KENNEDY'S CORRUPTION: Theatre play

"He accuses everyone of being rogues, so no one blames him for his corruption," is the excuse we often hear from leaders who, despite having been convicted of embezzlement, strutted around television studios announcing their upcoming anti-corruption candidacy.

I remember the wife of one of the political unions, a former mayor of a Capital city, who wrote a very bad monologue about her loneliness during the months of her husband's electoral campaign, romanticizing her evenings with caviar, without any reference to the alleged embezzlements of her husband.

The first readers of this work were my Portuguese students, who did not hide their horror at my portrait of corruption. Months later I sent a copy to a famous theater director, who praised the rhythm of the piece and, at the same time, recommended I correct certain passages he deemed lurid. The names of Kennedy's Crimes' characters refer to several famous plays: Aminta is inspired by the protagonist of Les Précieuses ridicules by Molière, and Portia by one of Shakespeare's heroines. As in Miller's "All My Sons", this theater play addresses the reality of individual corruption,

though in Kennedy's Corruption there is not a single character that embodies the ethics of Chris/Christianity. The hybris of deceiving the needy is, we discovered, the root of all the social problems.