Mário Coelho

(1993), Lisbon Sisters is an attempt to explore and develop some of the points and themes proposed in the original work.

Jeffrey’s fictional tale tells us the story of a group of five sisters, with the surname Lisbon, who have just arrived in a typical neighbourhood of the suburbs of Michigan, in the United States. Given a rigid education in a strict environment, these sisters’ lives undergo a complete turnaround after the youngest of them, Cecilia, commits suicide. Following this event, the parents keep a close watch on the other two and order them to abandon the school. They then begin to spend the rest of their days locked up at home.

We do, however, only learn about all this indirectly through the accounts provided by the boys who live in the neighbourhood. Their reports are of an inevitably mystical and innocent nature, emanating from a group of adolescents who are in love with those young girls.

This show, Lisbon Sisters, focuses precisely on the gap in Jeffrey’s narrative, in which the sisters are locked up in their rooms. Since the original work makes few references to this period (all we know is that everything will end in a collective suicide), the challenge will be to create and develop a direct discourse for these young girls, in an attempt to understand and to see what their life might have been like, during those days when they had their freedom and youth taken away from them.