A White Adult Man. Under pathological condition. Genetically inclined to be a Natural Born Killer.
Penthesilea/Achilles: a “schizophrenic” entity.
How shall I act?
The play is freely inspired by the work by Heinrich Von Kleist and reinterpreted through the book “Anti-Oedipus” by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.
“It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts.
It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks.
…Everywhere it is machines–real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections. An organ-machine is plugged into an energy-source machine: the one produces a flow that the other interrupts.”
This is the beginning of one of the most visionary and precursory texts in the philosophy of the twentieth century. The Anti-Oedipus of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari will bring us, the “believers”, towards the world of the future.
In 1997 I was in Pontedera to meet Thierry Salmon and Renata Molinari. The purpose of Masque was to convince the great Belgian director to take part in the fourth edition of the Crisalide festival, which that year was organized in the areas of il Ramo Rosso, the historical site of our theatre company. Thierry held an important four-day workshop, in which participated his closer collaborators Renata Molinari, Patricia Saive and Enrico Bagnoli. There were also, listening to the wonderful talks about his theatre, eight young companies which would leave their mark in the Italian contemporary theatre, as we know it today. I go back to that day in 1997.
That night I attended the play Themiscyra II, the final act of a long work taken by Thierry Salmon, with the aim of exploring the play of Kleist and his character Penthesilea. According to the myth, the Amazons had intercourse only with a defeated male enemy, who was then taken to their homeland, Themiscyra…Since then, I have had a strong desire to find the right way to explore a story that Kleist himself defined as “half in anger, half in grace”.
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