Tiago Rodrigues: A Theater of Consequence

This fall, Minneapolis will have a belated but timely introduction to the theater of Tiago Rodrigues. Belated, because the productions of the Portuguese actor, playwright, director, and producer have circulated for over two decades to great acclaim at international festivals such as kunstenfestivalsdesarts in Belgium, MITsp in Brazil, Festival TransAmériques in Canada, Theaterformen in Germany, METEOR Festival in Norway, Festival d’Automne à Paris, among others. Timely because, especially given the current state of the world, the theater that Rodrigues creates invites us to consider our role in upholding democratic principles. Presented at New York’s Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) in 2021, his performance By Heart comes to the Walker Art Center on October 28 and 29.

I became aware of Tiago Rodrigues in 2022, when he became the first foreign artist to be named Director of Festival d’Avignon. It was energizing to hear that one of Rodrigues’s initial gestures was to propose that this very French festival yearly host a “guest language”; after English, Spanish, and Arabic, in 2026 the festival will feature Korean. Under his leadership, a goal of the Festival d’Avignon is to “work on the idea of a cultural, diverse, innovative, and inclusive Europe open to the world and enriched by collaborations and partnerships.”^{https://festival-avignon.com/en/archives}

The Portuguese director believes that “the great intangible treasure of Avignon is the democratic celebration of our capacity for wonder before art.” Rodrigues is a prolific artist, writing in a range of forms and style: he writes drama, documentary theater, and adapts classic plays and novels, often combining real and fictional events. Also, the subjects that his theater approaches are quite varied: Insofar as the Impossible (2022) collects excerpts from interviews with humanitarian workers from the Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders; Lovers’ Choir (2021) is a “lyrical narrative” in which a couple experiences a life-or-death situation;^{Tiago Rodrigues, “On Tour.” https://tiagorodrigues.eu/en/portfolio/coro-dos-amantes/} No Yogurt for the Dead (2025) takes the scribbles that Rodrigues’s journalist father wrote in a notebook as he lay dying on a hospital bed as a point of departure.

In every case, “the theatre of Tiago Rodrigues is deeply rooted in the idea of writing for and with the actors, searching for a poetical transformation of reality through theatrical tools.”^{Tiago Rodrigues, “About.” https://tiagorodrigues.eu/en/sobre/} His is a clearly collaborative theater. Laura Cappelle of the New York Times writes that “As a rule, 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.”^{Laura Cappelle, “Tiago Rodrigues’s Theater of Compassion.” https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/20/theater/tiago-rodrigues-paris.html?searchResultPosition=5}

Last year, New Yorkers had a second opportunity to attend a performance of his: Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists performed upstate to PS21 in the summer and to BAM in the fall. Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists—I can’t imagine a more unsettling title. Set in a familial context that reminds us of Chekhov’s plays, but structured to foreground dialectic debate in Brechtian form (one of the characters extensively quotes from the German playwright and director), Catarina does not let us forget that it was not that long ago that fascism shredded Europe’s democratic fabric.

In Portugal, it only came to an end on April 25, 1974, when the Carnation Revolution overthrew Europe’s longest-surviving dictatorial regime. I later learned from its then Executive and Artistic Director Elena Syianko that Tiago Rodrigues made it a point to show Catarina at PS21 on the 4th of July weekend, and to bring it at BAM the week after the November elections. How consequential is it to present a play that raises questions about the strength of our democracy on such important national dates? Truly, Rodrigues creates a theater of consequence.

It is a little hard for me to write about Catarina, the same way that one should always hesitate going into details about an important dream: speaking about it out loud runs the risk of banalizing, emptying its impact. Like a vivid dream, Catarina has stayed with me for well over a year now; I saw it twice at P21 and couldn’t help but see it again when it played at BAM.

What makes the performance so compelling is that its impact is equally intellectual—as it historicizes fascism and makes us think about strategies to protect democratic coexistence—and emotional. It places the dangers of a fascist state before our eyes, makes us empathize with each character and their position, unapologetically leaving us with no message and experiencing the anguish of not knowing the right answer. While stage and audience share the desire to stop fascism, the performance does not feed us answers; rather, it makes us sit with difficult and urgent questions.

For 70 years, a family gathers in their country house in the south of Portugal to kill a fascist. The family tradition began when their matriarch witnessed the killing of her friend Catarina Eufémia at a labor protest: a lieutenant shot her in the back. The matriarch recognized her husband in the lower-ranking officer standing next to him. At night, Catarina’s ghost came to ask her for justice; the matriarch killed her husband—he did nothing to stop the murder and omission is actus reus—and made a promise: every year on the anniversary of Catarina’s murder, all members of her family—men and women alike—would call themselves Catarina. And, in commemoration, one of them would kill a fascist.

The play begins as the family readies for this year’s commemoration—it is the first time that the oldest daughter will kill a fascist. She points the gun at the right-wing politician that she and her cousin kidnapped for the occasion, but then she halts: she is not sure that she wants to kill the man. A family fight breaks out, and the dialectic exchange begins: what is fascist? “Should democratic principles be compromised to protect democracy itself? What role does violence play in creating a more just society?”^{BAM website, https://www.bam.org/theater/2024/catarina} The audiences at PS21 and BAM remained transfixed during the performances of Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists. Its running time: 2:30h, without intermission.

Premiered in 2013, By Heart is a very different kind of piece. Rodrigues is the performance’s sole actor, its director, and playwright. Collaborator Magda Bizarro is the set, props, and costume designer. I haven’t seen By Heart, butrecently had the opportunity to read the script in Portuguese (it will be performed in English at the Walker).

The set consists of 10 chairs. In the play’s opening lines, Rodrigues addresses the audience to ask that 10 spectators join him on stage. Only then can the performance begin, he says; he explains that the 10 participating spectators will have to memorize a short text by heart. We soon learn that this text is a sonnet by Shakespeare.

The performance’s point of departure is a request that Rodrigues’s grandmother Cândida made to him when she learned that she would go blind in a matter of a few months: she wanted him to select a book— “the definitive book”—that she could learn by heart. That is an impossible task: How should he choose it? By Heart weaves biographical, historical, and fictional narratives to speak of different kinds of resistance.

Rodrigues takes us down the labyrinth of his associations: he shares his fascination with a Dutch TV show to recount stories in literary critic and essayist George Steiner’s Of Beauty and Consolation, brings up F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, speaks of Soviet Russia and the Birkenau concentration camp in Poland; Ossip Mandelstam and his widow; Franz Kafka, his own grandmother’s love of books and cooking, all the while coaching the 10 audience members as they learn, by heart, a poem about memory. By Heart frames the act of remembering as an act of private resistance. When in 2020 he performed By Heart in São Paulo, Rodrigues explained that,

“One of the joys that I came to experience with By Heart was to witness how a play created in a determined historical, cultural, and linguistic context can find meaning in other contexts. When I performed By Heart in Canada, I realized the power with which it related to the process of cultural erasure as much as to the presence of Indigenous peoples in North America; when I performed it in Australia, I saw how it could speak forcefully about the oppression of aborigine culture. I saw that, while it is a performance deeply rooted in the European cultural heritage, it brings humanist principles and global ideas that can resonate with other peoples. And this interests me a lot, above all because it allows us to think that, the moment that it takes art as a tool for resistance to totalitarianism, a play that is so connected to European culture can become a tool for other cultures and in other contexts.^{Daniele Avila Small, Luciana Eastwood Romagnolli, Sílvia Fernandes. “MITsp: Artista em foco.” My translation. https://mitsp.org/2020/entrevista-com-thiago-rodrigues/}“

I have no question that By Heart will have something to say to its American audiences; its humanist principles will resonate with our experience of the United States today.

I have much respect for an artist who can create a theater that is political but not didactic, who crafts pieces that are rigorous not for aesthetics’ sake, but in the way that they seek to connect with many others. I look forward to attending By Heart, a performance that I anticipate builds on Tiago Rodrigues’s belief that “…complicity is one of the defining features of the political power of theater.”▪︎^{Daniele Avila Small, Luciana Eastwood Romagnolli, Sílvia Fernandes. “MITsp: Artista em foco.” My translation. https://mitsp.org/2020/entrevista-com-thiago-rodrigues/}

Experience Tiago Rodrigues’ By Heart at the Walker on Oct 28 and 29, 2025. Learn more and get tickets here.