Weeks before Luigi Mangione allegedly shot and killed healthcare CEO Brian Thompson in Midtown Manhattan, I found myself part of an angry mob clamoring for murder. 

Our mob was confronting a fascist who stood on a stage ranting against racial minorities, women, queer people, the welfare state, free speech, environmentalists, unions, and more. We howled and booed and shouted, “Kill him!” We started the “We will rock you” stadium chant, stomping our feet and clapping our hands. We laughed gleefully at the prospect of his imminent demise. The fascist was lucky we didn’t storm the stage and attack him.

He was also lucky that our mob was the audience of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and that he was an actor in a play: Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists by Portuguese playwright Tiago Rodrigues. The play is about a Portuguese family that has gathered in their ancestral home to conduct the ritual murder of a fascist. It takes place in the near future, when a fascist, technocratic government has risen to power in Portugal. The family kidnaps a fascist politician, cooks a ritual meal, and discusses the ethics of assassination.

Throughout two uninterrupted hours of compelling debate, the kidnapped fascist is trussed up on stage. This empathetic and contemporary family, each member of which is witty and likeable, discusses political violence at length. Ultimately, they don’t kill him; instead, they are themselves caught and slaughtered by the fascist police. The kidnapped fascist is freed. With the bodies of the anti-fascist family strewn across the stage, he regales the audience with a hateful diatribe that goes on and on and on. 

When I saw the play, in that last hour the audience responded to his speech with speech of our own. Our shouts were wholly spontaneous, not solicited by the actor on stage or prompted by plants in the audience. It made me feel like I was at a carnival and I’d been lifted onto a parade float. It felt like the world had turned upside down. Together with hundreds of voices, I joyfully demanded (fictional) fascist blood. Then the play ended. The curtain fell. I stepped off the parade float and back into normal life. The carnival was over, but I was different.

When I interviewed playwright Tiago Rodrigues a few months later, he told me he had first conceived Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists in 2018, when a Portuguese judge, Neto de Moura, was systematically reducing the sentences of men who had assaulted women.In one instance, the judge gave a suspended sentence to a man who had kidnapped his ex-wife and beaten her with a nail-spiked baseball bat.

Rodrigues said, “I wanted to put this judge in a fiction[al] meeting with one of the great antifascists in Portugal, a woman that died when she was 26 in the [19]50s [and had] demand[ed] equal pay for those who worked the land.” That antifascist was Catarina Eufémia, a farm worker and resistance fighter who was shot three times by the fascist police while carrying her infant son. 

After a fascist-inspired far-right party gained 50 of the 200 seats in the Portuguese assembly in 2024, Rodrigues evolved this idea. Instead of Eufémia kidnapping the judge, her descendants would gather in the year 2028, during a wholescale return of Portuguese fascism, to kill a fascist in her honor. All the actors, male and female, would dress as Portuguese peasant women from the 1950s and they would all be called Catarina.

Seeing this play was one of the most extraordinary experiences I have ever had in the theatre. The spectator participation at the end, as in a political demonstration, brought together hundreds of strangers to act as one voice. The theatre became a space of communal expression. While no violence was committed and no unalterable decisions made, we experienced something transformative. 

Rodrigues’s play got me thinking about how live theatre can often be more helpful and cathartic than social media, opinion columns, or podcasts for processing global events and thinking seriously about politics. I thought about how political playwrights like Rodrigues aren’t so different from left-wing organizers. They aim to transform a group of strangers from passive spectators into an alert, politicized body. They look at how to provoke people to perceive the world differently. Some even want to impassion and outrage spectators to the point where we want to join in the fight for a better world.

Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists reminded me of theatre’s political power and the important role it can play parallel to left-wing movements. Anti-fascist theatre in particular has a long history of dramatizing the crimes of fascist governments and radicalizing audiences to oppose them. Anti-fascist playwrights have brought to light the mechanisms that allow fascist ideology to worm itself into the everyday thoughts of ordinary people. They have shown the many faces of fascism and of anti-fascist resistance, and done so through plays that stay with us long after we leave the theatre.

Here I will take us through a handful of plays from nearly a century of anti-fascist theatre, looking at the transformative stories that playwrights like Tiago Rodrigues have told to help light a path forward out of violence and darkness. 

Mother Courage and Her Children (1939) - Bertolt Brecht

I couldn’t write on anti-fascist theatre without first talking about the German playwright Bertolt Brecht and the techniques he invented for political theatre. Brecht is the author of the 1928 play The Threepenny Opera, from which originated the jazz standard, “The Ballad of Mack the Knife.” Brecht’s impact on modern theatre cannot be overstated. Even if you’ve never heard of Brecht, you’ve seen works influenced by him, whether they’re the plays of Tony Kushner or the films of Wes Anderson. In our interview, Tiago Rodrigues also cited Brecht as one of the dominant influences on Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists.

Brecht was a Marxist who tried to create a new kind of theatre for the exploration of left-wing themes. As essentially the father of anti-fascist theatre, right-wing governments were no fans of his. He fled Germany when the Nazis took power in 1933, eventually ending up in the U.S. after being hounded out of Europe. A little more than a decade later he was exiled back to East Germany from the U.S. by the House Un-American Activities Committee. As a playwright, Brecht had different priorities from the overwhelming majority of people who tell stories for a living. Brecht wasn’t interested in representing the world; instead, he wanted to change it. Theatre for Brecht had a serious job to do in the fight against capitalism and fascism, and he didn’t think traditional theatre was up to the task.

Brecht’s priority wasn’t entertaining audiences. He also didn’t exactly want us identifying with his characters, losing ourselves in his stories, or even taking pleasure in his work. He thought these things distracted from the radicalizing purpose of socialist theatre. For Brecht, traditional dramatic theatre—that is, almost everything under the umbrella of Western theatre, from Hamlet to Hamilton—didn’t have the right kind of juice to change the world. 

Departing from dramatic theatre, Brecht introduced the epic theatre—that is, a particular kind of political theatre, not one of grand scope or scale. In Brecht’s 1936 essay “Theatre for Pleasure or Theatre for Instruction?” he writes from the perspective of two different theatre spectators, one watching traditional dramatic theatre and the other watching epic theatre. 

The dramatic theatre’s spectator says: Yes, I have felt like that too - Just like me - It’s only natural - It’ll never change - The sufferings of this man appall me, because they are inescapable - That’s great art; it all seems the most obvious thing in the world - I weep when they weep, I laugh when they laugh. 

The epic theatre’s spectator says: I’d never have thought it - That’s not the way - That’s extraordinary, hardly believable – It’s got to stop - The sufferings of this man appall me, because they are unnecessary – That’s great art: nothing obvious in it - I laugh when they weep, I weep when they laugh.

In dramatic theatre we expect to be immersed in a story, and to care deeply about what happens to the characters. Epic theatre turns these expectations upside down. In epic theatre the world of the story seems off and what the characters do and say makes us uncomfortable. Where in a conventional drama the victims of cruelty are often the good guys and we celebrate when they triumph over their abusers, in Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists the victim of kidnapping and attempted murder is the bad guy, the fascist. When he is freed he torments the audience with his vile right-wing ideology. We do not rejoice with him. We do not empathize with him. We want him dead.

Most people who see this show probably believe that murder is wrong. The play shows them pacifism rewarded with slaughter and fascism triumphant because anti-fascists refuse to pull the trigger. By the end, we demand murder. As spectators of epic theatre, our expectations are subverted, and our values and beliefs about the world deliberately challenged. The subject of political violence is ripped out of its usual casings and presented as something unfamiliar, a new object to be approached differently. 

While Rodrigues’s play didn’t change my mind about political violence, I’ll never think about it in the same way ever again. Brecht helped create these defamiliarizing techniques in the 1930s in plays like Mother Courage and Her Children (1939). This is a historical play set in the 17th century during the Thirty Years’ War—an extraordinarily bloody war whose death toll was not exceeded in any war in Central Europe until World War I. Brecht’s play is about Anna Fierling, known as Mother Courage, a woman who follows the Swedish Army with her three children, making her living by supplying the soldiers with necessities. Mother Courage successively loses one child after another to the meat grinder of war, each death more gruesome than the last. Even while her children are kidnapped, murdered, tortured, and raped, she never exits the battlefield, but continues selling her wares and dragging her cart full of goods after the army. 

Despite the tragic plot, Brecht does not pull on our heart strings. Each scene is set up as a business transaction. The dialogue is dry, abstract, and darkly funny, and the play is interspersed with comic songs. Introducing herself as she sells her wares to a company of soldiers, Mother Courage sings out her unvarnished truth as a war profiteer: 

Captains, how can you make them face it— 

Marching to death without a brew?

Courage has rum with which to lace it

And boil their souls and bodies through.

Their musket primed, their stomach hollow— 

Captains, your men don’t look so well. 

So feed them up and let them follow

While you command them into hell. 

Mother Courage is a stock character, the brassy businesswoman who boasts of how well she handles her affairs. Her business instincts, however, fail her over and over and she is unable to either turn a profit or protect her children. This small business tyrant instead deludes herself into believing she can use the war machine to her advantage. She loses everything but still plods on after profit. Having lost her children and her goods at the end of the play, Mother Courage is now able to pull her empty cart all by herself. The play ends with a menacing note of optimism. “Be all right,” Mother Courage says as she pulls her cart, “not much inside it. Got to get back in business again.” Mother Courage is another victim of abuse here, but we are not asked to empathize with her. Instead, we wince in horror. 

If you’re interested in subtlety and empathetic engagement with different points of view, Brecht probably isn’t the playwright for you. He drives his point home in scene after scene with the patient incessance of a military drummer. Mother Courage and Her Children doesn’t have ambiguous political themes: Becht declares that there is no honor or romance in war and that it creates corpses and ghouls, not heroes. While aspects of Mother Courage can be engaging, it isn’t exactly pleasant to watch. That was Brecht’s intention. His plays can be a struggle to get through and for Brecht, the struggle was the point.

Rhinoceros (1959) - Eugène Ionesco 

Romanian playwright Eugène Ionesco, author of the anti-fascist play Rhinoceros, was deeply impacted by Brecht’s theatrical techniques (although he also rebelled against them). Rhinoceros is about a small town in France where all the inhabitants are literally transforming into rhinoceroses. The play sounds like it could be a funny, action-packed caper, and while it’s certainly comedic, there’s not a lot of action. The characters mostly stand around discussing banalities. Did they see one rhinoceros or two? Was it an Asian or African rhinoceros? Did they see a rhinoceros at all? Are there grounds for divorce if your husband turns into a rhinoceros? The overwhelming majority of characters are blasé about the rhinoceroses and do not respond like sane people to this earth-shattering event.

In an interview in Le Monde in 1965, Ionesco explained that the play was a metaphor for the rise of Nazism among his peers as a student in Romania. In the 1930s he would get together with a group of educated young people to discuss the rise of fascism. Over time, one person after another succumbed to its allure:

From time to time, one of the group would come out and say 'I don't agree at all with them, to be sure, but on certain points, I must admit, for example the Jews ...' And that kind of comment was a symptom. Three weeks later, that person would become a Nazi. He was caught in a mechanism, he accepted everything, he became a Rhinoceros. 

A central theme in Rhinoceros is the way that fascist ideology worms its way into susceptible minds and sets up a framework for justifying the unjustifiable. It corrupts normal, sane, human responses to atrocities. The citizens of the town suffering from “rhinoceritis” first deny the evidence of their eyes, then normalize what is happening, and finally start believing, as they make their metamorphosis, that the transformation is not only normal but good.

The characters in Rhinoceros, being so divorced from reality, put me in mind of some of the media responses to Trump’s election. Sure, the government has been taken over by people who think Haitian immigrants want to eat your dog, but did Walmart get too woke? Did an inferior electorate fail Kamala Harris? Shouldn’t we all be thinking about what the cool fascists are wearing to the MAGA ball? Our media figures are busy bickering over exactly what kind of rhinoceroses they’ve seen, and not focusing on the horrifying transformation itself, let alone working out how to stop it. Ionesco is known as one of the creators of theTheatre of the Absurd. His examination of fascism in Rhinoceros looks at human ridiculousness and illogic. He helps show ushow the gradual creep of fascism develops into mass societal psychosis. 

Aunt Dan and Lemon (1985) and The Designated Mourner (1997) - Wallace Shawn

Contemporary writer and actor Wallace Shawn is another playwright whose plays examine the methods by which fascism implants itself in our minds. Shawn’s Aunt Dan and Lemon is a portrait of two fascist women that does an extraordinary job of showing how fascist doctrine wriggles past conventional morality. It looks at how easily the horrors of fascism are justified by banal truisms. 

Aunt Dan is a nasty right-winger with a romantic, para-social relationship with Henry Kissinger: one of the genocidaires responsible for the deaths of millions in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos (and that’s naming just one period of this war criminal’s decades-long career). Aunt Dan is obsessed with defending Kissinger. She argues that we can denounce the horrors of genocide all we want, but we wouldn’t know how we’d behave in the hot seat of leadership. She says,

How dare they attack him for killing peasants? What decisions did they make today? What did they have to decide, the little journalists?... Cowards! If anyone brought them a decision that involved human life, where people would die whatever they decided, they would run just as far as their little legs would carry them.

Aunt Dan sounds like JD Vance defending the Trump administration against online criticism. Where in a traditional play we are often asked to empathize with the victims of cruelty, here Aunt Dan and Lemon asks us to empathize with the victimizer. The play is discomfiting because it subverts our expectations and intimately displays fascist logic, showing us how easy it is to follow conventional wisdom straight to hell. Asking us to agree with the logic of genocide, we squirm in horror.

Shawn’s The Designated Mourner is set in an invented modern country that is responding to a left-wing guerilla movement by violently oppressing all dissent. Its protagonist, Jack, is an unhappy and obscure college professor who is indifferent to politics and sounds sometimes like a New York Times op-ed columnist, a Maureen Dowd or Michelle Goldberg, opining acidly against the left. He spends much of his time resenting his father-in-law, Howard, a renowned leftist poet. With irony, Jack says:

“How should I begin to tell you about this remarkable man, who responded so sensitively to the most obscure verses and also to the cries of the miserable and the downtrodden, sometimes virtually at the same instant, without ever leaving the breakfast table?”

As the government becomes increasingly genocidal, Jack withdraws from life and from his family. Eventually, his wife is imprisoned by the government and his father-in-law assassinated. One of the final scenes is of Jack watching his wife being executed on television. Jack, having never stood up for a cause, who abandoned his father-in-law’s left-wing literary circle, is left alone by the government. He is the only member of his old world, the world of writers and poetry readers, to have survived. The play delivers an interesting message to the apolitical: sure, you might survive as the whole world is dismantled around you, but then you’ve got to go on living alone in the ruins. 

Are You Now or Have You Ever Been (1975) - Eric Bentley

Eric Bentley was a playwright, professor, and translator of Brecht. He knew Brecht personally and played a hand in popularizing epic theatre techniques in America. As a professor at Columbia, he was active in the student protest movement against the war in Vietnam. He was also fiercely critical of the university’s treatment of student protesters. His 1975 play, Are You Now Or Have You Ever Been, looks at the fascistic tendencies of the American government during the Red Scare of the 1940s and 50s. Bentley’s play is a docudrama: the text comes directly from the transcripts of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), the congressional committee created to investigate citizens suspected of being communists. For dialogue, the play uses transcripts of committee interrogations of show business people who were accused of Communist Party membership. These include testimony by playwrights Arthur Miller and Lillian Hellman; screenwriter Dalton Trumbo; director Elia Kazan; choreographer Jerome Robbins; and singer, actor, and activist Paul Robeson.

Creating a compelling dramatic work from these transcripts, Bentley shows that sometimes the most radical act you can make as a dramatist is just to reveal the evidence of what happened during a time of political oppression. The transcripts speak for themselves. Here we see who collaborated with the government (Kazan and Robbins), who kept the moral high ground (Hellman), who prevaricated (Miller), and who stood steadfast in defiance (Robeson).

The most exciting transcript is Paul Robeson’s jaw-droppingly eloquent testimony. It reads like the operatic battle cry of a Left under siege. Asked why he sent his son to study in the Soviet Union when he was himself so celebrated in America, he says, “My father was a slave, and I have cousins who are share-croppers. I do not see success in terms of myself.” Robeson does not trust America to educate his child and give him a good life because he knows his own privileges are predicated on extreme exceptionalism. Asked to condemn Stalin, he points out that the United States is guilty of crimes just as bad as the dictator’s:

What has happened to Stalin, gentlemen, is a question for the Soviet Union, and I wouldn’t argue with a representative of the people who, in building America, wasted the lives of my people. You are responsible, you and your forebears, for sixty to one hundred million black people dying in the slave ships and on the plantations. Don’t you ask me about anybody, please!

Bentley, however, was no liberal individualist, and even Robeson’s eloquence isn’t enough to save him. Instead, much of the play shows how little personal heroism mattered in the face of the power of HUAC. Whether they’re B-movie actors, songwriters for musicals, or film noir directors, most of his protagonists put up a fight but ultimately get ground down over time. This was a moment when American capitalism defeated the Left, and many transcripts show a lot of frightened and confused creative workers.

The legal context of the committee hearings keeps the audience at a distance from the proceedings: they are formal, procedural, and repetitive. Those interrogated, however, pierce through these distancing techniques with profound personal intimacy. As an anti-fascist theatre artist, in his choice of testimonies, Bentley is humane as well as message-driven. He maintains our attention, doling out fun and seriousness (and seriously radical politics), and all through the use of dialogue taken directly from historical documents. 

Watch on the Rhine (1941) - Lillian Hellman 

All the anti-fascist playwrights I’ve so far discussed have been in some way avant-garde. But there is nothing inherently left-wing about artistic experimentation. There is no reason leftists have to be aesthetically cutting-edge. Writing in a more traditional vein, but nevertheless radical and anti-fascist, was playwright, screenwriter, and memoirist Lillian Hellman. She was a Communist Party member who saw great commercial success early in her career on Broadway and in Hollywood. Before getting blacklisted by HUAC in 1948, she even won an Academy Award. 

Hellman’s 1941 anti-fascist play, Watch on the Rhine, is about a wealthy Southern family getting reunited with a daughter who has been in Europe for 20 years. The daughter, Sara, married and had three children with Kurt, an anti-fascist resistance fighter. On her return to her childhood home, though, she finds that her family has taken in a Bulgarian aristocrat who turns out to be a fascist collaborator. The aristocrat attempts to blackmail the resistance fighter out of the funds he has collected to support the resistance. But Kurt fights back. He murders the fascist nobleman, receives accolades from the family, and flees the country to return to the fight. He gets away with murder scot-free.

The play is a mystery, an intimate family drama, a thriller, and a comedy all at the same time. It was commercially successful from the get-go. In 1943 it even got turned into a film starring Bette Davis. It is overtly political and speaks plainly on the need to directly confront and root out fascism at whatever cost. At the time of writing, Hellman opposed the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact of 1939 and the play is a direct comment on her political views. Through effective storytelling Hellman makes many of the same arguments that Brecht makes in his plays, only using a completely different set of dramatic tools. Hellman used realism, seasoned with heaping spoonfuls of Hollywood schmaltz, the vernacular of her era, to propagandize anti-fascism. Asked by his mother-in-law how he has been supporting his family, Kurt the resistance fighter says:

You wish to know whether not being an engineer buys adequate breakfasts for my family. It does not. I have no wish to make a mystery of what I have been doing: it is only that it is awkward to place neatly. It sounds so big: it is so small. I am an anti-fascist. And that does not pay well. 

While Watch on the Rhine is not as intellectual as many of the anti-fascist plays described here, being clear, prescriptive, timely, and commercial, it effectively preached anti-fascism to a mass audience. 

I end here with Hellman’s play because it puts me in mind of how desperately we now need to be spreading anti-fascist messaging to millions of people at once. Today in the United States, as ICE kidnaps people off the street, it can feel like we live in a nation taken over by Ionesco’s rhinoceroses. Like Brecht’s Mother Courage, the anti-vaxx influencer-mothers of the Internet bury children who’ve died from preventable diseases. AI slop is transforming all those who practice the art of letters into designated mourners for literacy as we know it. 

Tiago Rodrigues described theatre to me as “the hallway towards politics,” or “the space where you ask questions that might open the debate that might become politics when it goes out into the streets and into the houses.” He told me that politics is part of theatre’s genetic code, because theatre requires the human assembly: people sharing a space that doesn’t belong to any of them. 

For my entire adult life, I’ve discussed and been radicalized by politics on social media: spaces that have now become perilous, reactionary, and increasingly unusable for political debate and discovery. When I saw Catarina and the Beauty of KillingFascists, I was reminded of the role that live theatre can play in political discourse. As the websites we use for public discourse become corrupted, coopted, and surveilled, we might look to live theatre as a space of communal connection.

As random, reactionary acts of political violence increase, we need a shared third space where we can engage with politics as it exists in our collective imagination. We need a space where no harm can come to anyone, unlike social media. In the theatre, when our emotional bodies can take flight by engaging with a story, it isn’t just consequence free fun. It’s a necessary form of collective sublimation that we ignore at our peril.