There are texts that stand the test of time, like stumbling blocks planted in the heart of the collective conscience. Vitaliano Brancati's The Governess is one of these. Written in 1952, buried by censorship for over a decade, it returns today with the cutting force of a work that still has much to say. Brancati delivers a drama that delves into the undercurrents of respectability, the silences of imposed morality, and guilt as an instrument of social control. He does so with a seemingly classical theatrical structure, in which small incidents and major misunderstandings—in the manner of Chekhov—are transformed into emotional detonators. But behind the sober form lies a fiery substance.

The housekeeper

Teatro Biondo Stabile

A family gathers for Easter, but a swarm of bees threatens their peace. Conflict erupts, quickly devolving into unmanageable chaos, until the family decides to welcome the bees and establish a new balance.

The invasion of the bees

Tribunetta Sala Strehler

Claudio Tolcachir and Cristiana Morganti have come together to write and bring to life a story that begins with autobiographical reflections and insights, but is also inspired by the stories of classical theater characters, archetypes of the female condition within the family and society.

The forest

Lina Prosa returns to the myth of Penthesilea with a new script, entrusting the direction to Massimo Verdastro, with whom she has shared an "artistic-human" partnership for over forty years.

Penthesilea

Written in 1974,  Il pozzo dei pazzi  is Franco Scaldati's most famous and dazzling work: a ferocious and heartbreaking score in which two derelicts, Aspano and Benedetto, fight for survival while fighting over a stolen hen, suspended between the crude realism of the street and the Orphic and surreal dimension typical of the great Palermo playwright.

The Fool's Pit or Never Again

The invisible inn is an imaginary place, the ruins of a bombed-out house, the rubble of which can still be found among the alleys and squares of Palermo. But its appearance also mirrors that of the gutted houses we see daily in war chronicles that seem from another era. It is the symbolic place of a human condition in an eternal struggle for survival, inhabited by an infinite variety of characters and shadows, projections and embodiments of the Poet's dreams, of the "presences" he sees and senses around him. Each of them has a story to tell: desires, fears, doubts, contradictions, certainties that attract us, amuse us, and astound us. Stories that seem fantastic and imaginative to us and that gradually or suddenly become a mirror of the reality around us, stories imbued with a humanity that makes them feel close to us, ours, universal.

The Invisible Inn

After the war, a family of vavaluci (snails, in the Palermitan dialect)—mother, father, children, uncles, grandparents—decides to take a trip to Mount Pellegrino, a sacred mountain for the people of Palermo, where they can also thank Saint Rosalia for having protected them.

Go go lights

Teatro Montevergini

Polish writer and playwright Slawomir Mrożek wrote Emigrants in 1974 during his exile in France, reflecting with acuity and irony on the condition of estrangement and alienation of those forced to live in a foreign country.

Emigrants

Great art is often ambiguous. Shakespeare always is. Just as in The Merchant of Venice he appears to be writing an anti-Semitic text, yet places in Shylock's mouth one of the most illustrious passages defending the dignity of the Jewish people, so in Othello he composes a dramatic structure that sees the Moor as the perpetrator of a horrible crime, but gradually reveals that the true demonic being is the white Iago.

Othello

The protagonist of The Overcoat is Akaky Akakievich, a meek employee bullied by his colleagues, mocked by his superiors, and excluded from Petersburg's social life. He is so poor that he has to save for an entire year to afford a new overcoat. When he finally manages to do so and puts it on, it becomes a priceless possession for him. However, his happiness lasts only a day: invited to a co-workers' party to toast their new acquisition, on the way home he is attacked and robbed of his precious garment. The police treat him roughly, and even a collection among his colleagues is unsuccessful, and after a few days Akaky Akakievich dies of despair and cold.

The coat

This Mandrake is transposed into a present dominated by finance, profit, and appearance. Machiavelli's Renaissance Florence becomes the Global City, a glass and steel skyscraper where everything is transparent. The characters act not out of love or faith, but out of desire, convenience, and opportunism. The comedy thus becomes a scathing satire of contemporary capitalism, where every relationship is a transaction. The action takes place inside a corporate skyscraper. The set is minimal and modular: transparent panels, neon lights, screens with financial charts and breaking news. All around, the city looms: a vertical, competitive, dehumanized world. Callimaco is a young, ambitious manager, brilliant, seductive, devoid of any morals. Deception is not a means, but a professional skill. Messer Nicia is an elderly CEO obsessed with legacy and reputation; he doesn't understand the changing world, but is willing to do anything to leave a "successor." It's both ridiculous and tragic, a symbol of empty power. Lucrezia is an intelligent woman, trapped in a marriage of convenience and a system that demands her to be "perfect." Her final surrender isn't weakness, but a clear choice for survival and power. Fra Timoteo becomes an ethics consultant, a spiritual media leader who uses the language of morality to justify any action. He's the most dangerous figure because he legitimizes cynicism with reassuring words. Meanwhile, Ligurio is easy to imagine as a fixer, lobbyist, or business intermediary. He's the true driving force behind the action: he understands how the mechanisms of power work and exploits them without ever exposing himself, the perfect embodiment of the end justifying the means. Power as manipulation, morality as a rhetorical tool, the body and desire as commodities, the victory of amoral intelligence.

The Mandrake

In Vigata, the name of a mysterious agitator is circulating: Michele Sparacino. It is he, it is said, who incited the sulfur mine workers and sparked a general strike that spread throughout the city, uniting bakers and street cleaners, teachers and office workers. In reality, Michele Sparacino was born from the imagination of Liborio Sparuto, a lazy and lying journalist who, to explain to his readers the events shocking Vigata, completely invented the figure of a dangerous subversive.

The Triple Life of Michele Sparacino

In a reversal of the perception of time typical of dreams, an old actor, in the half-hour that separates him from going on stage to play the lead in Strindberg's Thunderstorm , finds himself reliving moments of his own life in an endless time. The soundtrack of the reality of a theater coming to life outside his dressing room becomes the pretext and the invitation, at times carefree and at others moving, to wander and even converse with the ghosts of his past in a temporally illogical intermingling, while one sound evokes another, a laugh recalls a moment of joy, a long silence recalls a loss long ago.

Before the storm

'A birritta cu 'i ciancianeddi  is the original title of the work that Luigi Pirandello wrote in 1916 in Sicilian dialect and which two years later he transformed into Italian in Il cappello a sonagli , where he takes up the themes of the two short stories  La verità  and  Certi obbligati , both from 1912.

The bell cap

This is not a simple rewriting of classical myth, but a refined exploration of the existential dynamics that span time and culture. Dürrenmatt uses myth as a critical tool, capable of reflecting the tensions of contemporary society and the fragilities inherent in the human soul. The Minotaur is no longer a creature to be feared, but a complex symbol: marginalized, misunderstood, a prisoner not only of the physical labyrinth but also of his own identity.

The Minotaur

Peter Stein, an undisputed master of twentieth-century direction and founder of the legendary Schaubühne in Berlin, championed a philological, rigorous, and profoundly humane form of theater. Born in Germany in 1937, Stein has left his mark on the stage with his ability to reinterpret classics in a contemporary key, preserving their complexity.

Platonov

A voice echoes within a chamber of the soul. It is that of the Moon. It evokes sounds and images that bring to mind characters, hidden hopes and desires, regrets and fantasies. All indelibly sewn onto the skin of two souls searching for themselves, for what they were, what they are, and what they will be: two men, whose reflected images are constantly changing. The illusion and truth of their experiences will accompany them on this emotional journey from a point of no return to a desire for acceptance. A flight of renewal, looking to the past to face a possible future. The dream of the Moon is a suspended state, poised between reality and fiction, which delicately reveals the details, revealing the light and dark sides of the existence of two satellite wanderers, lost in a space odyssey. The Moon becomes the spokesperson and mirror of a poetic nature deeply rooted in Mediterranean and Palermo folk culture, evoking alleyways, vibrant voices, dances, songs, and traditions destined to thrive on the same sensation that lingers in the mind between sleep and wakefulness. Fragmented, incomplete characters from a Palermo struggling to tell its story once again, keeping alive the memory of a bygone era.

The Dream of the Moon

Deeply touched by the tragic love story between the Muslim girl Admira and the young Serbian Boško, known as the "Romeo and Juliet of Sarajevo," director Paolo Valerio evokes in the setting of his play a backdrop of war and conflict, reminiscent of the former Yugoslavia, thus offering a powerful image of the bloody and senseless conflicts between families that bloodied the Verona described by Shakespeare.

Romeo and Juliet

Claire and Solange are two sisters who work as maids for a wealthy woman they call Madame. When Madame leaves the house, the two women rummage through the closet and, taking turns wearing Madame's clothes and jewelry, play the roles of mistress and servant. Madame is an obsession for the sisters, engendering ambivalent feelings of veneration and hatred, envy and admiration, until the game becomes increasingly dangerous and their fantasies of revenge become reality.

She serves

On the night between June 3 and 4, 1798, Giacomo Casanova suspects he is about to die. The Venetian gentleman, a living legend of seduction, has been a guest for thirteen years at Dux Castle in Bohemia, where the Count of Waldestein has appointed him palace librarian. From the early hours of dawn, a sequence of clues, pieced together by his intuition, seems to announce the approach of his fateful passage. Giacomo had turned 73 a month earlier; he had celebrated his birthday by toasting himself with a glass of iced water, reflecting his image in an opaque mirror above the fireplace in his study.

Casanova of the infinite escape

Mimmo Cuticchio pays homage to Dante Alighieri by offering a unique transposition of the Inferno , in which Dante's imagery and the themes of the Divine Comedy intersect with the world of the puppets against the backdrop of the Sicilian natural landscape. Cuticchio's tale interacts with the images of the puppets in motion, captured by Daniele Ciprì's camera, while Giacomo Cuticchio's original music, performed live , alternates with the voice of actor Alfonso Veneroso, who interprets the poet's verses.

On the Roads to Hell

Pulcinella is the man in the street who manages to escape death, mocking power and arrogance while also displaying fear, dread, and all those feelings not inherent to the fairytale hero but to everyday man. Storie di Pulcinella is a way of presenting ancient plots in their modernity and universality, alternating them with other ancient and modern stories. Beyond entertainment, it can also become a meeting, a lesson, a story, a shared journey into the wonderful world of Neapolitan puppets.

Storie di Pulcinella

The Teatro dei Piccoli di Podrecca, founded in 1914 in Rome by Vittorio Podrecca, originally from Cividale del Friuli, has triumphed throughout the world, gaining international fame.

Variety

On June 1, 2018, Andrea Camilleri performed Conversations on Tiresias at the Greek Theatre in Syracuse , widely considered his artistic testament. It was an unforgettable evening: Camilleri, alone on stage, seated in an armchair, captivated and mesmerized the audience with the magic of his raspy voice and the power of his words. At the end of the evening, the writer interrupted the seemingly endless applause and, in the silence that followed, uttered the following words: "Excuse me, I'd like to tell you one more thing. I'd like us all to meet again, here, on an evening like this, in 100 years."

Cain's Self-Defense

Here We Are is composed of three short one-act plays that recount, at different times, three different relationships between a man and a woman. In the first, Amour et Piano by Georges Feydeau, set in late-19th-century Paris, the meeting between the two protagonists occurs purely by mistake, giving rise to an embarrassing and hilarious comedy of errors. However, the epilogue suggests a possible romantic sequel to the encounter born out of pure chance. In the second, Here We Are by Dorothy Parker, the scene is occupied by two newlyweds departing for their honeymoon, and the station waiting room becomes the backdrop for a series of skirmishes, unsaid words, and seemingly hopeless misunderstandings. A couple torn between libertarian impulses and nostalgic capitulations, immersed as they are in the American dream of the 1940s. In the third, " I Posted You for Joy ," written by Gioele Dix, he and she are two millennials who meet for the first time after a long time of dating only on social media. Expectations, misunderstandings, comical stumbles, and secret hopes will be the ingredients of a lively conversation that will bring the two closer, perhaps more than their mutual distrust might have led them to believe.

Here we are

Pinocchio, the most famous puppet in the world, was born from the desire of a poor carpenter, who, to alleviate his loneliness, sculpted a wooden boy "who, above all, knows how to dance!"

Pinocchio or the Father's Show

In this fast-paced drama, which unfolds with the pace of a courtroom drama, Massini recounts the trial of Herbert Nolan, editor of the local newspaper in a small provincial town in the United States in the early 1960s. Nolan is accused of manipulating information for private gain. The killing of a vagrant mistaken for a robber or rapist was allegedly fabricated by the newspaper to create widespread fear throughout the county, prompting residents to arm themselves to defend their homes. As a result, the local arms company multiplies its profits. "What's so strange about that?" says Nolan's lawyer. "Since the dawn of time, newspapers have had to make the news!" However, the newspaper editor turns out to be a major shareholder in the arms company. The prosecution, represented by the very capable Attorney Miles, tries to nail Nolan to account. The trial unfolds in a traditional manner, alternating questioning of the defendant and witnesses. Beyond the conflict of interest, which is central to the prosecution's case, Alessandro Gassmann's show raises some burning issues: fake news, the artfully fueled climate of fear, and the power and abuse of power of the media.

State vs. Nolan

How often does it happen that a human being suddenly feels like a stranger in the eyes of their mother, father, and sister? What does it mean to feel like a stranger among people, among family members who no longer recognize each other?

The Metamorphosis

Diptych of the End  was born from author Fabrizio Falco's encounter with the theater of Eugène Ionesco. But this is merely an inspiration, because everything is radically set elsewhere: no longer in a bourgeois space threatened from without, but within a world already collapsed. When the story begins, there is nothing left to defend, the metaphysical environments described by Ionesco are now destroyed: the walls have collapsed, the war is not a distant noise but a present condition. The characters emerge from the rubble like survivors, dusty, disoriented, frightened, alive by chance.

Diptych of the End

The Last Sunday of August is an original text by Fulvio Pepe inspired by Leo Tolstoy's 1883 play The Power of Darkness . A true rarity, performed very rarely in Italy, it is inspired by the true story of Efrem Koloskov, a peasant who rose to prominence for killing the newborn child of his union with his stepdaughter. Repenting of his insane act, the peasant publicly confessed to the crime at the girl's wedding. Tolstoy was so deeply affected by the story that he visited the man in prison in Tula.

The last Sunday of August

Virdimura  tells the true story of the first female doctor in history, in 1300's Catania. The show is based on the novel by Simona Lo Iacono, winner of the 2024 Vittorini Prize, with dramaturgy by Angela Dematté and direction by Cinzia Maccagnano. Daughter of a doctor who teaches her to heal all human beings, Virdimura grows rooted in her city, as strong as the moss on the walls from which she takes her name. She is played by Donatella Finocchiaro, who embodies a courageous and pure, almost mythological figure, capable of healing bodies and souls. At a time when a female healer risked being branded a witch, Virdimura founded a hospital open to all, a place where suffering was welcomed and alleviated without privilege or distinctions of race or religion.

Virdimura

Ciccio Speranza is full of dreams, sometimes decidedly out of his reach, but he has the right to try and live the life he wants. One of these dreams, too big to keep in the drawer, is that Ciccio wants to dance.

The very difficult life story of Ciccio Speranza

After its preview reading at Mittelfest 2026, The Vergarolla Massacre , written by Paolo Valerio and historian Davide Rossi, arrives in its fully performed form. Eighty years after the events, the performance reconstructs one of the most tragic and forgotten episodes of twentieth-century Italy: the explosion that occurred on August 18, 1946, on Vergarolla beach in Pula, during a sporting event, which caused dozens of civilian casualties, including many children. This terrorist attack was linked to the climate of post-war tension and aimed to intimidate the Italian population and accelerate the exodus from Istria to Italy.

The Vergarolla massacre

A powerfully dramatic text written by Pirandello in the 1920s, influenced by an incident involving writer Luigi Capuana, " Dressing the Naked" is a powerful indictment of machismo and the power exercised over women. It tells the tragic story of Ersilia Drei, who, after a life of humiliation and abandonment, attempts to construct a lie, to "dress" a respectable identity, in order to die with dignity. The play explores the impossibility of defending one's own truth against the masks imposed by society, culminating in suicide as the only act of rebellion.

Clothe the naked

Pound incatenato  brings us back to the poetry of the great Ezra Pound through the myth of Prometheus, who, according to Greek mythology, was punished by the gods and chained for having given men Fire, that is,  techne  and knowledge.

Teatro Biondo

14 - 25 Oct, 2026

The invasion of the bees

17 - 25 Oct, 2026

The housekeeper

Oct 31 - Nov 8, 2026

The forest

10 - 22 Nov, 2026

Penthesilea

Nov 28 - Dec 6, 2026

The Fool's Pit or Never Again

17 - 25 Oct, 2026

The housekeeper

14 - 25 Oct, 2026

The invasion of the bees

Teatro Biondo