ABSTRACT
This chapter explores Marco Baliani's idiosyncratic style of theatrical storytelling in his significant one-man plays. Together with Marco Paolini, Moni Ovadia, Laura Curino, Davide Enia, and Ascanio Celestini, Baliani may rightly be listed among Italy's most celebrated theatrical storytellers. Baliani started his career, unlike many author-performers in contemporary Italy, with no formal drama academy training, but with a passion for the theatre. In Nairobi, together with a team of theatre practitioners, Baliani has adapted two plays, Pinocchio Nero and L'amore buono. Marco Baliani's one-man plays are often endowed with a complex literary intertextuality, evident as early as Kohlhaas, a tendency that continues in Tracce. In his call to spectators to use their imagination and powers of empathy, and to develop a deeper social and political awareness, Baliani's theatrical storytelling stands as an important phenomenon in the context of contemporary Italian theatre.
