A few years ago Giovanni Casula asked me to tell some stories he had written, taken from experiences he had lived as an educator within the Psychiatry Service of the SS. Trinità Hospital in Cagliari. The stories that Giovanni had collected maintained an intrinsic strength and expressive originality.
However, I wondered “if it was right” to use such intense dramas, true facts and experiences in a theatrical way.
Giovanni’s work continued and at the end of 2011 he sent me a manuscript in which he recounted fragments of intense humanity, the surprises, the empathy, the beauties and distortions, that he had seen and encountered since he began his work as an educator. I felt like I was reliving the joy, the pain, the enthusiasm I had known years before.
I remembered when, in 1982, at the beginning of my experience as a theater actor, I had the fortune of collaborating, for a short period, as a volunteer animator at the closing of the Villa Clara Psychiatric Hospital in Cagliari, under the passionate guidance of doctors like Alessandro Montixi. From that experience I had always carried with me not so much the suffering, but the enthusiasm that I had every time I crossed the gate of that place. Hence the decision to give life to a show, linked to Giovanni’s book, entrusting Giorgio Del Rio, musician and accomplice, with the experimentation of original sounds and music and Pierpaolo Piludu, a lifelong companion in cada die theater, with the sensitive direction. Alessandro Mascia
“Welcome to…” is a journey in which we try to rediscover the dignity of mental illness, in the discomfort of living, common to many human beings: the two protagonists of the show, Giovanni and Nino, remember the many people they have met in recent years in the Psychiatric Diagnosis and Treatment Service, reliving first-hand both the pain and the great desire to live.
from the book “Benvenuto in Psichiatria” by Giovanni Casula
