Jean Genet, author

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I'll say it again: this play, written by a White man, is intended for a White audience. But if, by some strange chance, it is performed for an audience of Black people, it will be necessary to invite a White person - man or woman - to each session. The producer of the show will have to welcome them with the utmost solemnity, make them dress up and lead them to their seat, preferably in the front row of the audience. The actors will perform just for them. And throughout the show, a spotlight will be shone on this symbolic White.
What if no White person is willing? Then hand out White masks to the Black audience at the entrance. If the Black people refuse the White masks, use a mannequin.

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Rogério de Carvalho, director

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A situation of shock and turbulence through an allegorical representation, the irony of a ritual that ends in massacre. The show opens up the search for an identity for black people that is not the image that white people have of black people. The black person wants to free himself from this taint, which would give him freedom. It is in this illusion that the play finds the theme of blackness. The horror of the show is that it deals with it in an ironic way, reaching the boundaries of parody.

You never lose sight of the fact that the truth of the stage means play on the part of the actors. The ritual is lived. It's a ceremonious show, with ritualistic moments. Is it enough to say that acting is ritual? What is the boundary between theatrical performance and ritualization? What role do we give spectators, be they black or white? Is it necessary for the scene to be legible, in what terms for each of the colors? What is the color black, since the color black is pejorative in certain countries?

What does it mean to be black when you don't live in a black country?
 

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Zia Soares, artistic director of Teatro GRIOT

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13 black actors on stage.
13 black actors invariably provoke the same question, asked with more or less astonishment, anger, benevolence or irony: why are they doing this play with only black actors? On stage, where acts of transgression are becoming more and more difficult and extreme, people wonder - myself included - why 13 black actors on a stage is still an act of transgression, and what that tells us, all of us, about ourselves.
We've arrived here, we're here, with this exclusively black cast, with a black director (after all, what does it mean to be black?), to finally break the silence. This is where we allow ourselves to Speak. Experimenting with the possibilities of the black voice (after all, what does it mean to be black?), challenging the limits of what can be said, placing ourselves in the abyss where words lose their utilitarian meaning and the text takes place in the black body, that body which, after all, can be pierced by light.