he family slaves were used to the routine. On Saturday afternoons, they would leave their masters' houses, and with tins and buckets they would go for water. Heated over wood, this would provide master and mistress with their weekly baths. It was natural for thee slave girls to be all of a fluster on the afternoon of January 27th 1887, merely a Thursday, when their masters and mistresses brought bath-day forward by two days!
This simple Thursday, with a Saturday's ceremonial, announced the realization of a dream dating back to 1872, when the town had "172 inhabited houses, 19 uninhabited houses, a Parish Church, a Municipal Chamber and a prison, four streets lengthwise, six streets crosswise, three squares, a Catholic cemetery, four bridges, 892 inhabitants in the urban area, and 7,727 in the rural area".
The dream had been fostered for 15 years, and now it came true. The first play was to be staged in the town of Lapa, State of Paraná, in the town's own Theatre of 212 seats. There were 79 people in the stalls and 133 in the boxes.
The streets were hot and wet: nature, either ignorant of the reasons for such festivity or perhaps joining in, had made a toast to the town with heavy rain early in the day.
The buckets and tins carried by the slave girls met with the chairs and benches carried bay the male slaves, sweating, trudging along the earth roads.
At the appointed hour, with torches lighting the streets and lamps the hall, the curtain went up in the São João Theatre. The name - St. John - was in honour of João Pereira Braga, founder of the town (formerly Vila do Príncipe). The theatre had worked on an informal basis for 11 years, now the Spanish actress Pepa Ruiz played the operetta "The Bells of Corneville" by the French composer Planquette.
The Theatre still had no furnishings, so the seats had to come from home. Stories told by the people of Lapa when they remember the deeds of their ancestors. More so, perhaps, than the nebulous visit of the Emperor D. Pedro II, recorded by a journalist among the Imperial followers: "There was a splendid ball, of which we did not see the end. In the middle of the third Walz, we polka'd off to Morretes, and from there had the devil's own gallop to Curitiba".
But the Emperor himself, regarded as a meticulous man, affirmed in his diary on June 2nd 1880 that, "Lapa, too, has set up a theatre, felicitously used as a small public bookshop to provide books for those who want to read. I reminded them to use the Theatre as a classroom too".
The São João Theatre served as an emergency dressing-station during the Federalist Revolution, as a silent cinema at the beginning of the 20th century, and as the town's first talking cinema. It hosted the First Regional Agricultural Exhibition, and for many years turkeys, sucking pigs, chickens and other items were auctioned there for the feast of St. Benedict.
Almost in ruins by 1950, the building was occupied by a radio station, Radio Legendária, of the Parish of Lapa, for 25 years.
It came under a conservation order, first by the State of Paraná, later by the Department for the National Historical and Artistic Heritage. The São João Theatre is the only survivor among the theatres of the Province of Paraná; it was restored by architects José La Pastina Filho and Cyro Correa de Oliveira Lyra, under the auspices of the Institute for the Heritage, by agreement with the municipal administration.
Opened once again to the public in 1976 as a playhouse, the Theatre plays the part originally intended for it by Emydio Westphalen, Pedro Fortunato de Souza, Magalhães Junior and João Domingos Garcia.
As representatives of Lapa's Literary Society, they purchased in 1873 for the sum of 500,000 réis a piece of land, 93 palms from to back...