Premiere SIX PASSIONATE WOMEN /SEI DONNE APPASSIONATEMario Fratti
Coproduzione con il Florian Metateatro di Pescara / In co-operation with Metateatro Florian from Pescara
Mario Fratti, dramaturge, writer, essayist and theatre critic, possibly the best living Italian dramaturge, lives and works in New York. Six Passionate Women is one of his comedies written in 1981. It was inspired by the film “8½” by Federico Fellini, having then become “Nine”, a musical of an extraordinary success with spectators and critics, a proper theatrical phenomenon with more than two thousand reruns. It is a play that through female characters shows weaknesses of men and the complexity of their relationship, offering an indiscreet and ironic view on the hassle of passionate love or perhaps anti-love that defines not only the relationship between sexes bur also the totality of human nature, reflecting the political and artistic crisis of educated people, challenging also the vulnerable behaviour of men that need women.
Running time:
The performance lasts 1 hours and 30 minutes.
The guiding principle of the Italian Drama in the season 2017/2018 is to pay homage to great authors, presenting thus the best opportunity to stage Mario Fratti. Fratti is a well-known Italian author frequently performed worldwide, furthermore, also a writer belonging to a «minority», being an Italian who lives and works in the USA since the year 1963. It is hard to think of a more suitable text than the Six Passionate Women, a play inspired by the life of the great Fellini and told in a contemporary and essential language, a play in which life, theatre, film and reality interweave and merge into an oneiric surreal atmosphere. Six Passionate Women is seemingly a light text, a game during which the director does not realise that he himself has become a character in a play conceived and directed by the women of his life. This is a game in which roles are changed, while relationships interchange in the play of catching glimpses and framings, betrayals and lies. A play that was written by the author who is competent in presenting personalities living in the world of today, without the need of unnecessary decorations or weight. He succeeds in depicting the balance of emotions and interests perfectly. Life is a film set in which we all are actors, ours the choice on which role to play.
The production in the competent direction of Vincenzo Manna is the result of a fruitful co-operation with the Florian Metateatro from Pescara (Abruzzo), with whom we do not share only this beautiful theatre experience but also the Abruzzo origin of the characters created by the great author from that region, Mario Fratti
Rosanna Bubola
Italian Drama Director
Written in New York in the seventies, the comedy Six Passionate Women was staged and presented in different ways all over the world. This text was the basis for the co-operation of Fratti/Kopit that resulted with Nine, a musical of an enormous success on Broadway. It was in turn the inspiration for the film Nine with Daniel Day-Lewis in the main role and a cast of Hollywood stars, among which is also Sofia Loren.
It was Federico Fellini, another Italian film icon, who is the inspiration for the story of Six Passionate Women. Fratti creates Guido, an alter ego of the Rimini director, who is also reflected as Mastroianni in Eight and ½, in a play of mirrors, through theatre, film and reality. Guido, Snaporaz and Fellini. Just as in Eight and ½ the hero, a famous film director, finds himself in the midst of a creative crisis he is not able to resolve. With his wife Marianne present, he turns to his numerous lovers asking them for help, which they refuse fed up with being extras in his rather crowded harem. There seems to be a usual routine of argumentation and betrayal until a mysterious American female producer offers Guido an unlimited amount of money to direct a film on women. Guido is delighted to accept the offer and he starts «work» on a new film…
Six Passionate Women is a brilliant comedy in which dramatic turns of events alternate with moments of pondering upon topics central for the culturale debate of the seventies, actual also today.
Love jealousy, betrayal in love relations, and woman as a victim of discrimination and male chauvinism, but also compromises that we are ready to accept for a career in the show business…
In this production, with an enormous cinema set reproduced on stage, it is with irony and ease that actors play a most amusing play of roles always hanging in the balance between the theatre, film, fiction and reality.
Vicenzo Manna
Director
