"BROTHERS OF ITALY"

a project by
Paola Berselli & Stefano Pasquini

with
Paola Berselli, Francesca Bonarelli, Elisabetta Costantini,
Maurizio Ferraresi, Massimo Giordano,
Stefano Pasquini, Samantha Zanarini

directed by
Stefano Pasquini

TEATRO DELLE ARIETTE - 1999

We had been thinking about Antigone for a long time.
But it was thinking about Eteocles and Polynices, two brothers leading opposite sides in Thebes' civil war, died fighting each other for the throne, that we imagined Antigone involved in the Italian Resistance.
We studied and re-wrote the trilogy of Oedipus’ offspings.
We saw her in the dark age of nazism and fascism, at the World war Two climax and its absolute horror.
We met the old people living in the small town Castello di Serravalle, who had been partisans, soldiers, republicans and were deported in German concentration camps. And we met simple housewives.
We’ve been telling each others a lot of stories, sitting on a table in winter nights.
Our work is the story of this journey, the discovery of a civil and human theatre. We’ve been through thousands of words.
We looked for the meaning, the meaning that gives a deep vibration and a thick layer of fleshy matter to words. The meaning that goes through reason and clearly opens the eyes and the heart. We are souls travelling on the same way: Antigone and her brothers, Paola, the actors and the audience. All in the same pot, at the same time and place as it happens in theatre.
We are looking for a deep presence, total and alive, we are looking for the plurality of things, stories and reasons.