O AUTO DA COMPADECIDA

A Dog's Will -  O Auto da Compadecida -  literally "The Compassionate Woman's Play", the woman being the Virgin Mary) is a 2000 Brazilian comedy play by Ariano Suassuna.

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The plot concerns the adventures of João Grilo and Chicó the most cowardly of men. Both struggle for daily bread in a telling representation of the life of the poor in North-East Brazil (O Nordeste) in the early 1930s and gull a series of comical stereotypes — baker, landowner, and priest — in a series of interrelated episodes united by the passion of the adulterous baker's wife for her little dog who dies from eating the food she supplies to them as occasional workers, and the daughter of the landowner Antônio Morais — a magnificent comic character who represents the colonial pretensions of the erstwhile "colonial" class who owned the great estates  of the region in which sugar production was central to a once-booming economy.