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Night of the Assassins

Three siblings plot to kill their parents in this controversial masterpiece from a major Cuban poet and playwright.

  • Full Length Play
  • Drama

  • Time Period: 1960s
  • Target Audience: Young Adult, Adult
  • Set Requirements: Interior Set

  • Performance Group:
  • College Theatre / Student, Blackbox / Second Stage /Fringe Groups
Three siblings plot to kill their parents in this controversial masterpiece from a major Cuban poet and playwright.

In the game-playing scenarios the siblings invent, they play the parts of the parents, policemen and judges. 

José Triana's play Night of the Assassins is a dramatic allegory of the political situation in Cuba in the 1960s, with its call to revolution echoed in the children's need to overcome their fear and turn convention upside down.

The play was written in 1965 (Triana had begun work on an earlier version of the play in 1957), and first staged in November 1966 in the Teatro Estudio, Havana, Cuba.

This English translation by Sebastian Doggart was first staged in August 1994 in the Demarco European Art Foundation, Edinburgh, by the Southern Development Trust.

Night of the Assassins is available in the collection Latin American Plays.

REVIEWS:

"The atmosphere of oppression is almost tangible... in the hysteria and power games of three siblings enacting or re-enacting the murder of their parents... utterly compelling."

 Scotsman

Premiere Production: Cuba 1966; this translation, Edinburgh, 1994.
  • Casting: 1M, 2F