Books on stage
Ascanio Celestini
presents La pecora nera
“The mental asylum is a condominium of saints. The poor mad donkeys under the Chinese sheets, industrially manufactured shrouds, are saints, the nun who lights up like an ex-voto next to the little light on her bedside table is a saint. And the doctor is the saintliest of all, he is the chief of the saints, he is Jesus Christ.” This is how Nicola tells us about his 35 years in the “electric mental asylum,” and in his disorganized head reality and fantasy collide, producing unpredictable illuminations. Nicola was born in the Sixties, “the fabulous Sixties,” and the world he sees inside the institution is not so different from the one that is running out there – an increasingly voracious world, where the only thing that seems unable to be consumed is fear.
«I collect memories of those who have known the asylum a bit like geographers of the past did. These ancient scientists asked sailors to tell them what an island was like, they asked a spice or carpet trader what a road to the East or through Africa was like. From the stories they heard they tried to draw geographical maps. The resulting maps were often inaccurate, but they were also full of the gaze of those who had known the places by passing through them.
So I listen to the stories of those who have traveled through the asylum not to construct an objective story, but to restore the freshness of the story and the imprecision of the subjective gaze, the wonder of the imagination and the concreteness of the fears that accompany a journey».
