Saudades is a new play about Laura, a young Brazilian-American woman who embarks on a self-discovery trip to Brazil, searching for her long-lost mother.

After growing up believing her Brazilian mother had passed away when she was a child, Laura finally discovers her mother is alive – living in Brazil after leaving Laura’s father for another man – and decides to go after her. Divided between wanting to go through this journey by herself, but being immensely scared of it, she ends up making a friend on the plane who becomes a powerful ally – Pedro, a Brazilian young man who goes to college in the US and has very negative views about his home country.

In a parallel storyline told through flashbacks, we meet Luiza, a young Brazilian woman who, while attending college in the US, got pregnant and ended up getting married to the father. After living in the US for 6 years in an unhappy marriage and feeling like she might not be fit to be a mother, the longing for her home country and a new love led her to leave her family behind and go back to Brazil.

Representing nuanced and varied perspectives of Brazilian immigrants in the US, Saudades brings this underrepresented community to the forefront and exposes some of its main emotional struggles – guilt, shame, discrimination, and nostalgia. 'Saudades' is an untranslatable Portuguese word which means "the love that remains after someone or something is gone". As Brazilian artists living in New York, we might not always feel proud of our home country, a nation full of controversy, corruption, violence and inequality. Still, as proven by this play, the profound melancholic longing we feel for it can only be described as 'saudades'.

‘Saudades’ is sponsored, in part, by the Greater New York Arts Development Fund of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, administered by Brooklyn Arts Council (BAC). This project was also partially developed as part of LPAC's Rough Draft Festival in association with The Brick and supported by Consulate General of Brazil in New York and Instituto Guimarães Rosa.

Et Alia Theater is a NYC based theater company founded and led by international women. We bring together an unfamiliar combination of foreign and immigrant voices and offer them a space to explore an

d interchange their multicultural perspectives. We use our art to expose the obstacles experienced by immigrant women and empower our community. As a company who is committed to blurring borders, Et Alia is not limited to a single form of work and is open to creating conversations through different styles of theater. We strive to make the out of place, a place. Et Alia is Latin for ‘And Other’: we create art for the other, by the other, and about the other.