Società per Attoripresents "The Maids" by Jean Genettranslated by Franco Quadricon Franca Valeri, Anna Maria Guarnieri, Patrizia Zappa Mulasdirected by Giuseppe Marini"Jean Genet's theatre is constantly at war with itself.
The Servants have returned to tell us about theater. We find them aged, even more bruised and consumed by devotion turned to hatred for their Lady, but proud of their degradation and determined to live it to the full.
Stealing their mistress's gestures, language, and clothing, each evening they stage their little theater of death, reenacting Madame's murder. In their senseless wandering through Madame's chamber-mausoleum-theater, in their faded makeup, in the musty odor of their bodies and skirts, we recognize the industriousness of death at work.
Madame, no less a dreamer than her servants and possessed by her delirious performance du vide, plays at impersonating various forms of an excessive femininity, reviewing the internal episodes of two opposite and contiguous poles of Saint and Whore.
She is the icon to be torn down after being canonized and "raised in a tabernacle" for her youthful guilt, for the sole sin of being good, beautiful, and sweet. A dark tale, poised between the anguish of existence and the armor of irony, constructed on a blend of lyrical and hallucinatory realism, where the real and the unreal merge in a dreamlike atmosphere, a magical nightmare. The extraordinary cast synthesizes and reveals the show's deepest motivations.
I have chosen not to accentuate the political and (homo)erotic references of Genet's poetics in order to investigate his metatheatrical anxieties with less "encumbrance", in an attempt to clear a dramatic adventure targeted by too many canonizations and to shed light on the mystery of a theatre that dissipates in its making." from 4 to 9 March at the Teatro Bellini in Naples in a convention for Arcigay members
