For Her, On Her Birthday

From March 22 to 24, 2024, Naples welcomes to the Teatro Tram, "For Her, On Her Birthday", written and directed by Francesco Bianchi. The show, featuring Simone Tangolo and Monica Buzoianu, narrates an abrupt departure to deliver a birthday gift, a very long journey filled with doubts, questions, and lingering unfinished thoughts of a "self" that tries and retries to take stock of its own existence. On stage, the protagonist, alone for most of the time, faces a "special day" that has all the traits of a day like any other and at the same time presents dreamlike, nightmarish glimpses, like photographs from a dimension slightly detached from reality. A journey that seemingly has a purpose, but of which the trace is lost along the way because the malice and schizophrenia of the modern world distract him from his goal. To whom does the protagonist speak? Who is the presence that urges him to move in his pilgrimage? The alpha and omega of this journey is the She of the title, a woman who evokes love but also conflict, definitely the frantic search for a reason to live, to move forward, to forget the ugliness that the world continuously dumps on its inhabitants. She has an ambiguous charm, his She (his premise and destination of the journey, his Beatrice) and at the same time constitutes the boundary between reality and vision, the boundary between what he is and what he would like to be. In her physical and real sense, it is essential that she is physically present at the beginning and the end. But it is noteworthy how for Him it is essential to operate even in her absence. There's another protagonist, however, on stage: the box, a character of presence/absence that speaks to the protagonist with his own voice, is an expedient of self-escape, as well as the gift he wants to bring to Her. "How much space do we, human beings, occupy with our thoughts and our emotions, within the life we live?" - Francesco Bianchi, playwright, director, translator, and trainer who has collaborated with directors such as Valerio Binasco, Massimiliano Farau, and Gigi Dall’Aglio, asks and questions. And, above all, are we really allowed to occupy a place, or must we settle for what is assigned to us? "For Her, On Her Birthday" is a structure in frames where the protagonist (simply called Man), in a crazy day, makes a journey to deliver a gift package to a woman. The space of the journey is made up of many waits and dead times within which the protagonist begins to come to terms with his own existence and with his own shadows. It is an ironic and bitter stream of consciousness, often interrupted by encounters with other characters who, like him, are protagonists of their own journey and who, with more emphasis than him, try to grab life by the horns, always resulting in being dehumanized, brutalized, degenerated. They compose the multifaceted and noisy picture of life that with its brutality creates a deep sense of vertigo and tedium. Within this crazy journey, the monologuing I desperately tries to make sense of himself and what surrounds him.