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One of Brazil's most respected playwrights, award-winning film screenwriter, and winner of two Jabuti awards, Alcione Araújo drew applause and laughter from Rio de Janeiro audiences in 1981 with the play "Doce Deleite," starring masterfully Marília Pêra and Marco Nanini, which ran for four years. Almost three decades after its first production, the play repeated its success with a new staging in 2008, this time with Camila Morgado and Reinaldo Gianecchini in the cast and Marília herself directing. Originally published in the third and final volume of the "Teatro de Alcione Araújo" series (1999), which brings together 12 plays written by the playwright, the play now has a special, independent edition featuring an introduction by the author, as well as interviews with actors Camila Morgado and Reinaldo Gianecchini, who discuss their involvement in the play's second production and the process of creating the characters. With this first volume, Civilização Brasileira revives Alcione Araújo's Theater series, which in this new phase will feature short texts, including some previously unpublished. With lively and exuberant humor, Doce Delite is a 12-sketch comedy that reveals the behind-the-scenes of a theater and its characters, both onstage and in the wings. Written in 1980, a time when the country's mood was buoyant with the return of political exiles, a glimmer of hope, and freedom seemed at hand, the play utilizes different forms of the same genre—comedy—to honor theater as the most ancient art of acting. Featuring a pair of actors who play multiple roles, Doce Delite celebrates a singular type of artist whose creation gives life, body, voice, features, and emotions to non-existent beings, as well as to those who exist behind the scenes but seem not to exist because they never appear onstage, such as stagehands and ticket takers. In the words of director Aderbal Freire-Filho, who was the lighting designer for the first production and wrote the book's blurb: "Alcione plays with theater, mocking it, its sayings and myths, its trades and officials, its pretensions and miseries. A dish made to show that theater is such a powerful art that it can't be taken seriously."