"I am mentally working day and night on Oriana. And I believe, in the flood of writings, words, images, interviews that Emilia Costantini sends me, that I have intuited the 'crisis' that I would like to bring to the stage.

"The inner compulsion to correspond, day after day, year after year, to an image of herself that all her life she has been compelled (perhaps) to nurture and protect." The dislike, the hatred, nurtured toward her has a basis. Her struggles, her statements, her stances may not even be condemnable. Some of the things about which he reasons (and writes) are and should have been shareable. Even from part of that intellectual world that has never accepted her. But her reasoning is hyperbolic, lacking in nuance, cutting, leaving no room for the interlocutor, for reflection, for understanding the other′s reasons, for the crisis that in all people who work with "thought" sooner or later sets in motion transforming judgment, taking note of the other′s reasons. Oriana′s suffering over this non-recognition of Fallaci is real, real... because more real than herself is the image she built of herself (she had no children, she did not take care of herself, she had no really intimate relationship, she never really gave herself... she should have shown herself...). Here... What begins to move inside me and will lead me then, perhaps, to to be able to embody her and if not defend her at least make understandable her pain, her being split in two. The first great victim of the image society.

The emotionally powerful experience of the little girl running on a bicycle carrying weapons and helping the grown-ups in the terrible game of war marked her. I imagine (I only imagine) that she felt the need to move all her life in that "emotional and civilian setting" that she shared from as a child with her father. All this created "Fallaci." That Fallaci lives of war, lives of courage, lives of extremism. There can be no "crisis" or doubt when everything you do, write, declare must go to feed "the Other Self" you have created. "I no longer cried wet..." she says after a violent slap taken by her father that made her cry.

She says in an interview "the black smoke from the burning wells filled my lungs...I wondered where it went to into me that poison that invaded all of me..." and hints that it may have caused her cancer. "How many cigarettes do you smoke, Mrs. Fallaci?" That is the question. This is enough...

The image she created and has to nurture must trace her illness back to the war not to cigarettes. I see her in her loneliness, in that area that never appeared precisely because she had to remain hidden for the Other to live. Locked away in her New York home where she let no one in.... "don′t look at me..." she will ask gently at the end. "Don′t watch me die..." She succeeded to safeguard the myth. And leave us with only the possibility of speculation....

The stage will help us... There′s no place more than the stage where you can′t lie. No place (whatever many people think...). I am writing for the stage and moving toward this truth. I don't know. But I go. I try to imagine Oriana. With my eyes closed I feel. And I do not deceive myself.

"A woman does not die if from another part, another woman, takes her breath back," says Helene Cixous.

I want to try to catching his breath."

Monica Guerritore

"How do you observe a person′s life, after his or her death, and from his or her words, deeds, encounters, and actions tell the essence?

Is it possible to trace the common thread of an entire existence?

Two phrases seem relevant in trying to narrate Oriana Fallaci. The first, hers, concerns Death. And then Pasolini who, acutely, suggests how above all life, the "true life" flows undisturbed, straight to fulfillment, regardless from of who leads it. Almost as if a mysterious "daimon" pilots it.

"We love it with passion, Life, you know what I mean? I am too convinced that Life is beautiful even when it is ugly, that being born is the miracle of miracles, living the gift of gifts. Even if it is a very complicated gift, very tiring. to times, painful. And with the same passion I hate Death. I hate her more than a person from hates. And the fact is that although I know her well, I do not understand Death. I only understand that it is part of Life and that without the waste I call Death there would be no Life." (Oriana Fallaci)

"What is this human soul? It′s a presence; a reality; that′s all!

It looms through the individual to whom it belongs as its monumental but elusive double. Such a "looming figure" stands only where it can stand. It has the property of bodies..." (Pier Paolo Pasolini)"

Henry Zacchaeus

"to five years after the passing of Oriana Fallaci, in a place, the theater, so seemingly distant from her militancy as a journalist and writer, as a woman-within-a-woman, constantly immersed in the hectic everyday life of her and our time, and yet so adherent to the three-dimensionality of her human and professional story, I thought of making an imaginary confrontation: Oriana, the absolute protagonist, in her solitude as a woman-against, is questioned. A hypothetical cross-examination, where the greatest journalist of the ′900s is induced to to explain the reason for her civil battles, the reason for certain of her intransigent attitudes, for certain of her closures and sudden generous openings, for those bold invectives that cost her contempt, sneers and even heavy labels of moralist, tightwad... even "terrorist!"

I then began to investigating, to collecting details of his biography, to going over his books, to investigating his behavior in public and, as much as possible, in private. I rummaged through memories and sudden amnesias, admissions and sudden omissions, seizing insights, tracing clues, intercepting above all unpublished emotions and feelings, to try to reconstruct the fundamental stages of his existential journey.

The story of a fighter, who always courageously fought, came to me. Against power, injustice, injustice, impositions, all kinds of rules, because "there are times," she said, "when keeping silent becomes a guilt and speaking out becomes an obligation, a civil duty, a moral challenge, a categorical imperative from which one cannot escape. Against hypocrisies, prejudices, false maître à penser, fake revolutionaries, always ready to to shoot the truth in the face without regard, because "the truth resembles surgical irons: it hurts, but it heals." And above all, against war, "the most useless, stupid and illogical thing, the most bestial proof of idiocy of the earth race": she, who as the first great special correspondent, the most famous in the world, has seen so many wars from close up, was then forced to to engage in her personal war against cancer, "thealien": a fifteen-year struggle from to which, only in the end, she emerged defeated.

Oriana Fallaci, with whom all women of the last thirty to forty years cannot do to less than come to terms, remains always and in any case a giant question mark. An uncomfortable question mark

I then proposed, the collected material, consisting solely of Fallaci's written or spoken words, to Monica Guerritore. She wrote a text of it, elaborating her own dramaturgy and returning, to in my opinion, a real-irreal, faithful and resoundingly unfaithful portrait of her."

Emilia Costantini

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