Everyone reacts to his or her own way. I, in my own small way, reacted this way. During the pandemic there were many who associated, mobilized and questioned what the future of our profession would be. For me, too, of course, the question became constant, and it came naturally to me to step away from the conversation until to I disappeared in order to ask myself sincerely, in my inner self, what I expected from the theater of tomorrow and from myself as a director. Stimulated thus from Nino Marino, director of the Teatro Stabile dell'Umbria, on the new post-pandemic three-year period I replied that Chekhov would be the right choice to start again. A trilogy with the same company to emphasize the importance and talent of Italian actresses and actors, ranked in political thoughts in the relegation zone but a true gemstone of Italian theater.
The company thus had to represent the category in all its diversity, of experience and place, embracing under one roof the legacy of turn-of-the-century masters, avant-garde theater, collective experiences, cultural associations, provincial hardships and the totalizing precariousness of the new generations. Only one common denominator required to deal with the Russian author: sincerity of ...spirit. To be crystal clear in the willingness to deliver three extraordinary texts to the audience through the strength of ensemble and thus be able to grasp the love that Chekhov devoted to the figure of the actor in his writing dynamics. To put it silly: we asked the Doctor to teach us to how to love ourselves.
And one can only love these extraordinary artists: Giordano Agrusta, Maurizio Cardillo, Alfonso De Vreese, Ilaria Falini, Christian La Rosa, Angela Malfitano, Francesca Mazza, Orietta Notari, Mario Pirrello, Tino Rossi, Massimiliano Speziani and Giuliana Vigogna.
The choice of texts and chronology
Il Gabbiano - Return to the theater, yes: but to tell us what?
In our theater, is form killing content irretrievably, or can we still aspire to the return of stories? In my constant rages from spectator I notice more and more that so many prefer to speak to few, contestation traceable to dramaturgy as to politics, thus leaving successes and spaces to populist waffle. Treplev's journey and Trigorin's perplexities ask us what we want to talk about once we take the stage and in what way; whether we can abandon the excess of symbolism in favor of the citizen, and whether we should not free ourselves from the juvenile shortcut of novelty.
Treplev - "yes, I am becoming more and more convinced that it is not a question of old and new forms, but the fact that man writes, without thinking about forms, he writes because his soul flows freely."
Il Gabbiano sharply presented the parallelism, the centerpiece of the Chekhov Project, between society and the stage, staging mother actresses, Hamlet's children, playwrights, directors, young actresses and bored spectators. To mirror themselves in the audience, or in the lake, to recognize themselves. To find themselves through love. Dorn - How much love, enchanting lake.
Zio Vanja - Once we have killed il Gabbiano, made the abstractionism disappear under a white sheet from the planks of our stage, we focus on the history of our strange society/family and its state of uninfluence. The famous press conference where the former PM declared " a watchful eye for our artists who make us so amused and so passionate " was a godsend for this show, which, in an amused and passionate format, was able to laugh at our ridiculousness. All the characters, including the wooden demon Astrov, bang their heads in the feeling of living in a season that has lost the force of impact, that no longer believes in its own nature and thus generates a confused and dangerous generality between excesses of tradition and kinemonologues. A theater that no longer believes in itself is an irrelevant theater, a place that, by hiding in the glories of the past, kills the possibility of the present.
Vanja: "We've been talking, talking, reading pamphlets for fifty years. It's time to knock it off... until last year I too, like you, was filling my head with all this sophistry, not to look real life in the face, and I thought I was doing well. Now, if you only knew!!! I spend entire nights to gnawing with rage at having so foolishly wasted my time."
The Cherry Orchard - A place that lives only in memory. Our useless garden, our public theater, cannot be based only on numbers and cannot be evaluated only by counting how many cherries it produces from year to year. Otherwise, yesterday as today, we might as well privatize it and make lots of cottages for tourists. If there is no risk it is not Public and does not deserve to be supported by the people. If the only thought is to have more and more, to accumulate in a self-defeating way and to squeeze people next to we, if we believe in this form of slavery in the new millennium, if we stop caring about the quality of our lives through the quality of the lives of others then I wonder what we are doing, still, on a stage. And the actors wonder, too, forsaken to having to beg for attention with long emotional and ephemeral monologues about hundred-year-old closets. to having to self-assert the value of their work. We forgot about them, closed the door to double-locked and left them agonizing after exploiting their service. Here is the last image Chekhov leaves us with in the finale of Garden, the finale of a life spent on the theater. A forgotten "servant" saying to himself, or to the theater he is occupying: Firs: "... you have no strength left, you have nothing left at all, nothing, eh, good to nothing..." Then a tragic violin string to fill the scene. Anton Chekhov, after all this good jam given to him, leaves us with a sad note, as if he no longer feels like laughing. And indeed there is from crying. Or, indeed, from react by believing in the present force of Theater.
Leonardo Lidi
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