Pirandello Pulp

Massimo Dapporto and Fabio Troiano
We are in rehearsal, on the stage where "Il Gioco delle Parti" by Pirandello must go. Maurizio, the director of the show, was expecting another technician to assemble the lights, but Carmine shows up, who knows nothing about the show and suffers from vertigo. Maurizio is forced to go through the whole text to make him understand and Carmine, in order not to climb the ladder to place the lights, starts discussing every detail of the direction. His ideas come from a dangerously lived sexuality, but they are innovative, and Maurizio goes from irritation to enthusiasm, conceiving itself the idea of a pulp regia: a game of parties set in a squalid parking suburb, where they consume exchanges of couples. The roles are reversed, and now it is Maurizio who goes up and down the ladder to point the lights, while Carmine has become the thinking mind. It seems a simple game of role-playing, but the discovery of disturbing truths will shake the precarious balances found by the characters and precipitate the comedy towards an unexpected ending. The metatheatre, a specialty of Pirandello, is interpreted by Edoardo Erba in a more current and irreverent key. Yet the lesson of the Sicilian master bursts out suddenly, when the relationship between the two characters goes beyond the limits of the foreseeable. Fun, intelligent and engaging, Pirandello Pulp is one of the most interesting Italian news of the season.