Crossing The Line Festival - Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists

Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists
Written and directed by Tiago Rodrigues

Presented by BAM in association with L’Alliance New York’s Crossing The Line Festival

It’s a family tradition: once a year, they all get together in their charming Portuguese country home and kill a fascist. For 70 years, this is how they have honored the memory of Catarina Eufémia, an iconic resistance leader and farm worker brutally slain under Salazar’s dictatorship.

But this year, the youngest member of the family is reluctant to perform her initiation and shoot the fascist kidnapped for the occasion. Dramatizing questions as urgent now as they were decades ago, Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists asks what fascism looks like today—and if killing a fascist is an act of resistance, or simply murder?

Last at BAM in 2021 with his internationally acclaimed work By Heart (NYT Critic’s Pick), Festival d’Avignon Artistic Director Tiago Rodrigues brings his uniquely political vision of theater back to New York with this gripping original drama that marries the burning issues of today with the ghosts of our past as only live performance can.

Tiago Rodrigues:

Named Artistic Director of the Festival d’Avignon in 2022, Tiago Rodrigues is the first foreign artist to helm this preeminent European institution. His work is acclaimed in his native Portugal and across Europe, where he has pursued numerous collaborations and received many honors and awards.

In 2003, Rodrigues and his partner Magda Bizarro founded the company Mundo Perfeito, with which he created around 30 shows, performed in over 20 countries. A charismatic actor, director, teacher, and—perhaps first and foremost— and author, Rodrigues has an open, contemporary view of writing, which involves shaping the work in collaboration with the performers, and which leads him to revisit classics, adapt novels, delve into myths, and mix fiction with reality.

At the heart of Rodrigues’s approach is a vision of theater as a gathering of people. With each work, he aims to rediscover what is truly vital in a particular story and its staging, producing shows stripped of artifice that use the poetry of the world as their raw material.

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