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.” 

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