The Wedding Tableau: A Site-Specific Theatre Project

On Saturday 23 and Sunday 24 March (7:30 PM), the ntS' company returns to the stage with a new site-specific project: Tableau de Mariage, written by Elvira Buonocore and directed by Mario Gelardi, featuring Francesca Cercola, Anna De Stefano, Carlo Di Maro, Gaetano Migliaccio, Gianluigi Montagnaro, Giovanna Sannino, Chiara Vitiello. In this new project, designed for the wonderful ceremonial courtyard of the Hotel Palazzo Caracciolo, Gelardi stages a long, endless welcome aperitif, waiting for a couple of newlyweds to return from the classic photo shoot. As the arrival of the newlyweds is awaited, the hypocrisy of relationships emerges and the bourgeois necessity to save appearances, respecting the roles imposed by the solid hierarchy of the Tableau de Mariage. Curiously, all guests are under 35 years old. The theatrical work features live music performed by Carlo Vannini; costumes are by Antonietta Rendina; lighting and sound by Alessandro Messina. The project is realized with the support of MiC and SIAE within the 'Per Chi Crea' program. A wedding. The ceremonial air, the bad taste, the anxiety of the unforeseen. The endless wait for the spouses, mysterious figures lost in the meanders of the couple's photo shoot. Every moment is marked by the liturgy of common sense, every detail, established by a qualified wedding planner. Everything seems perfectly ordinary, except for a demographic detail that dominates the writing: 'Starting from a real assumption, such as the need to use actors below that terrible threshold of 35 years - explains the project's creator Mario Gelardi - Tableau de Mariage turns the age constraint into a dramaturgical premise: the society depicted here repudiates the old. It considers them unable, aesthetically inadequate, and unfit to fuel the international production machine. For this reason, it distances them. It marginalizes them. It excludes them. A young wedding, then. A party full of vigor. But youth is a variable condition and what determines it has no absolute value. Especially in this case, where one is old very soon. The 35 years represent a void in our country.' 'A dimension of unrecognized vagueness where one is too adult to be young but not grown enough for the world to recognize and thus accept the claim for confirmations and privileges that, only those of age to say they have arrived, can afford.' So what do the young on the margin do? How do they participate in the party? And what happens when someone has a birthday? The wedding frame is a perfect device for developing a narrative. To hypothesize a revolution. 'After the closure of the New Sanità Theatre - continues Gelardi - our company needed to rethink projects beyond the theatrical space. It seemed natural to start from a path we had been experimenting with for some time: that of theatre outside the theatre. Thus, after Do not disturb and Tur de Vasc, Tableau de Mariage arrives. The idea is to delve into the folds of human hypocrisy, starting from some rites of passage of our society: we had already done it with La terza comunione and Niente fiori ma opere di bene. At the time, the church/theatre of piazzetta San Vincenzo was a natural scenery. Today, as our work is constantly in search of alternative spaces, our experimentation can also be more daring. And never as in this show, the audience will be inside the theatre, will have a dramaturgical function. In short, it will participate in a real way in a real theatrical banquet.'