Flash and Crash Days deals with the theatre produced in Brazil during the 1980s and 1990s, especially its postmodernist directors, women playwrights and theatre companies. It attempts to answer the following questions: Did the thriving stage of the 1950s and 1960s wither during the reign of terror in the early 1970s, unleashed in the wake of the 1968 state of siege declared by the generals? Did the return to civilian government fail to create conditions for a new theatre? This book examines how the absence of censorship, on the one hand, and the exigencies of protest and ideological purity on the other have given rise to a variety of theatrical modes which Brazil has never experienced in the past, allowing all voices the opportunity to be heard.