THE CROSS-STREAM DAYS – a two-act play

The facts and characters portrayed here are based on events regarding early twentieth-century Parmesan tradunionism and centres on the extraordinary work of the mythical Father Lino Maupas, who devoted himself  totally to the cause of outcasts and the oppressed.



ICARUS – a monologue

Icarus, the protagonist, and his computer experience such a symbiotic relationship that he feels he is the hub of the world, though he lives on a planet of his own. He tells his outlandish stories to his chat-buddy, Samantha, whom he plans to make the love of his life… that is, until Samantha shocks him back into the real world.

COLLAGE  - play in two acts

Benedetto was a simple clerk who stenographed the sermons delivered by Saint Bernardino in Siena in the thirteen hundreds.  His naïve world of fancy is peopled by Nello and Nico, two doves  who, against the backdrop of a mediaeval city torn by civil strife and thanks to their candid mimesis of human failings, underline the purity of an uncontaminated dream which the brutality of war is destined to destroy.

SHOEMBRUNN DAMEN – a monologue

Cristine is caretaker of the women’s toilets at Schönbrunn palace. She is exacting, meticulous, and a maniac for cleanliness. On the other hand, the new caretaker of the men’s toilets is the complete opposite: dirty, vulgar, out to get what he wants. And yet, Cristine, due to a misunderstanding, believes that he is in love with her. But fate has many unpleasant surprises in store for both of them.



THE SEDAN CHAIR   a radio play adapted for theatre

Set in an undefined period between the seventeenth and seventeenth centuries, this play features two servants obliged to carry their despotic and cruel master about in a curtained sedan chair. Weary of their thankless, excruciating job they decide to rid themselves of His Excellency by  throwing him into a gully. After a short period of freedom and boredom, unable to deal with this glut of happiness, they go in search of a new master.


MELOSPHERES– a one-act play (“It happened in Sicily”)

Set in seventeenth-century Palermo, it tells the story of the “vecchia dell’aceto” [the vinegar hag], a woman who used arsenic to free other women of  their disagreeable husbands.



A STRANGE FOLLY – a one-act play (“It happened in Rome”)

The mythical popess Joan, her life in serious danger, tells a stunned young doctor the  story of her life, that of a brilliant young woman bent on winning the right to study and assert herself as a person. Posing as  a man, her dazzling career is seriously jeopardised by pregnancy. Despite the doctor’s desperate attempt to save her, Joan and her baby are lynched savagely by the Roman mob.


JUDITH – a monologue (“Helen and the others”)

The biblical heroine and her servant, amid clouds of incense and precious silks, folly and rebellion, dazzling fascinating and a thirst for ruthless revenge, cause the downfall of the enemies of  Israel.

NOCTURNE

by Paola Moretti

(monologue)

INSOLENT LOVE  - a play

The focus of this play is the story of Marguerite Duras and her mother, of their  violent affective relationship which often verged on hatred and destruction due to their failure to understand and accept each other. The jealousy Marguerite felt towards her brother Pierre, the early years spent in Indochina, her sexual initiation are all relived through the power of memory at a time when the writer, aided by Yann Andrea, was being treated in a clinic for alcoholism.

Two “migratory birds” (who find themselves quite, by chance, at S.Thala, a habitat of the memory)  bear unknowing witness to the drama of disappointed love, hovering between past and present.

The play also investigates the brighter and darker sides of a vocation which marks one of the loftiest and most intense literary expressions of our recent past.



“Insolent Love” was awarded the “Luigi Antonelli-Castilenti ” in 2008. The panel of judges was formed by Franca Angelini, Giorgio Patrizi and Luciano Paesani

Transation from Italian by Kay McCarthy