The story takes place in a basement, in a narrow stage space. The two emigrants, during the night of New Year’s Eve, tell their stories of loneliness and struggles in a foreign country. A story capable of giving strong emotions, of making the audience laugh and cry at the same time.
In a foreign city, AA, a disillusioned intellectual who left his country to escape the conditioning of an oppressive regime, and XX, a proletarian who left the same country to work and make money, live together in a squalid basement. Their sensibilities are distant, their ways, their languages different. It is New Year’s Eve, outside the city is celebrating. In the solitude of their refuge XX and AA will find themselves dramatically comparing their existences.
I would like historical time to remain undefined, the condition of isolation that the two live can always repeat itself, it happens even today. I would also like their origin not to be defined, the only certainty is that in the country they come from there is a system of repression and control, but to locate that place there is only the embarrassment of choice and it is better that each one finds it in his personal geography of oppression. I imagined a narrow, oppressive stage space, where to live it is necessary to reduce to a minimum the gestures and experiences that convey them, and where even vital needs are subjected to the rule of parsimony. The two characters seem tied together by thin threads that imprison them, each gesture of one corresponds to a reaction of the other, as if the empty-full relationship were continually put in danger, and the proportions and distances had to be restored with forced care. The rhythm is tight, tense. The only waste allowed to the two characters are the words, which on this night come out bursting forth, without any more control, as if they had been held back for too long and now explode to express the malaise cultivated over time.
