play in his native Paraguay, despite that being the country it is about and despite that being Luis’ homeland. Done in collaboration with a Brazilian director, Bellassai’s “108” is about an infamous moment in Paraguayan history.
In 1959, authorities in Paraguay under a Cold War-era dictatorship mass-arrested gay men with a flimsy pretext of investigating a specific violent crime. The news broke the story that 108 men were arrested, despite the fact that the real number of arrests was assumed to be far higher. This has led to the number 108 being commonly associated in Paraguay with homosexuality, to the point where a member of the national legislature tried to change his office number, room 108, when he kept getting unkind remarks.
Here in Halifax, the play was part of the Fringe Festival in 2024, and got some modest local media attention.
MindThis was grateful to meet Bellassai for an interview about this important project. The author of this piece has no experience with LGTBQ+ activism or LGTBQ+ internal politics in Canada, let alone in Paraguay, and was happy to learn a bit about the front lines of social change around the world.
“I think it was good how people responded, especially here in Canada,” Bellassai told me.
“They also were very engaged with this contrast between a funny situation and a tragic situation,” Bellassai added. “We really make people feel this change in the play, like there is a moment when we are making fun of people being tortured, and everyone laughs. It’s kind of like an improvisation part where we are in the audience, just laughing and, like, making jokes about this situation, and then a whole torture happened in front of the audience… That was kind of risky as a writer and also as a performer.”
“I got a grant from the government of BC to develop this story, and it was my first application ever,” Bellassai said. “I’m not even a writer. I am a performer and I am an architect. So for the government or the artists who curate and who decide who’s going to get the money from them to see me and say, “Okay, I’m going to give money to this guy as an individual, not even as a company…” Means that Canada and the world wants to know about Paraguayan stories, even if those stories are tragic.”
“We are still quite conservative,” Bellassai added. “If you compare with the rest of South America, Argentina has a gay marriage approved. Brazil, they have common law, I think Uruguay, they have gay marriage approved. And Paraguay, no, we don’t have abortion. We don’t have gay rights.”
Bellassai’s play might become more famous in Canada by accident, as there is currently a film in production in Europe that is about the same historical events. This is likely to bring increased attention to the play, and also is likely to help bring change in Paraguay on gay rights issues.
The interview with Bellassai was part of a series of interviews by the author of this piece — himself a straight man living quietly as a part time professor in Canada – did with playwrights with a Queer focus. The author was happy to be invited to the play of a friend’s theater company that showed in Halifax as part of the Stages Theater Festival.
The resulting interview was with Celeste Godin (They/Them), the playwright of the play Bouée.
Bouée followed the efforts of humanity to update the Voyager space shuttle with a more nuanced view of the human experience, in order for it to be found by distant civilizations. With a more low key Queer focus, the play takes steps such as operating in French but minus pronouns.
“In English, it doesn’t show so much, but in French, because it’s a gendered language, every time you talk about a person or a table or a cup, you have to give it a gender,” Godin explained to MindThis. “So choosing to write it without giving any pronouns to any of the actors or any of the people we speak about shows a portion of a future where humanity is beyond those questions that we’re struggling with right now.”
“I think we’re a little ambiguous about when this takes place,” Godin added. “You know? I think the play feels like an 80s version of the future. So it’s a little bit in the now, the questions we have now, but it’s an indefinite kind of future.”
Clearly, even as many parts of the world are moving backwards on many issues, Canada remains an island in the storm where these questions can be asked and these stories can be told.