‍Chapter I: The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella ★★★★

Fancy a 2.5-hour performance-art spectacle about rape and femicide?

Brazilian artist Carolina Bianchi, writer and director of The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella, knows such a show would be a hard sell at the best of times. Undeterred, she has created an unforgettable work that can’t help but invite controversy and questions. At the outset, she introduces herself, then promptly spikes her own drink with a date-rape drug known in Brazil as the “Goodnight Cinderella” drug.

It isn’t an act. From the moment she gulps her sedative-laden cocktail, she has about an hour before she passes out on her desk. She makes the most of that time, delivering an electrifying art-history lecture that begins with an analysis of Botticelli’s The Story of Nastagio degli Onesti, a series of four panels depicting a man, Nastagio, who – after being rejected by his beloved – is condemned to witness, week after week, a knight chasing a woman through the woods, killing her, ripping out her heart, and feeding it to his dogs. Her sin? She rejected the knight, who then killed himself. (The paintings, by the way, were commissioned for a wedding. One must wonder how that marriage fared.)

From that startling entry point, Bianchi shifts from the Renaissance to an exploration of women’s bodies in modern performance art. Her central obsession is Italian artist Pippa Bacca, who in 2008 donned a wedding dress and hitchhiked across war-torn Balkan countries in a durational piece called Brides on Tour. The project, meant to promote peace, did not last long: Bacca was raped and murdered in the third week.

As Bianchi’s never-boring talk continues, she grows visibly woozy before finally collapsing into sleep. At that moment, the enormous screen behind her drops, revealing a larger stage and eight performers who seem to be dancing in the club from hell, one where group dances are interspersed with the movement of corpses, all while true-crime stories flicker and are meditated upon on smaller upstage screens. The transition is thrilling, and with Bianchi unconscious, the audience is thrust into the roles of witness and voyeur.

But how much is too much? The show continues without intermission for another 90 minutes after the ensemble appears, and the dispiriting effect is one of diminishing returns. What was once powerful and precise grows loose; a piece that had shown exacting discipline suddenly loses it. Less here would mean far more.

Despite its inflated running time, The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella remains exceptional in how it mixes ideas and provokes questions, chief among them what seems to be Bianchi’s central dramatic thesis: In art, should catharsis even be a goal when the stories concern victims who have received no justice whatsoever?

That is her question, one of many. As with the best art, the audience leaves with questions of its own:

Q: Is the overextended second half necessary because of the drug Bianchi has taken? A: Perhaps.

Q: What are the physical effects on Bianchi from ingesting this drug night after night in performance?

A: Let’s hope the production has a medical consultant.

Q: The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella is the first chapter in Bianchi’s Cadela Força trilogy. Will the exciting new arts festival Powerhouse: International and L’Alliance New York bring the second and third chapters to the city?

A: Let’s hope so.