The city of the living by Nicola Lagioia at the India Theater in Rome
It is a theatrical experiment, a “story that becomes a shared experience”, which crosses different genres and instruments. A novel that turns into a podcast and now a show soon around Italy.
Lattes Grinzane Award 2021 and over 80,000 copies made, The city of the living of the writer Nicola Lagioia arrived at the India Theater in Rome on November 8th, with the musical accompaniment of Luca Micheli. Published by Einaudi in 2020, the story, which also inspired a podcast produced by Chora Media in five episodes (available for free on all platforms) and a show at the Milan Base, it reports the story of the terrible murder of Luca Varani, a young 23-year-old, killed in Rome in March 2016 by Marco Prato and Manuel Foffo.
A PAINFUL STORY
The show traces with essentiality, leaving unchanged the depth and rhythmic narrative cadence, the trace of the podcast: an investigation into the evil and recklessness of the human being. “Watching disasters as spectators take place […] it is a characteristic and essential modern experience […]. War is now part of what we see and hear in every home”, Wrote Susan Sontag in In front of the pain of others. The war – and therefore the violence – to which we are addicted (even visually), is such that we no longer react, that we are no longer able to reflect and ask ourselves “Because?“. Why are you so informed yet so indifferent? “We face the abyss of evil“Lagioia dice”with the risk that that abyss begins to look at us“. The author, defined as “a storyteller” in an interview with Corriere della Sera, brings to the stage a dramatic story where the viewer is captured, almost bewitched, halfway between the fear of being able to take on the role of the protagonists and disbelief. what happened.
THE DRY AND POWERFUL SHOW
There is no scenography on stage because the human imagination, guided by the writer, reviews fact after fact, and reconstructs the story – or rather – the story of the victim and the executioners, as well as of that corollary of characters that revolve around it: families, girlfriends, friends, journalists, law enforcement agencies, prosecutors and lawyers. All the voices – but perhaps even more so, those of the killers, often referred to as “normal people” – seem extraordinarily familiar, almost giving the feeling of having heard them elsewhere. In the narration, as on the stage, it is all an alternation of lights and shadows: the narrator, the audience, darkness. And then light: the writer with his notes in hand, the listeners and the projection of the dialogues taken from the interrogations, as if to reveal a script that does not exist. The projected words that weigh like boulders hide altered worlds, perhaps unexplored because they are unconscious. The magic of the theater is revealed, you get lost in the sneaky game of a staging in which there are no actors, there is no fiction but raw and true reality, everything has happened and tells of the era we live in. It is the “power of the word” and at the same time its contradiction that dwells in the ego of man. A “public discourse” – which suddenly frees itself from the idea of collectivity and calls into question the individual, be it spectator or listener. “What else would narratives do if they didn’t raise the right questions?”Asks the author. Rituality and community are the two cornerstones around which the time of history and the narrative practice of the staging takes place. The show ends with a ritual – also collective – an atheist prayer for Rome where everyone is invited for a few moments to think about his “Roman epiphany”: “What is the day when you noticed a brief moment of happiness in Rome?“Asked Lagioia on Facebook during the lockdown. This ritual ensures that the curtain never closes, letting the memories invade the space. An intimate and collective time is filled with colors, emotions, looks and urban portraits that know how to give profound moments. This is also “the city of the living”.
– Claudia Fiasca