At first, Carolina Bianchi didn’t realize the sensation that her 2023 stage production “The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella” was creating. After all, she is unconscious for most of it: In order to explore the consequences of a sexual assault she experienced a decade earlier, Bianchi, a Brazilian director and performer, drinks a spiked cocktail that knocks her out onstage, then lets actors manipulate her motionless body.
At the Avignon Festival in France, where the show premiered, there were tears. Audience interruptions. Post-show conversations that stretched into the early hours.
Practically overnight, Bianchi became an international theater phenomenon. “The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella” has since been performed in 13 countries, to a mix of acclaim and bemusement. In Australia, it even triggered a debate over whether the onstage action was in breach of local laws on consent.
“It took me almost six months to understand what was happening,” Bianchi said in a recent interview. “People were really touched, on different levels.”
Now Bianchi is back with a follow-up, “The Brotherhood,” the second chapter of a planned trilogy about sexual violence and the social structures that enable it. It picks up where the first installment left off, asking “what happens when someone comes back” from an assault, Bianchi said.
