When
Saturday 29 October 2011
Where
Il Frantoio, Parco Corsini, Fucecchio
Press Office
Camilla Rigatti
BAGLADY, starring Laura Bencini, marks the opening of the first instalment of ACTOR’S STUDIO, a series featuring brand-new monologues that have never before been performed or translated in Italy. The Actor’s Studio takes its name from Lee Strasberg’s famous New York school, where in the 1950s famous actors such as Marlon Brando, Al Pacino and Marilyn Monroe studied. With this fascinating new programme, Firenza Guidi aims to open Il Frantoio to a new type of programming designed to give actors who already have a wealth of experience the opportunity to engage with new creative exploration and performance challenges.
The new pieces on the programme aim to bring to the public the voice, body and experience of actors who also come from the Frantoio’s permanent school, creating events that serve both as training and experimentation for the performer, and as an opportunity for everyone to discover unpublished texts and contemporary authors. The shows linked to the ACTOR’S STUDIO run in parallel with the Performer Training School that the Frantoio is promoting for the 2011/2012 season, which this year focuses on the all-round development of the individual performer.
Director Firenza Guidi translates and stages the Italian premiere of a play by the Irish playwright and poet Frank McGuinness, considered one of the most brilliant and prolific contemporary playwrights. A hallmark of McGuinness’s dramaturgy is his ability to bring to light the unspoken and uncomfortable dynamics inherent in the values of conventional society, thereby revealing its distortions and contradictions. In this, his work finds a connection with Guidi’s own practice; she worked with him in 1986, taking part in the workshop that led to the creation of the play *Cartaginesi*.
Written in 1985, the monologue BAGLADY addresses themes such as loneliness, marginalisation, abuse, and the denial of oneself and one’s past through the voice of the protagonist – a homeless woman who drags the remnants of her life with her, wrapped in plastic bags.
Firenza Guidi’s directorial vision focuses on the play written by McGuinness, exploring a journey of inquiry into madness, a theme the director has been addressing for three years through the project LA RAGIONE E IL SUO ROVESCIO, which involves examining various forms of induced madness. Guidi engages with madness to uncover its language, its secret grammar, in order to define the fine line separating alienation from reason and to ask whether, as in the case of the ragged heroine of BAGLADY, madness is nothing more than the only, desperate way to survive a dysfunctional and pathological normality.
Director, playwright and artistic director of Elan Frantoio, firenza Guidi has for years been creating theatre productions and films inspired by events, memories and phenomena linked to both the local and universal spheres. The philosophy behind Elan Frantoio’s work is to stage new plays: new because the texts and stage designs are unpublished, or new because they are by contemporary authors never before performed in Italy.
In November, Guidi will present a new play inspired by the Fucecchio asylum where ‘Le Tranquille’ were confined.