Savages

Savages is a play by British writer Christopher Hampton. It premiered at the Royal Court Theatre, London in 1973, with leading players Paul Scofield, Tom Conti and Michael Pennington, and was published the following year by Faber and Faber. Hampton was inspired to write this play by the article "Genocide", written by journalist Norman Lewis and published in The Sunday Times Colour Magazine on 23 February 1969. Lewis described the systematic extermination in Brazil of its Indians, ranging from the 16th century to the present day under the military dictatorship. The American premiere of Savages took place on August 15, 1974 at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. It was presented by the Center Theatre Group and was directed by Gordon Davidson. It featured Joseph Maher, Michael Cristofer, and Ben Piazza. Background The play is based on an incident in the early 1960s, in which most of the Cintas Tribe was massacred on one of their traditional feast days, the Quarup. Sticks of dynamite were dropped from a plane, killing most of the members of the tribe in place. Hampton based his research about the Quarup and its legends on Mythology of all Ages and on Claude Lévi-Strauss's works of anthropology: Le cru et le cuit and Du Miel aux Cendres.