L'uomo che Dio mise a nudo - Francesco

An actor enters the stage to rehearse a reading of a text about Saint Francis. He has a script, a lectern, and the confidence of his craft. But he's not alone: ​​a voice-over—which could be the director, his conscience, or something he doesn't yet dare name—interrupts his every attempt to treat Francis as pure theatrical material, to keep him at a distance, to "interpret him well" without allowing himself to be touched by him.

Through eight movements, the life of Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone unfolds not as a hagiography but as a trajectory of collapses and new beginnings: the rich and vain boy who dreams of the glory of chivalry; the war and imprisonment that shatter something inside him; the kiss of the leper; the public and naked break with his father in the square; the brotherhood that grows around him and at the same time betrays him, transforming into a founder someone who wanted to remain only a brother; the unarmed encounter with the sultan in the midst of a crusade; the stigmata and blindness; the Canticle of the Creatures, sung from a body now destroyed.

But the more the Voice presses on, the less the actor can remain within the character's reach. The question that runs through the entire show—"Who do you want to serve? The servant or the master?"—slowly stops being about Francesco and begins to concern him. The arc of the show reverses: if at the beginning it is the actor who tries to read Francesco, at the end it is Francesco, through the Voice, who reads the actor—and, with him, everyone in the audience.

Not a show about the saint of gardens and birds, but about the man who has taken everything off himself—and about the question that that gesture leaves open to anyone who watches it. Directed by Martino Gonnelli