New Plays from Italy, Vol. 1: The Origin of the World: Interior Conversation Piece (Italian Playwrights Project) - Softcover

Calamaro, Lucia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0990684792 ISBN 13: 9780990684794

Publisher: Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Publ., 2018

Synopsis

A story of basic and perverse family dynamics, the play is an all-female human comedy in three acts. The Mother Daria lives with her Daughter Federica among bulky modern appliances, godlike monumental figures; they confront reality as they eat, chat, and get dressed. Sometimes other characters in the family constellation, such as the Analyst, join them. The womb of domestic life is staged in chapters, which lead not towards an ending but towards an origin. The play portrays the indifference, rage, and helplessness of those who live with depression.

About this title

About the Authors

Dr. Frank Hentschker holds a Ph.D. in Theatre from the Theatre Institute in Giessen, Germany and joined the Faculty of the Ph.D. Program in Theatre at The Graduate Center, City University of New York, in 2009.

Dr. Hentschker currently serves as Executive Director and Director of Programs at the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center (MESTC), an institute for theatre based at the CUNY Graduate Center. In this capacity, since 2001 Dr. Hentschker has transformed the MESTC into a premier forum for public programming in international and U.S. theatre and theatre studies. He founded the acclaimed annual festival PRELUDE-at the forefront of contemporary nyc theatre, which features twenty New York-based theatre companies and playwrights at the Center each fall. He also started the PEN World Voices Playwrights Series, in partnership with the PEN America Center's PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature, and led 19 CUNY performing arts centers in the formation of the CUNY C-PAC Performing Arts Consortium, producing its first joint festival in 2009.Each year, Dr. Hentschker curates and produces approximately 40 events for the Segal Center, featuring lecture-demonstrations, symposia, works-in-progress and conversations with theatre scholars, theatrical luminaries and emerging voices in the international and local theatre scene.

Before coming to the Segal Center, Dr. Hentschker served as a producer, consultant and actor in the U.S. and Europe. He founded and was Artistic Director and Financial Administrator of DISCURS, the largest European student theater festival existing today; served as Robert Wilson's personal assistant and tour manager for his production of Dr. Faustus Lights the Lights at Berlin's Hebbel Theatre, and appeared as Hamlet in Heiner Müller's own production of his play Hamletmaschine, among many other roles. Dr. Hentschker served as President of the Board of PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art from 2005- 2009, and edited the book Jan Fabre: I Am A Mistake, Seven Works for the Theatre (MESTC Publications, 2009).

The career of Lucia Calamaro, playwright, director, and actress, has taken her to three continents: Uruguay, France, and lastly Italy. Born in Rome, she moved to Montevideo with her diplomat father when she was thirteen years old. She earned a degree in Art and Aesthetics from the Sorbonne, Paris. Besides teaching at the Catholic University of Uruguay in Montevideo, she took part as an actress and director in many productions there, as well as in Paris, and then above all in Rome, where she began collaborating with the independent organization Rialto Sant’Ambrogio.

In 2003, she founded the Malebolge company and it was through this group that she was able to stage her own plays and her adaptations of classics. In 2003 she adapted and directed Medea, tracce, di Euripide (Medea, footprints, by Euripides) and Woyzeck, an adaptation of Georg Büchner’s 1836–37 unfinished play. The following year she began staging her own plays: Guerra (War, 2004); Cattivi maestri (Bad teachers, 2005); Tumore, uno spettacolo desolato (Tumor, a bleak vision, 2006); Magick, autobiografia della vergogna (Magick, autobiography of shame, 2008); the latter was produced at Teatro India as part of the project Young Talents of the Teatro di Roma.

 

Between 2011 and spring 2017, Calamaro steadily wrote and directed her own plays, as follows: L’origine del mondo, ritratto di un interno (Origin of the World, Interior Conversation Piece, 2011), which garnered three UBU prizes among which was best new Italian play of the 2011–12 season; Diario del tempo, l’epopea quotidiana (Journal of passing time, an epic of the everyday,

2014) premiered at Teatro India, Rome, in a co-production of the regional theatre of Umbria, Teatro di Roma, and Teatro Franco Parenti. La vita ferma: sguardi sul dolore del ricordo, (Life at a standstill: looking at the sadness of memory, 2016) is her latest creation. The play premiered in September 2016 at Festival di Termi as a coproduction of the regional theatres of Sardinia and

Umbria; Angelo Mai Occupato, Rome; the Odeon National Theatre, Paris; and Teatro di Roma.

In 2012 the independent Italian publishing house Editoria e Spettacolo collected three of her plays in Il ritorno della madre (The return of the mother), edited by Renato Palazzi: Tumore, uno spettacolo desolato; Magick, autobiografia della vergogna; and L’Origine del mondo, ritratto di un interno.Her plays were published in French translation in 2017 by the prestigious publishing firm Actes Sud; they are forthcoming in Spanish translation. Besides her numberous UBU awards, she won the Franco Enriquez Prize for directing and playwriting in 2012. Since 2014, she has taught playwriting at Scuola Civica Paolo Grassi, Milan.

Edition details

• Publisher: Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Publ.
• Publication date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0990684792
• ISBN 13: 9780990684794
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 229
• Editor: Hentschker Frank