News: 2023 In Scena! Italian Theater Festival Closing Night and Award Ceremony May 16th

Since the 2023 In Scena! Italian Theater Festival opened on May 1, it has presented audiences across the city's five boroughs with family history and candy fantasy, explorations of trauma and feel-good comedy, and more than one rap. To close out this successful two weeks of events, the festival finishes its NY leg on Tuesday, May 16th, with an award ceremony and reading for the 2023 Mario Fratti Award. This closing night will take place, beginning at 6 pm, at the Italian Cultural Institute of New York (686 Park Ave, Manhattan, NYC), and, as with the rest of In Scena! 2023, admission is free. 

The 2023 Mario Fratti Award will be awarded to playwright Andrea Scrimàli for his play L’attesa, which deals with love, seen through the many reflections of generational conflict. The awards ceremony will include a reading of the English translation of the play, directed by a female-identified director, Kiara Pipino. Since 2022, the Mario Fratti Award readings and plays in NY have been directed or co-directed by a female-identified director as part of KIT’s commitment of hiring more female directors in their productions.

L’attesa concerns an estranged father and son, the former a scholar with a condescending manner and a strong sense of duty and the latter a self-taught musician who left university to fully dedicate himself to his art. One evening, father and son find themselves in the same ER waiting room, waiting for some news on, respectively, the son’s wife and the son’s mother, both victims of a serious accident. However, as often happens, appearances are deceiving. Is the father actually in the hospital because of his wife? What is he actually waiting for? And is the son truly whom he pretends to be?
 
Andrea Scrimàli's plays have previously been awarded with the Vallecorsi Award, the Borgese Award, the Casentino Award, and the Efesto Award, among others. The jury for the 2023 Mario Fratti Award was Angelo Trofa and Valentina Fadda (playwright and actress, Gruppo Batisfera – In Scena! Artist 2020/2023), Giulia Basel (actress/theater director of the Florian Metatearto, Pescara, Italy), Elena Vannoni (theater director/costume designer), and Eleonora Francesca Cordovani (theater director, Artistic Co-Director of All’italiana, Boston Italian Theater Company). This jury called L’attesa a “fascinating play for its concise dialogue that rattles off the story of the two characters, a father and a son, disclosing their conflictual relationship as well as their fragility, slowly unveiling their deep motivations and leaving room to intense actors’ interpretations.” 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Review: The Immersive "American Blues: 5 Short Plays by Tennessee Williams" Takes Audiences on a Marvelously Crafted Journey

Image
American Blues: 5 Short Plays by Tennessee Williams Written by Tennessee Williams Directed by Jim Niesen Presented by the Irondale Ensemble Project at The Space at Irondale 85 South Oxford St., Brooklyn, NYC October 27-November 26, 2023 Shadenia Savid in Moony's Kids Don't Cry . Photo by Natasha Rotondaro In 1948, Tennessee Williams published American Blues , a collection of five one-act plays, and a remarkable new production of this collection by Brooklyn's Irondale shows that these works have lost none of their power to both entertain and challenge audiences in the intervening three-quarters of a century. Comprising plays written in the decade between 1936 and 1946 - Moony's Kids Don't Cry (1936); The Dark Room (1939); The Case of the Crushed Petunias (1941); The Long Stay Cut Short, or, the Unsatisfactory Supper (1946); and Ten Blocks on the Camino Real (1946) - American Blues represents the second part of Irondale's American Century, the first install
Read more

Review: Nancy Redman’s "A Séance with Mom" Conjures Mother-Daughter Hilarity and Love

Image
A Séance with Mom Written by Nancy Redman Directed by Austin Pendleton Presented at Chain Studio Theatre 312 W. 36th St., Manhattan, NYC April 20-23, 2023 [Update 5/1/23: shows added May 24-June 4, 2023 (no performance May 29)] Nancy Redman Nancy Redman appears onstage, a simple table in front of her, a walker off to the side. Within seconds, we are immersed in a séance involving two then three then four characters—all emerging from only Redman. Redman plays Nadine, a woman who has something urgent to address with her dead mother, Gussy. Redman manages multi-faceted character work, each character in conversation with the other, complete with different gestures, accents, and mannerisms. The effect is riveting and, ultimately, deeply cathartic. The heart of the show comprises Nadine’s mission to reach her mother through a séance in order to talk. An unwitting rabbi plays the bumbling gatekeeper to the spirits in the séance, while Nadine’s something—actually several somethings—to tell her
Read more

Review: From Child Pose to Stand(ing) Up: "Yoga with Jillian" and "Penguin in Your Ear" at the Women in Theatre Festival

Image
Yoga with Jillian Written by Lia Romeo Directed by Andrew W. Smith Presented by Project Y Theatre and Richard Jordan Productions in association with The Pleasance June 2-17, 2023 Penguin in Your Ear Written and performed by Eliza Bent Directed by Jess Barbagallo June 10, 2023 Part of the Women in Theatre Festival , presented by Project Y Theatre at A.R.T./New York Theatres Michole Biancosino. Photo courtesy of Project Y Theatre This June, Project Y Theatre Company presents the eighth annual installment of its Women in Theatre Festival (WIT), which showcases new work by women and maintains "more than 50% female representation of all artists involved." This year, the festival includes a lobby installation project, titled In the Betweens , from scenic designer Chen-Wei Liao, through which audience members pass on their way into the theater proper. One first chooses first between "light" and "dark" rooms and then moves into "the gardens" before re
Read more