Nov

15

2024

Alisa Solomon (contributing writer): In 1954, the 26-year-old agricultural worker Catarina Eufémia was shot and killed, with her baby in her arms, by a lieutenant of the the Salazar dictatorship during a strike of wheat harvesters for better wages. She quickly became an icon of Portugal’s anti-fascist left and, over the decades, has been memorialized in songs and poems. In 2019, Portugal’s populist, far-right Chega party began to rapidly gain political ground. It was in this political context, nearly 70 years after Eufémia’s death and close to 50 years after the fall of the Salazar dictatorship, that Eufémia also became the inspiration for another work of art: writer-director Tiago Rodrigues’s stinging play, Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists. The show has been touring, mostly in Europe, since its 2020 premiere in Portugal and has now, with grimly apt timing, touched down in New York. It is playing at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Theater through this weekend (in Portuguese with English supertitles).

The play is set in 2028 in a rural area southeast of Lisbon, where a family has gathered at their country house for an annual ritual that is equal parts celebration and sacred duty: killing a fascist who has contributed to the harm or death of women. The family is following the instructions of their deceased mother and grandmother, a friend of Eufémia’s who avenged her murder by killing her own husband—a soldier who stood by as Eufémia was attacked. “I killed him for the good he didn’t do,” she explains in a letter to her progeny, who read it aloud as part of the rite. “May this inheritance serve for you never to fall silent at the sight of injustice . . . don’t hesitate to do harm in order to practice good.” Each descendant, regardless of gender, is named Catarina and wears a layered peasant skirt and apron. Upon turning 26, each becomes fully initiated into the tradition by gaining responsibility for pulling the trigger.

But the Catarina meant to come of age in this instance cannot follow through. As she takes aim, she is seized by immobilizing doubt. Through a series of arguments she has with her sister, cousin, uncle, and mother, the play engages perennial debates of liberation movements: When, if ever, is violence justified, not to mention effective? Do all lives truly deserve to be mourned? Can fascism be defeated with the tools of democracy when, as one Catarina puts it, “fascism corrodes democracy from within”? On the other hand, asks the young Catarina, what is left to defend if the ideals of democracy must be abandoned in the fight?

Though listing these questions may sound flat or didactic, Rodrigues’s rounded characters and stylized staging—the set features an abstracted wooden house with detachable walls and trees growing through its roof—give them a barbed texture. This way of engaging spectators both emotionally and analytically is one way that Bertolt Brecht ghosts Rodrigues’s play, which owes much in spirit and form to Brecht’s anti-Nazi version of Antigone. One Catarina uncle often quotes the great Marxist dramatist—“Those who lament the violence with which the oppressed respond to the violence of the oppressors are the same people who would like to eat beef without killing the cow” and “he who fights might lose; he who doesn’t fight has already lost”—making Rodrigues’s nod to Brecht’s self-conscious theatricality both wry and explicit.

The night I saw the show, as the play reached its conclusion with the kidnapped fascist delivering an increasingly appalling (and chillingly familiar) 15-minute populist speech, some audience members—not plants—booed, shouting “shut up” or noisily walking out. But nothing deters his misogynist, xenophobic paean to “freedom.” Do we have to shoot him? Or at least wish he might simply drop dead? This, in the end, is where Rodrigues invites our minds to go. As my thoughts headed that way, I was reminded of good old Woody Guthrie and the slogan on his guitar: “This machine kills fascists.” Not literally, of course, but with words, music, ideas, and imagination, which, like Catarina itself, create space for engaging those impossible questions.

Nathan Goldman (managing editor): This past Saturday evening, I went to see a band I’ve admired since high school and last caught live in college, more than a decade ago: Godspeed You! Black Emperor. I knew going in that the vibe would fit my desolate post-election mood. The band has long purveyed a singular sort of leftist music, infused with the emotional energy of anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism but rarely making these themes completely explicit, in part because their work is largely instrumental. Perhaps the most notable exception to this wordlessness is also the band’s most memorable political statement, the wrenching spoken-word monologue that opened their iconic first album, F# A# ∞, in 1997: “The car’s on fire and there’s no driver at the wheel. And the sewers are all muddied with a thousand lonely suicides . . . The government is corrupt . . . We’re trapped in the belly of this horrible machine, and the machine is bleeding to death.” But for the most part, the music’s political implications are left unspoken or surface only in places proximate to the songs themselves—for instance, in the name of their most recent record: “NO TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024 28,340 DEAD,” a reference to a now long out-of-date (and even then incomplete) tally of Gazans killed by Israel. (“NO TITLE= what gestures make sense while tiny bodies fall?” they write in the album description. “this new century will be crueler still. / war is coming. / don’t give up. / pick a side. / hang on.”)

For the entire two-hour set—during which the band, as is their practice, did not acknowledge the crowd except for a wave before each member left the stage—I was held rapt in the catastrophe of the present. There is something fundamentally punishing about a Godspeed show: the solemnity of the non-engagement; the long, attention-taxing songs; the incantatory cycles of repetition; the inscrutable and sometimes brutal images projected behind the band; the ear-splitting, body-shaking volume at which they prefer to play. This visceral, consuming experience of extremity felt especially right in this moment, a way of forcing myself to face something, face everything, without distraction or easy relief. And at the same time, while Godspeed’s work draws much from the traditions of ambient drone, which often foregoes the immediately impactful dynamics of pop music, the band also leans into movingly melodic guitar lines and rousing crescendos. (If the album titles I’ve already mentioned highlight their avant-garde impulses, two others—Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven and ALLELUJAH! DON’T BEND! ASCEND!—exemplify their anthemic posture.) As songs like the aching, epic “BABYS IN A THUNDERCLOUD” swelled and soared, they offered me something else I needed: a way to be alongside others feeling not only the grim enormity of our plight but also some sense of a path through it.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): At the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, along with the Mexican print show I recommended last week, you can now see an exhibition featuring the career of perhaps the most extraordinary architect you’ve never heard of: Paul Rudolph. The man was not in the league of a Le Corbusier or a Frank Lloyd Wright, and many of his massive, almost monstrous buildings put up in the ’50s and ’60s have since been torn down. (You can see the process of demolishing one in this remarkable clip.) Others, including some of his most impressive, were never built at all. But Materialized Space: The Architecture of Paul Rudolph will give you a chance to discover—and even, in a sense, experience—this forgotten genius of American architecture.

Before going to the show, I recommend watching this stunning seven-minute video of one of Rudolph’s masterpieces, the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth campus. The mass and weight can be viscerally felt; the construction inspires admiration, terror, and awe in equal measure. Indeed, part of Rudolph’s problem was that he was unabashedly Brutalist, even simply brutal. But at the same time, there is something almost playful about his work—for instance, in his trademark application of a rough “corduroy” texture to raw concrete. Rudolph loved the cheap and flexible method of modular construction, and his buildings often look like boxes piled on top of other boxes in odd, overhanging configurations. The show contains maquettes and drawings of many such edifices.

Like other Brutalists, Rudolph designed public housing projects, including one in the Bronx on Mosholu Parkway that is still standing and occupied, and another in Buffalo on the Lake Erie waterfront that has been largely demolished. But he was able to apply the same formal touches to constructions as radically different as a university campus and a parking garage. Perhaps Rudolph’s most paradoxically whimsical project, one fortunately never realized, is his design for a Lower Manhattan Expressway. Though like Robert Moses’s original plan, it would have destroyed a huge swath of the city (a fatal flaw that, as catalog author Abraham Thomas points out, was also common to many Brutalist housing projects), Rudolph’s design would have called for the expressway itself to run under what is described as a “mountain range of buildings,” one after another over and along the length of it, in which life and business could continue above and beside the hum of traffic.

Materialized Space is a generous show, featuring clips from films that include his architecture (such as Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums) and models of projects built and unbuilt from around the world (Rudolph was big in Asia), as well as furniture and rooms assembled in accordance with his designs. It’s a marvelous revival and revelation.

“Where is the sheep for the burnt offering?” This is the question that Isaac asks his father, Abraham, as the two walk up Mount Moriah in the final aliyah of our parshah, Vayera. At first glance, the inquiry seems utterly naïve: Could Isaac truly not have noticed until this moment that his father had conspicuously failed to bring a sacrificial animal with them? Does he really not know that he is the sacrifice to be offered up? But perhaps Isaac is already aware of the answer, and the question expresses not a genuine uncertainty but rather his mounting horror that his loving father plans to slaughter him.

Rebbe Nachman of Breslov (1772–1810), the great Hasidic master, picks up on Isaac’s dread, connecting the unusual word for “where” that Isaac uses—“ayeh”— with a line from a prayer recited on Shabbat mornings: “Where [ayeh] is the dwelling of God’s glory?” In the context of the prayer, the question seems to be a rhetorical declaration of God’s omnipresence: The preceding line is an affirmation that “God’s glory fills the entire world,” and it is followed by the insistence that God will “turn toward us in mercy.” For Rebbe Nachman, though, the question is an articulation of the same despair that Isaac voices: Where could God possibly be amid such horror?

Rebbe Nachman spoke often of his own despair. This world, he taught, is actually hell, “for everyone is always full of great suffering.” Over the past 13 months, I’ve thought of these words often as I’ve wrestled with my own hopelessness. Time has felt like “one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage”: October 7th, the horrific destruction of Gaza and Lebanon, the extreme manifestations of climate catastrophe in North Carolina and Florida, and now the looming onset of another Trump presidency, with more wreckage surely on the way.

Faced with such a grim reality, it is tempting to try to think our way out of despair. How many of us have already tried to convince ourselves that maybe Trump won’t be as terrible as we expect this time around, or that he’ll be just terrible enough to mobilize the working class against him? Or that eventually the images of burning children in Gaza will awaken the world to Palestinians’ right to freedom and dignity? Rebbe Nachman, however, cautions against this approach. “When a person follows their own intellect and wisdom,” he teaches, “they can fall into great errors and obstacles, and come to great evils, God forbid.” Rebbe Nachman is not advocating the rejection of critical thinking or the adoption of an unsophisticated faith; rather, he is insisting that there are some fundamental challenges that neither rationalizing nor intellectualizing can solve. Such efforts lead us into “great evil” not because they are ill-intentioned, but because when our fantasies inevitably collapse, they tend to leave us feeling even more hopeless. After all, Trump could end his presidency to resounding applause, paving the way for a more extreme and capable fascist. And as Israel continues to unleash carnage in Gaza and Lebanon, the world may grow more apathetic instead of more outraged. If we have conditioned our ability to act on the belief that ultimately, the world is not as bad as it seems, will we have the strength to fight when it turns out to be far worse?

But what are we to do if not fantasize? Articulating an alternative path forward, Rebbe Nachman begins by noting that, according to the rabbinic sages, burnt offerings atone for “wayward thoughts.” While for the rabbis, this phrase refers to sinful impulses, Rebbe Nachman reinterprets “wayward thoughts” (“hirhurei ha-lev”) as referring to the confusion and disorientation of despair. In Rebbe Nachman’s reading, the “sacrifice” we can offer in response to our anguish is none other than the act of asking, “Where [ayeh] is God?,” which is itself a reenactment of Isaac’s experience of horror. For Rebbe Nachman, it is only by giving voice to the very despair we are seeking to escape—by honestly facing the extent of our hopelessness—that we can avoid being trapped by it. When we admit that there may well be no logical reason to hope, we can exchange our fantasies for an insistence that no matter the odds or the cost, our ideals and our communities are worth fighting for. This, too, is a sort of hope—one not dependent upon external circumstances.

But such faith does depend on something else: our own commitment. One of Rebbe Nachman’s later followers draws an additional parallel to Isaac’s inquiry—to the question God asks Adam as he hides in fear in the Garden of Eden after sinning: “Where are you [ayeh-kah]?” In this version of the question, the suffix “kah” is added to “ayeh” to direct the query back to humanity. Perhaps, we might venture, this connection means that it is only when we admit that no one is coming to save us that we can truly commit to fighting. When we finally cry out, desperate and broken, “Where is God?,” we may yet hear a faint echo, asking in return, “Where are you?”

Aron Wander is rabbinical student, organizer, and writer.