Bleak World: A Tale of Despair and Sensuality

At the Toledo Gallery, a stable theatre of innovation in the Spanish Quarters, directed by Laura Angiulli, from Thursday, March 14 to Sunday, March 17, 2024, Fattore K, Gruppo della creta and the Biancofango company present "Porco mondo", dramaturgy by Francesca Macrì and Andrea Trapani with Aida Talliente and Andrea Trapani, directed by Francesca Macrì. From Thursday to Saturday at 8:30 PM, Sunday at 6 PM. A man. A woman. A couple. A room. A month. December. One night. Christmas night. The snow that covers everything and erases everything. The dawn that catches the darkness off guard reveals obscene desires, consumes thoughts, distorts souls, leads to weariness. Here they are. The rebellious spouses. The exhausted lovers. Here they are. The survivor and the executioner. The meeting of opposites. Nothing satisfies them. Nothing quenches them. But where does one escape to while coming together? They have no names, this man and this woman. They could be called anything. They hide, despite themselves, despite us, something ancestral, atavistic. They have no names and never will throughout the play, this man and this woman. Sometimes being as one is no longer enough. And to say things that, perhaps, would otherwise remain locked in the throat, she wears, clumsily, clothes of Marilyn Monroe. No name, then, and, apparently, a house that could be anywhere. Anywhere, in this bleak world of suburbs. A window, like in a Hopper painting, divides the spaces. There one looks, there one waits. The place of emptiness and dream, of trepidation and silence. Of thought. Inside, outside. Outside, inside. One is never truly where one is. The eyes see, beyond the glass, an overpass, the tram tracks, and houses, houses, houses. Houses everywhere. It seems to us that we see the windows of these houses illuminated. The Christmas lights confuse the eyes. Warm inside and cold outside. And it's not known how true the one is and how fake the other. Locked in this room-cage-tomb, this four-penny Marilyn celebrates Christmas for her man. She has organized everything or perhaps only follows the instinct of a night. A graceless night. It's not known. He follows her because he could not do anything else. He follows her because in this bleak world, in this bleak city, he is the first of the inhabitants. And blinded by desires and guilt that mix at unheard-of speed, he discovers, on his own skin, that sometimes to love means to devour. The flesh is blood, it is said. And blood goes to the head, goes to the head especially to the bacchant brides who, without thyrsus, in this decay of the new millennium think that many things are possible, but only one is necessary. And so, here she is, the exhausted bacchant, the broken doll, this vile flesh in search of wicked flesh, dragging this man down, ever lower. And he is there and he is not there. He is there and would rather be elsewhere. He is there and thinks of something else. We, when we leave the theater, imagine them in the center of that room, without doors, without ways out. And really, it's not clear who is more alive and who is more dead. After so much clamor, finally, the silence. The snow falls. No one seems to have noticed anything. We look at them, from afar, and think: how fierce, how blinding is the sensuality of desperate lives.