FRA'- San Francesco la superstar del Medioevo

How can we talk about Saint Francis of Assisi without being monstrously banal? How can I stage this show without it sounding like a Jovanotti song?

If I ask an anticlerical atheist "tell me a saint you like" he will say: Francis. Why does everyone know St. Francis? Why have tens of thousands of texts been written about him? Why is he so irresistible? And why him? He was not the only one to practice pauperism. At that time it was full of saints and heretical movements who had made the same extreme choice, what was special about this small-bourgeois half-frikkettone suburb that leaves everything to become a scoundrel?

He had the special thing that he was an artist. Perhaps the greatest in history. His sermons were crazy and visionary masterpieces. They were performances of contemporary theatre. He played with the elements of nature, improvised in French, quoting songs from chanson de geste by heart, twisting their meaning, used the body, the nude, even his own illness, physical pain and mutism.

On December 24, 2023 we celebrated the 800th anniversary of Greccio’s nativity scene, Francesco’s most brilliant (and most copied) invention. But at the time there was no siae.

The monologue, orchestrated with the medieval lauds and ancient instruments of Luciano di Giandomenico, Maurizio Picchiò and Stefano Carloncelli, questions the enormous persuasive power that generates on us contemporary pop figure of Francis, and goes through the life of the poor man of Assisi and his obsessive effort to tell the mystery of God in every form, up to the physical wear that will lead him to death, from the sermon to the pigs until the composition of the canticle of the creatures, the first lyric piece in Italian vulgar of history, Francesco sings the beauty of friar sun from the darkness of his cell, blind and devastated by disease. No one in history has ever told God with such brilliant creativity. Francesco knew how to enchant the public, exterminated crowds, he could make people laugh, cry, sing, dance. The real problem I had to face preparing this show is that Francesco was a much better actor than me.

And then the grand finale, death, the relationship of brotherhood, almost of carnal love that had Francis with Sora our bodily death, from which null homo vivente may escape. And even the public will not be able to escape from this finale, chained on the seats of the theater they will also be forced to face the true, the last, great taboo of our contemporaneity: we are not immortal.