When the booing started, and the yelling, and then the exodus of audience members, the fascist had been orating for quite a while, spewing hatred of the usual groups: women, migrants, vaguely defined minorities. The picture of presentability in his suit and tie, he sneered at constitutional restraints.
“Those who voted for us have a dream for this country,” he said. “That Constitution isn’t going to be the thing to stop us realizing that dream.”
It’s not a sentiment likely to win approbation from any audience at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, in a deep blue corner of this deep blue city. But it may have been even more nettling on Wednesday night, when the headlines were filled with President-elect Donald J. Trump’s appointments to his incoming administration. In any case, it was around that line that the jeering from the crowd began.
Which meant either that Tiago Rodrigues’s play “Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists” was working as the provocation it’s designed to be, or that after more than two hours without an intermission, people were unwilling to endure a poisonous monologue by a despicable character that went on and on. And on.
“Wrap it up!” someone shouted, which was not exactly ideologically pointed. Others hurled obscenities, seemingly venting anger about real-world politics. The disturbance never approached gale force, however; an opera audience, more acquainted with expressing outrage, might have summoned greater energy.
What superb timing, though, for this strange, contemplative, enticingly titled play to arrive in New York, as part of BAM’s Next Wave festival, in association with L’Alliance New York’s Crossing the Line Festival. For many of us, theater is secular church. Performed in Portuguese with English supertitles at the Harvey Theater, this is a service well worth attending.
For most of the show, set in 1928 in the south of Portugal, the unnamed fascist (Romeu Costa), utters not a word. Kidnapped and brought to a family gathering there, he is the sole outsider present. Each year for four generations, the clan has met at its rural ancestral home to slay a fascist and bury the body beneath the cork oak trees. This time the bullets are for him.
Or they would be if the designated executioner (Beatriz Maia), a novice at homicide, hadn’t been gripped by sudden reluctance — not pro-fascist but anti-bloodshed. She has been raised in the righteousness of this family tradition, initiated by her great-grandmother when she murdered her soldier husband. His crime: failing to stop the killing, by a military officer, of her friend Catarina.
In a letter from the great-grandmother that is her descendants’ guiding text, she stated her credo: “No murdered woman forgotten. Nobody complicit forgiven. I expect the same from you.” She exhorted them: “If you have the need, don’t hesitate to do harm in order to practice good.”
On a single day each year, family members dress like Catarina, in long skirts, and call one another by her name — which, yes, leads to some perplexity for the audience. But Rodrigues, who has led the Avignon Festival since 2023, is a savvy writer and director of this Brecht-quoting, Chekhov-feeling play, which dates from 2020 and has been well traveled since then. The stylization creates a helpful distance from events and ideas that might otherwise be too close to an audience’s own charged actuality.
Inside that space, we can consider our anger, ethics, tactics, rationales. We can observe, too, the fluctuation in our sympathy for the fascist as a fellow human being. Do we care more about whether he lives before he opens his mouth? What might that suggest about us?
Post-show, down the street from the theater, I overheard someone saying: “We don’t know how to fight fascists. And the play doesn’t tell us.”
But at a freighted moment, it slows the world down and invites us to think.
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