PS21’s international theater offerings include distinctive performances by artists who are breathing new life into traditional genres and creating new ones.
US Premiere
JULY 5 & 6 Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists Tiago Rodrigues
National Theater of Portugal
A Festival d’Avignon Production
Saturday, July 5 at 8 pm
Sunday, July 6 at 7 pm
PS21 Pavilion Theater, 2980 Route 66, Chatham, NY
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.
“Rodrigues isn’t a showy director: He is a humanist at heart, preoccupied with empathy and the ways in which today’s world undermines it. Complexity is always the answer in Rodrigues’s work — and it is one of the best ways to the audience’s heart.” — The New York Times
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Tiago Rodrigues is an actor, director, playwright, and producer, was born in Amadora, Portugal, in 1977. He joined the Belgian collective tg STAN in 1997, where he co-created and performed in productions in more than 15 countries. Six years later he and Magda Bizarro founded Mundo Perfeito, where he created numerous shows that have been performed. Since 2023, he has been artistic director of the Festival d”Avignon. Rodrigues is celebrated for dismantling the boundaries between theater and everyday reality and challenging our perceptions of social and
historical phenomena.
ABOUT PS21
A vibrant center for contemporary performance in the Hudson Valley, PS21 “presents work that challenges and invites” (The New York Times): adventurous productions by leading and emerging American and international artists in music, dance, and theater, and visionaries creating entirely new genres. On our open-air Pavilion Theater stage, across our expansive, unspoiled grounds, and in the diverse surrounding communities, PS21 cultivates and presents productions that transcend aesthetic boundaries and revitalize existing artistic languages and grammars. Throughout the year, we host developmental residencies for dancers, musicians, actors, and creators of original, even unclassifiable new work.
Each season, we present adventurous, thought-provoking productions by leading and emerging American and international artists, all at affordable prices that help expand audiences willing to encounter and embrace unfamiliar, challenging genres and ideas.