Berlin 1932. The home of Agnes, a middle-aged and scarcely successful actress, is the stage for the existential vicissitudes of a group of bohemian artists and intellectuals, mirrors of the most vibrant and progressive part of the Weimar Republic. We witness the disintegration of their friendship, and their very lives, in the face of the rise of Nazism. Their powerlessness to counter the Evil growing around to them will lead them one by one to to make the only possible choice: to flee. Left alone, Agnes will choose immobility as the ultimate weapon of self-defense, closing in on herself in a vain attempt to defend her bright place from the darkness that has now enveloped it. to make from counterpoint to this narrative, the interludes of Zillah, an American factory worker from the 1980s, who constantly reminds us how Evil is always lurking.

In this text I from immediately saw an admirable as well as merciless fresco of the inherent weaknesses of democracy. Through the stories of the protagonists, in fact, we see how men and women of good will, deeply bound-beyond their political affiliations- to ideals of freedom, social justice, and equality turn out to be incapable of defending these ideals in the face of the advance of Evil.These figures, whom we would call genuinely anti-fascist today, show us the various faces of the sloth on which fascism feeds. From the over-ideologized and therefore ineffective action of the militant Communists to the inability of Baswald's character to act when he finds himself in a position to eradicate (in a sense) the very root of Evil by killing Adolf Hitler, each choice of our protagonists carries within it the seed of their own defeat without appeal. Nor can individual freedom, the pillar of the American dream, against which Kushner warns us by showing how Agnes-whose home is the pivot of the characters' action and inaction-will resist the consequences of Nazism by closing in on herself until she regresses to an almost animal state. To underscore the to-historical and universal nature of such criticism, Tony Kushner then inserts interludes, in which Zillah, an American worker in the mid-1980s, stigmatizes the political system to her contemporary by branding it as masked fascism. Time passes, factors change but the issue is always the same: the inherent fragility of democracy, and the difficulty from by those who should be its defenders to recognizing the seeds of Evil. Precisely for this reason, the eternal and universal value of Kushner's text becomes even more glaring today, where against the various symptoms of authoritarianism that from various parties manifest we seem capable of nothing more than bland and fragmentary opposition. From the scenic point of view, the pivot of our work has been the idea that the narrative is nothing more than a dreamlike projection of Agnes, in which both the stage space and those who inhabit it represent instead of being, and where Agnes herself loses the unity of her being in a continuous splitting that finds its unity again only in the finale.Lorenzo d'Amico De Carvalho