NEW YORK — From European festivals to Brooklyn Academy of Music, directors and playwrights have been reviving and rewriting anti-fascist theater in the past few seasons, invoking Bertolt Brecht while staging newer provocations such as Tiago Rodrigues’ “Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists.” The push is driven by a familiar fear — that extremist politics can become everyday language — and by a belief that live performance can still make that drift visible, Dec. 16, 2025.
Brecht’s political dramas weren’t built to comfort. His “epic theater” tradition is often taught as a set of techniques — direct address, songs, interruptions, scenes that refuse a tidy emotional payoff — but the intent was always practical: to turn spectators into witnesses who notice how power works, and how ordinary people get pulled into it.
That goal is back in fashion, even as the question has shifted from “Would this happen again?” to “How do we recognize it while it’s happening?” Today’s anti-fascist stage work is less a museum revival than a stress test: How much can democratic societies tolerate, normalize or excuse before they stop sounding like democracies at all?
Why anti-fascist theater keeps returning
The current resurgence is not the first modern moment when artists looked to Brecht as a diagnostic tool rather than a history lesson. In 2013, a Guardian essay tracked a new wave of Brecht revivals and asked whether audiences were “seeking him out again” as political anxieties sharpened.
Three years later, after the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the conversation widened beyond repertory choices and into the basic civic purpose of performance. In American Theatre’s post-election colloquy, playwrights and artistic leaders argued that theater’s democratic value is not in delivering consensus but in gathering people to sit through disagreement — and to listen to stories they might otherwise avoid.
By 2017, the sense of déjà vu was explicit. Reviewing a staging of Brecht’s “The Caucasian Chalk Circle,” a Portland Mercury critic wrote that anti-fascist theater felt “so relevant again” — a line that reads, in hindsight, less like a reaction to one production than a warning about the decade that followed.
That continuity matters, because it reframes the present moment: anti-fascist theater doesn’t simply “return” when politics get bad. It returns when people realize they’ve been slowly adapting to things they once would have rejected outright — and need an argument strong enough, and communal enough, to interrupt the adaptation.
From Brecht to “Catarina”: staging the moral trap
Rodrigues’ “Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists” is not a Brecht adaptation. But it shares Brecht’s suspicion of easy virtue — and his insistence that audiences shouldn’t leave feeling morally purified. In Festival d’Avignon’s production description and notes, Rodrigues describes aiming for a “disquieting pleasure” rather than a play that merely confirms what viewers already believe.
The premise is blunt: A Portuguese family has maintained an annual ritual of kidnapping and executing a fascist, until the youngest Catarina refuses. The refusal is not staged as a tidy embrace of pacifism or a clean conversion to militancy. Instead, it becomes the engine of a family war that mirrors a civic one: If democracy is threatened by anti-democratic movements, can it defend itself without breaking its own rules?
That tension is rooted in a specific history. According to PS21’s press release for the work’s U.S. premiere, the family’s ritual commemorates the 1954 killing of Catarina Eufémia, a harvest worker shot during a wage protest under Portugal’s Salazar dictatorship. The same release says the play is set “shortly — 2028,” and quotes Rodrigues arguing that only theater can hold the central provocation in open air: “Only the theater can create a context in which that question exists.”
It’s a deliberately uncomfortable structure: the play forces spectators to watch how quickly moral language becomes tactical language — and how “never again” can become a slogan that people repeat without agreeing on what it requires.
BAM’s “Catarina” brings the debate to the house
When the work reached Brooklyn, it landed not as a fringe experiment but as a marquee offering. BAM’s listing for “Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists” describes a premise built for argument: for more than 70 years, a family gathers annually for an execution, and the youngest Catarina’s refusal triggers a confrontation over whether “democratic principles” can be compromised to protect democracy. The listing notes the production was performed in Portuguese with English supertitles, ran 2 hours, 30 minutes with no intermission and was recommended for ages 17 and older because of violence, strong language and loud sound effects.
The presentation also reflected a broader institutional trend: political work is increasingly framed as civic dialogue, not niche ideology. On L’Alliance New York’s event page for the BAM performances, the organization positions “Catarina” as part of its Crossing The Line festival and underscores the Eufémia connection, describing the annual killing as a family rite honoring the resistance figure slain under Salazar’s dictatorship.
Rodrigues has been unusually direct about why he keeps the word “fascists” in the title rather than softening it into more conventional political shorthand. In an Onassis Foundation feature on the production, he argues that terms like “populist” or “extreme right wing” have been normalized in public speech, while “fascists,” he says, still “annoy” the people being named — and that friction is part of the point.
For audiences, the result can feel less like a rallying cry than a controlled burn: a theatrical space where the language of resistance is examined for contradictions before it hardens into dogma.
What the revival can — and can’t — do
Anti-fascist theater is not policy, and it is not an election strategy. Its power is smaller and, in some ways, stranger: It lets a room of people confront political ideas as lived dilemmas, spoken by characters who are frightened, compromised, self-righteous, exhausted or simply wrong.
Brecht’s legacy in this moment is not nostalgia for midcentury agitprop. It’s the reminder that spectacle is a political technology — and that citizens can be trained, gently, to accept what once would have shocked them. If “Catarina” feels like a contemporary extension of that lesson, it’s because it refuses to let viewers leave with a single clean answer.
That refusal may be the boldest revival of all: an insistence that the fight against authoritarianism isn’t only about identifying villains. It’s about noticing the everyday bargains that make villains unnecessary.
