Tuesday, May 14, 2019
6:30 PM 9:30 PM
Instituto Cervantes Chicago (map)
Title: A Notebook for Winter and Event Horizon
Playwrights: Armando Pirozzi and Elisa Casseri
Translator: Adriana Rossetto
Directors: John Green and Matt Masino
Collaborators: Italian & American Playwright Project
A Notebook for Winter synopsis:
A Notebook for Winter is a two-actor-piece which in three acts and tells the story of an introvert professor of literature who finds a burglar on his way back home. The knife-wielding burglar wants something unexpected from him: it is a question of life or death. During the entire night the two characters talk, exchange ideas, feelings, ask painful questions out of hope and desperation, in a completely new and unexpected atmosphere. They will meet again years later, both affected by that night. Although their personal memory of that night is different, yet it may have triggered a change in both of them, by offering a further comprehension and awareness of each other. The key idea is based on the power of writing as a way to directly impact reality: the wonder resilience of poetry is not seen as a literary exercise, but rather as a vibrant force which affects life.
Event Horizon synopsis:
Olga is stuck in a studio apartment, which has a wall with many doors and cupboards, a front door which doesn’t open and no windows: she cannot figure out what has happened, she only knows that she cannot escape. When she tries to open one of the doors on the wall, she immediately comes back from another one and continues to stay there. At some point, however, she realizes that time is messed up and that every time she leaves, she enters a different time of her life.
It turns out that the doors are a black and white hole device, which draws her own personal story into the room, including events and people she loves, as if she had been kept captured in a maze of memories.
Marco is her boyfriend but sometimes he isn’t, her father is alive but later dead, her mother left when she was a little girl but she is suddenly back. Olga struggles to understand and does not know what reality is and what she can do to change what happened and what didn’t happen. She cannot surrender to the real time, to past events, to those journeys into a grief which is too true to be science fiction.
She learnt from her father that the edge of the black holes is the horizon of the events, because it simply moves away as we get closer, which is how future works, too. You cannot fight against future by giving up on the present, you cannot deny present by locking yourself inside the past. So, when reality materializes and Olga realizes that her father is dead, that Marco has decided to leave his country and when her mother tries to ask forgiveness, she understands that the only way to overcome grief is to feel it.
So she runs away in order to learn how to get back.
The translation of Event Horizon would have been possible thanks to the involvement and support of Premio Riccione