Interludes

THE HANGOVER REPORT – Next Wave 2024 continues with Tiago Rodrigues’s provocative CATARINA AND THE BEAUTY OF KILLING FASCISTS

• By drediman
• November 14, 2024
• No Comments

Last night at BAM Harvey Theater, I attended the opening performance of Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists, the latest offering of Brooklyn Academy of Music’s 2024 edition of its storied Next Wave Festival. Written and directed by Tiago Rodrigues — the Artistic Director of the prestigious Festival d’Avignon — the piece tells the story of a liberal Portuguese family, which on an annual basis gathers in a country house to participate in an extreme ritual — the execution of a fascist. The play begins with the commencement of the latest of these vengeful rituals, which gets derailed when the young family member chosen to carry out the act questions the morality of violently taking matters into one’s own hands.

The show — which is performed in Portuguese with English supertitles — firmly continues the adventurous festival’s legacy of presenting invigorating, challenging new work (BAM is co-presenting the production with L’Alliance New York’s multidisciplinary Crossing The Line Festival). As demonstrated a few years ago with Rodrigues’s memorable last showing at Next Wave (By Heart), Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists showcases an active and curious theatrical mind in full creative flight, this time engaging in dynamic, honest conversation with the tense left-versus-right stalemates that have permeates global politics as of late, interrogating the play’s compelling central dilemma thoroughly from all angles. In the process, the play raises legitimate points, only to turn in on itself with one of the most audacious — not to mention disturbing and goading — closing sequences in recent memory (no spoilers here!). 

The forcefully-acted production is by no means flawless, however — there are stretches that drag (at a wordy two-and-a-half hours in length sans intermission, the play is admittedly a long sit), and the family exchanges often resort to shrill histrionic shouting matches. But these quibbles are neither here nor there. Artfully designed and presented (kudos particularly to F. Ribeiro’s elegantly rustic mobile set and Pedro Costa’s evocative sound design), there is little doubt that Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists is ultimately the work of a theatrical auteur — one who daringly yet poetically allows both compassion and outright outrage to exist shoulder-to-shoulder within a single work.

RECOMMENDED

CATARINA AND THE BEAUTY OF KILLING FASCISTS
Off-Broadway, Theater
Brooklyn Academy of Music
2 hours, 30 minutes (without an intermission)
Through November 17