US Premiere of ‘Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists’ at PS21

On Independence Day weekend, PS21 presented the US Premiere of Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists, directed by Tiago Rodrigues. The play takes place in a future Portugal under a fascist regime, where a family enacts a tradition of resistance by capturing and killing a fascist every year.

After each performance, we held a lively Q+A hosted by Thomas Bartscherer, the Peter Sourian Senior Lecturer in the Humanities at Bard College and Senior Fellow at Bard’s Hannah Arendt Center, where we collectively reacted to the play. And as a follow up to that, we were joined by over 30 audience members on Zoom the following Tuesday morning, to continue our discussion.

The piece gave us all a lot to chew on, and it was also unfortunately timely — the production takes quite a close look at authoritarianism, and it came to PS21 on an independence day weekend where many of us — Americans, French, and beyond — were anxiously grappling with our own proximity to that possible outcome.

Catarina was truly an incredible work of theater — a provocative, brilliant, world class production. If you missed it, you can see it at BAM in November!