AFTER THE SILENCE

taken from the book by Pietro Grasso Liberi tutti
by Francesco Niccolini and Margherita Rubino

with Turi Moricca

director Alessio Pizzech

stage design Giacomo Tringali

costumes Cristina Da Rold

music Dario Arcidiacono

lighting Luigi Ascione

video intervention Giacomo Verde
original songs Carlo Muratori
choir Discantus directed by M° Salvo Sampieri
graphic Andrea Castiglione

still photos Tommaso Le Pera

stage manager Michele Borghini

electrician Stefano Sebastianelli

sound Alessio Pasquazi
production assistant Fiorella Guarini

production SiciliaTeatro and Teatro Tina Di Lorenzo – Noto

Liberi tutti by Pietro Grasso is edited by Sperling & Kupfer S.p.A.

Following the significant experience of Per non morire di mafia, taken from the homonymous book, which after the successful début in Spoleto was present on Italian stages for two seasons, Dopo il Silenzio comes to life at the Festival of Spoleto 2013. A new theatrical adventure, an autonomous writing which is the result of the collaboration between a figure like Pietro Grasso and one of the most interesting Italian playwrights, Francesco Niccolini. Furthermore, this is a text which sees the light in a political and social scenario that compared to two years ago, is more and more constantly disorienting and where everything is devoured with amazing speed: from cultural contents, to the information in scientific and technological fields.

Faced with so much mass media speed, so much screaming, so much emotional and material distress which crushes the citizens of our beloved and wounded country, the theater can often be a story-bearer, creating the conditions for learning and therefore being able to decide on one’s own social and private destiny.

This is why it seemed important to accept the invitation of Sebastiano Lo Monaco and Margherita Rubino, inexhaustible source of energy and architect of the project, to continue a theatrical journey artistically together so as to carry on an organized line of reasoning around the words and thoughts of Pietro Grasso.

In this case, the stage is the venue of History, a collective history which crosses the little personal adventures of each of us and can therefore contain the basis of a possible national re-orientation.

From this point of view, even in Dopo il Silenzio the theatrical word becomes an instrument of inquiry into the History of a country, Italy, which coincides, sometimes collides,diverges and then finds contact points with the history of the Mafia with its political-economic connections, with its overturned values which have joined with the barbarization of costumes and public life.

This of course represents the narrative theme of the new show, just like in the first one, but this time it goes beyond Grasso’s individual and autobiographical experience, placing elements of a scenic tale which, not being reduced to a dimension of chronicle or protest, seems to go towards forms of ancient Tragedy dealing with the great issues of the conscience struggling with Justice and death as the extreme horizon.

Grasso’s writing and Niccolini’s dramaturgy projects us into a communicative need which solicits, rouses curiosity and allows the spectator to pay profound attention to human experience with all its contradictions and with the necessary ability of understanding and the suspension of judgment.

Theatre which has always been a source of spiritual salvation and mirror of the community, allows us to travel among the images, the memories, the fragments of an entirety that has broken up among the threats, bombs and death brought into the public squares.

The generations and the dialogue between them, becomes the axis around which the scenic writing of Dopo il Silenzio revolves. Pietro Grasso has given himself the duty to pass on history, make it known to young people. The image is that of a Silence that talks, as opposed to a conspiracy of silence which we want to erase and thus build our future on that "After".

This show is therefore a fiery and vibrant dialogue, which interposes two generations, two completely opposite ways of reading life.

The destiny of this teenager and man meets to pry into their conscience, in a waiting place, in a purgatory of the soul, in a condition out of time and space where the events of great history find their way. On the edge of time that is running out, the teenager and man make an inner journey which is a conscious

re-discussion of the reasons for one’s life, the choices which have been lived more or less ethically.

Those two very different men, compare their lives face to face starting with the Mafia as a phenomenon external to itself, to finish with a definition of Mafia as an interior condition of man, as a reaction to social problems, as a wrong answer to unexpressed needs, as a product of a Silence that is an accomplice; a Mafia which arises within each of us when the dialogue with our own values is not open and sincere.

In that place, which seemed to be there forever, a public man, who has always fought for his ideas, for justice, who has crossed the last thirty years of Italian history, with his disillusions and defeats but also hopes and victories, is waiting for that teenager’s arrival. A man who brings history with him, the dramatic history of this second republic, a man who has always faced his choices courageously and honestly, and with the same coherence confronts the teenager who asks, demands and judges. A teenager who does not know that history if not across television, a teenager who has sold himself and his freedom, a teenager with no words to build his own future. In front of him, the adult man feels his duty is to bring his words, his thoughts, his experiences so that all of this becomes a shared heritage.

Between those two men of diverse ages and experiences, there is a progressive creation of an understanding, an ideal embrace, an ethical and moral reuniting that can symbolically found a more civil Nation, capable of a moral revolt and of saying "Not us!"

In the face of the sacredness of death, of the limit that even the ancient Greek tragedy marked as the turning point and transformation of man, the mutual pietas finds a gesture with which to be fulfilled and that ethical dimension of political action becomes understanding of the other, listening to the other and concrete act.

The teenager and the man are our two faces: the awareness of deterioration, the perception of its deep root, where the Mafia is only the most immediately readable point and on the other hand we find the unconsciousness of not knowing, of not wanting to understand and not wanting to read the reality that surrounds us with new insight.

Between those two men, in that metaphysical space of remembrance, in that sort of mind archive, made up of faces, names, places, there is a woman, a female thought that lays the hope of transformation and imposes knowledge and learning as roads to the future.

The emergence of a female figure who stands alongside the man as educator, yet ethically turned towards the teenager, seems to me the important aspect of this new theatrical story. In this text, therefore, we want to talk about a collective History of men but also of women who have lived important choices naturally, that have borne deep grief but with that capacity of hospitality that women bring with them, they have overcome important and decisive trials.

In short, that woman influences the unfolding of the dialogue between the two and when she intervenes it is to bring a "wind" that opens the windows, open the doors wide to let out the truth and honesty which exists in every action that could save a young person! That woman embodies the future, the possibility of a transformation, a new possible dawn for the destroyed and torn apart city.

That woman substitutes the culture of blood with the culture of love, and like the ancient Trojan women defends those family values deposited in the secret of married life.

That man and that woman, with the boy beside them, with their faces touched by the wind, can finally celebrate those who are no longer present, those who have lost their lives to defend and build the democracy and so kneel down on the earth and feel the warmth of the sun.