US Premiere of CATARINA AND THE BEAUTY OF KILLING FASCISTS Opens in July

The US Premiere of Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists  opens July 5 and 6 at PS21 Center for Contemporary Performance in the heart of the Hudson Valley.

The curtain rises on what appears to be a summer  idyll, a family seated around a large table in a  grove of oak trees, eating and drinking in  celebration. The action is set in the near  future—2028—and we sense tension in the air;  something is amiss.

We discover that this family  meets every year to commemorate the 1954  murder of Catarina Eufémia, an illiterate harvest  worker shot by a member of the Salazar  dictatorship’s Portuguese national police while demonstrating for higher wages, her eight-month-old son in her arms.

For generations, the family—all of whom are named Catarina in honor of their martyr—has been carrying out its own bloody, archaic ritual of revenge, bearing witness to “the beauty of killing fascists” by kidnapping a fascist, appointing one family member to shoot the victim in front of the rest of the clan, and burying the body on their farm. But this year, the new generation of Catarinas, young and opposed to violence, suddenly rejects the family credo, “Do harm to practice good”—and refuses to go along with the naked and bloody ritual of violence. With gun in hand and finger on the trigger, moral doubts suddenly prevent this Catarina from firing it.

Instead, these Catarinas ask, “Is violence a legitimate means to make the world a better place? When fascist forces are on the rise in a democracy, what are the best means of countering them?” And, they wonder, what if the other side takes advantage of this very ethical dilemma and uses it as the first step to bringing an end to freedom? Rather than offering easy answers, Tiago Rodrigues dramatizes the consequences of these questions on stage as a paradox both lucid and grotesque. In doing so, he creates a performance that challenges the audience and their own contradictory values to the point where it hurts—especially in 2024, when we should be celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Portuguese revolution and the end of fascism in Europe—and makes palpable the threat to democracy and freedom that exists across the entire continent and beyond.