ABSTRACT
In 2003 I received a letter that reminded me of the years when the Teatro del Drago would meet in a garage in Milan and, with Marco Donati, Clara Bianchi and others, I thought that theatre could help change the world:
Dear Julia,
It is a very hot evening in June (35 degrees); I am wet and sticky from head to toe. Tomaso [Marco and Clara’s son] is on the balcony with three friends. They are studying like mad, from nine in the morning until midnight, every day, to prepare themselves for their imminent exams. A brief pause for supper (lovingly prepared by Clara, who is still incredulous that her son is studying so intensely) and then back to Kant, the nebulas, integral calculations, a little Virgil and the history of the right wing movement. They met at their theatre group and they have been together ever since. This year they played the Oresteia (a two and a half hour long performance). Tomaso was a kind of aedo [story-teller]; he connected the scenes between an Agamennon with a little bit of hair under his nose and the Erinyes (extremely good). Now and then the four of them talk of continuing to make theatre together, as the experience was too intense to be only a digression. I look at them with satisfaction and am moved. This is immortality, Julia; to see oneself reflected identically and differently at the same time in a story with which we are already familiar, with an actor who resembles us, and a friend of the protagonist called Giulia, in a parallel story that I decide after consideration not to tell them in order to see whether it ends as we already know or whether it is able to keep some surprises. Similar stories but never exactly the same, I say to myself as I keep on looking out of the window to enjoy the sight of them: twentyyear olds, beautiful, with energy to give away.
