We are made not only of what we have, but of what we have lost.
The play examines four modern anxieties—hatred, nothingness, forgetting, incommunicability—using Borges' stories as thematic anchors, with a fifth act offering redemption through reconnection with tenderness. Lorenzon's creative process was shaped by pandemic isolation and digital-age alienation, using Borges' literature as a guide through darkness while processing his grandmother's death and lasting influence on his artistic practice.
- Solo performance "Quase Infinito" at Teatro Faap, directed by Elcio Nogueira Seixas
- Four acts explore hatred, nothingness, forgetting, and incommunicability using Borges' stories
- Grandmother Zezé annotated Borges' "Ficções" with the word "Lindíssimo" before her death
- Text written during pandemic, shaped by isolation and digital-age alienation
Actor João Paulo Lorenzon's solo performance "Quase Infinito" draws from Borges' "Ficções" to explore modern anguish through themes of hatred, nothingness, forgetting, and incommunicability, inspired by a personal connection to his grandmother's annotated copy.
João Paulo Lorenzon sits with a book that belonged to his grandmother. In the margins of Jorge Luis Borges' "Ficções," at the end of the story "The Circular Ruins," she had written a single word in blue ink: "Lindíssimo"—beautiful. The geography teacher had loved it. Her grandson, who thought his grandmother was beautiful, wanted to know who had captured her admiration so completely. That question led him into Borges' world, and eventually to the stage of Teatro Faap with a solo performance called "Quase Infinito."
Lorenzon's grandmother, Zezé, had crawled through the streets of Pinheiros alongside him when he was small—her way of meeting him at his own level, of being close. She died when he was ten. The loss reshaped how he understood time itself. Years later, when he found her annotation in that book, something shifted. He began to see that losing someone doesn't erase them; it transforms them into memory, into a kind of presence that lives differently.
The play, directed by Elcio Nogueira Seixas, is built on four modern anguishes, each anchored to a Borges story. Hatred draws from "The Garden of Forking Paths." Nothingness comes from "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius." Forgetting and the failure to communicate live in "The Library of Babel." A fifth act—a garden—was created as redemption, as a return to tenderness surviving within chaos. Lorenzon wrote the text during the pandemic, when isolation was reshaping how humans experienced each other. He watched his students suffer. He saw the modern condition clearly: people roboticized by routine, separated by the very devices meant to connect them, starved for dialogue and touch.
Borges became his guide through that darkness. The Argentine writer's work offered something the moment needed—a way to believe that new dreams, new realities, might still emerge. Lorenzon used Borges' atmospheres, his contradictions, his understanding that loss and memory are inseparable, to build a structure for his own anguish and his students' pain. "I'm talking about my own solitude, my own anguish," he says. The play is personal and universal at once.
In the act about hatred, a single phrase crystallizes everything: "Forgetting is at once a revenge and a forgiveness." To hold someone in silence, to stop speaking with them, to refuse to overlay a false relationship onto one that was real—that is both an act of mercy and an act of refusal. It is how you honor what was. Seixas, directing, brought a fantastic atmosphere to the stage, elements that suggest a descent into the human mind, stimuli that awaken sensation. Under his eye, Lorenzon becomes visceral, able to surrender to feelings because someone is thinking through all of it.
Zezé hovers over everything. In earlier work, Lorenzon had made direct dedications to her, acknowledged her influence openly, hoped she was watching from the audience. That need has dissolved with time. Now, when he reaches a luminous moment on stage, it feels like an embrace. It feels like they are moving forward together. The performance suggests what Borges himself knew: we are made not only of what we have, but of what we have lost.
Citas Notables
I lost my grandmother, but in some way she continues here. Theater is how I keep speaking with her.— João Paulo Lorenzon
Forgetting is at once a revenge and a forgiveness.— From the play's act on hatred
La Conversación del Hearth Otra perspectiva de la historia
Why did your grandmother's single word in that book matter so much that it became the seed for this entire piece?
Because it was her taste, her judgment, her interior life made visible. I wanted to know what moved her. And following that thread led me to Borges, who became a way of understanding what she had understood—that beauty and meaning survive in strange ways.
The play has five acts, four of them built on anguish. Why did you need that fifth act, the garden?
Because anguish alone is incomplete. The pandemic taught me that people were drowning, but they were also still reaching for each other. The garden is what survives—tenderness, connection, the possibility that chaos doesn't have the final word.
You say forgetting is both revenge and forgiveness. How does that work?
When you stop speaking with someone, stop trying to fix or rewrite what you had, you're refusing to dishonor it with a false version. But you're also refusing to be haunted by it. You hold them in silence instead. That's both an act of love and an act of letting go.
Did writing this during isolation change what you were trying to say?
Completely. I was living it alongside my students. The isolation, the screens, the loss of touch—it wasn't abstract. I could see how modern life was already fragmenting us before the pandemic made it visible. Borges gave me a language for that fragmentation.
Your grandmother died when you were ten. Do you feel her presence differently now?
Not as a need anymore. When I reach something luminous on stage, it's like we're moving together. She's not absent—she's woven into how I see, how I work. The theater is how I keep speaking with her, but without the weight of needing her to answer.