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Once again this year the company of the Teatro Povero di Monticchiello is bringing a new show into the public square—an
'autodramma', to use the famous description coined by Giorgio Strehler.
In meetings held from January onwards, the company and the residents of the village have set out to discuss possible subjects, then
plot summaries, and finally the script of the show. As always happens, this long gestation process has involved a mixture of widely differing dimensions: people's life stories, memories of the
past, echoes of public and political issues…. Pulling these arguments together has led us this time to address a subject which is crucial for the whole future of this insititution, but
implicit in every group narrative: that is, the relationship between generations, a theme which is currently developing within problematic parameters dictated by an economy in serious difficulties, and
against the background of an Italian political situation which is far from reassuring.
Our show therefore takes as its starting point a group of young people who are living together out of necessity rather than choice,
each individual operating within the increasingly grey, confused and fraying framework of the so-called predicament of being young. They have to negotiate on the one hand with a handful of cunning
'hidden conditioners', who peddle abstruse theories of economic and existential survival; and on the other hand with the sheer growing necessity of taking on responsibilities both personal and civic or
political—responsibilities which must be weighed also against the deeply felt peasant history of this village, which still sends out messages relating to old struggles which refuse to go
away. And so, while other generations look on in bewilderment—torn between older and more recent habits of thought, anxieties, guilt feelings, solidarity, and hopes of redemption—we see
played out in our theatre (which is itself a public square, but also a metaphor for much wider forums) an uncertain attempt to restore a sense of shared experience to the rite of passage into
adulthood. An adulthood which no longer manages, as it once did, to promise any support, or any guarantee of a solid foundation. In order to 'take flight', therefore, the only resource
remaining is perhaps the escapist power of fantasy….
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