Blackface

A late night show format you know well (Think Colbert, think Lubach) with music, satire and a live audience, turned towards something most hosts would rather skip. Portuguese theatre-maker Marco Mendonça takes this familiar format and fills it with something that is still avoided too often: an open, direct and sometimes uncomfortably honest conversation about racism and representation. 

Blackface, the racist theatrical practice in which white performers paint themselves as caricatured Black figures, has a long history of stereotyping and dehumanisation. Mendonça investigates how that practice came to exist, why it was long considered normal and what the shift in our thinking about it says about how we understand racism today.  

Intelligent, confrontational and surprisingly accessible. Blackface is not a finger-pointing sermon but an invitation to a much-needed collective conversation about history, responsibility and the world as it is today. 

Marco Mendonça is an actor/writer/director based in Lisbon, Portugal. Finished his Acting degree in 2015, at the Lisbon Film and Theatre School. He was then cast as an actor at Teatro Nacional D. Maria II (TNDMII), where he worked with numerous Portuguese directors and companies. He later worked on projects by Mala Voadora, Gary Hill, Tonan Quito, Kassys, Artistas Unidos, Má-Criação, Formiga Atómica, among many others. 

In 2023, he wrote and performed his first solo performance, “Blackface”, and in 2025 he wrote and directed his second play, “Reparations Baby!”, commissioned by the TNDMII. 

Soon after, he received an emergent career achievement award, Prémio Revelação AGEAS TNDMII. Since 2020, he’s been touring with “Catarina and the beauty of killing fascists”, written and directed by Tiago Rodrigues.