director’s notes
None of the achievements of equality that we enjoy today would be conceivable without the courage of women who, despite not being explicitly political, with their life choices were able to open up paths of independence for themselves and for those who would come after them.
When Grazia Deledda, not yet thirty years old, left Sardinia in 1900 to pursue her desire to become a writer, perhaps she did not imagine she was one of those women, and yet her dream of art and autonomy would ask her to make a sacrifice that no man would have been asked of her: to tear herself away from her land and her family.
As a director I was interested in the political value of her private story and for this reason the directorial choices in this show, although starting from the three intimate moments of Deledda’s life told by Marcello Fois, then arrive to investigate both the relationship between women and literature and the contemporary women’s issue. Even the presence of Michela Murgia, on stage for the first time, is not a random choice in this direction; Sardinian, writer and activist for women’s rights, she was ideal to generate a doppelganger effect, in which her figure of contemporary woman and that of the Sardinian girl of the 1900s continually recalled each other as in a counterpoint. Together with her and the other actors we have flanked Marcello Fois’ dramaturgy with a parallel stage writing that allowed us to investigate the different levels of the relationship between reality and creative act, between biography and art. For this reason, at various moments in the show, characters from some of Deledda’s stories are also evoked in a visionary way, bringing all of her dreamlike imagery into play and bringing a breath of magic and living literature onto the stage.
(Veronica Cruciani)
Michela Murgia
When Marcello Fois imagined this text about Deledda and asked me to interpret it, the revolutionary potential of her figure convinced me to accept without reservations. It is in fact clear that Deledda paid, in addition to personal sacrifices, a very high social price to fulfill herself: the radical distrust of the Italian literary world, capable of even ignoring her Nobel Prize, was enormous towards her, and a judgment on her private life led even the great names of Italian literature to turn up their noses at her equal and companionate marriage, so similar to the power couples of contemporary star business, but completely unusual in the bigoted Italy of the 1930s. Her story of personal determination is a paradigm not only for women of all times, but for anyone who wants to realize a dream starting from a condition of social inferiority. To express this political drive, the choice of director could only fall on the civil sensitivity of Veronica Cruciani, whose pedagogical support was fundamental in allowing me to enter with respect into an artistic world that does not belong to me.
Marcello Fois
Deciding to talk about Deledda is an act that can be reckless. Especially for a writer, especially for a writer from Nuoro. The idea of talking about her by bringing her on stage borders on madness if it is true that the theater is a merciless and ritual medium. My idea, I would say my obsession, was that this woman, so important for the literary culture of our country, had to be represented in the flesh. As if it were absolutely necessary not to stop at a “simply” literary recollection, but rather a living representation. Great writers, great artists survive. This undead Deledda, who acts, thinks, suffers, comments, seemed to me a much more effective Deledda, in terms of restitution, than any novel or story could do. I wanted people to hear her speak. I wanted people to see her move. I wanted people to see in the facts how a writer, even if biologically dead, can consider himself alive and acting. In a better world, this exercise would be achieved by simply educating oneself in reading, by the idea that a writer’s achievement – and the Nobel Prize is a notable achievement – represents a reader’s achievement. However, considering that Grazia Deledda is not even included in the ministerial canon, despite being the only Italian woman to date to have received the coveted prize, it is clear that we are very far from living in a mature literary civilization.
So I decided that the best way to bring Deledda back to her rightful place was through the living rite through which we have collectively recalled facts and meaning for millennia. Theatre is a powerful territory. A false/true through which the substance is represented without going through the rhetoric of the substance. This flesh-and-blood Deledda rejects the commonplace of herself
Therefore “Quasi Grazia” is essentially a novel in the form of a theater. A narration acted out directly by the characters: Grazia Deledda, her mother, her husband Palmiro Madesani, her brother Andrea, Ragnar a Swedish journalist and Stanislao a radiology technician. Each chapter corresponds to an act of the play. The first is set in Nuoro, on the morning of February 1900 when Grazia moves with her husband from Nuoro to Rome; with the second we move to Stockholm, in December 1926, the afternoon before the official Nobel Prize award ceremony; the third takes place in Rome in 1935, in the radiology studio where Deledda will be diagnosed with the tumor that will kill her in August 1936. Ten years after the awarding of the most prestigious literary prize. The life of every great writer tells us something about great writing.
