The night was black
like when it’s about to rain, or rather, like when you know it’s going to rain
and not only that, like when something is about to happen, maybe it will be the wind,
which will knock down the trees and flood the fields,
and that everything pulls and takes, that the silence becomes like glass,
that everything sinks…I was waiting…
I put my hands on my head, like this… I didn’t want to feel if the sky was falling,
because it was so big, so heavy that it could fall…
It rested on the heart, here, right here…
Everything was dark, me too, I couldn’t even see my feet anymore…
I waited…like this…
Then, a light, illuminates everything, a light that comes from the sky, enters the earth,
like a war spear.
Uuuuuuu… what a blow!!! … oh so strong, strong…
Then another and another stronger…
All the creatures were swallowing their breath, they were shaking. I was shaking too.
Suddenly, I don’t know, so many words came out of my mouth
that I didn’t know I had… one word and another
and another… I said so many things, with words I didn’t even know,
speeches that I didn’t understand… I didn’t even seem to be the one saying them…
I couldn’t stop, my tongue was going, a fury and to hear it seemed like
a thousand drums…that were beating, beating me and it thundered,
it trembled, it thundered…it was refreshing.
A spear went through me, it entered my mouth while I was still speaking,
I fell, I felt the earth enter down to my throat,
that bitter taste… then, I understood that my heart was broken.
Susanna Teodoro
The tale of another youth is the tragic, comical and ironic story of Maria Piarulli, an Italian-Romanian daughter of immigrants from Puglia in Romania, at the end of the 19th century. At the age of 65, Maria is struck by lightning which, instead of killing her, gives her a new chance, a second youth. Maybe. The dreamlike, suspended and subtle, grotesque and earthy journey of an elderly woman forced to rejuvenate, in search of her own essence. A fairy tale of the eternal return in reverse, epic and metaphysical, with a circular structure. A reflection on time and eternity? Maybe.
The show is enriched by polyphonic and linguistic virtuosity and by the original string music performed live, elements that make it surreal at times, where the most abstract themes, from metempsychosis to the myth of eternal youth, suddenly become actual in the suffering of immigration and the difficulties of cultural integration.
