The Betrothed

Giuseppe Di Stefano

In this reworking by Lenz, of extraordinary and moving synthesis, Manzoni's events are physical traces of souls moving within a habitat of rooms with scattered mattresses that become beds, lazarettos, pedestals. […] In the contemporary theatre scene, Lenz Rifrazioni, with their scenic-installative grammar, rigorous artistic practice, exclusive aesthetic language, radical expressive sense, represent a unique group, for which the word “research” continues to be the driving force of their vision. From Shakespeare to Goethe, from Ovid to Kleist, every new dramaturgical elaboration is an authentic journey into a worldview. And of man. […] [The characters]] have the physicality, fragile and powerful at the same time, of a group of “sensitive” actors. They are former mental long-term offenders and people with intellectual disabilities […]. They act without filters, between truth and representation, adhering to their experiences and their emotions, controlled by spoken words “sayings”, which act as a grid, simultaneously creating a distance and an identification with the characters in the story. History of the humble, the last, the excluded, the simple. As they are. And to them, creative subjects, belong, of the text, scattered fragments of a plot of sentences and words born from a personal experience, of states of mind or filtered by memory: dissertations that always fall within the narrative writing of the novel but which happen hic et nunc. […] In the enormous room that welcomes us, the scenographic vision is dazzling. A bright installation in the shape of a square building, dissected by tall gray velars that create a series of rooms interconnected by large cracks in the corners, opening onto the walls and the path from one space to another. […] And the scenography lives on pictorial references through projections on the velars which are windows inside which live elongated bodies reminiscent of the sculptures of Giacometti, the figures of Modigliani, or El Greco. But the entire staging thrives on figurative art: a system that breathes with the sonic magma dramatized by Andrea Azzali starting from the musical reworking of Verdi's “Requiem”. All the concepts of Manzoni's work –oppression, weakness, cowardice, submission, justice and injustice, suffering, atonement, hope – find, within this texture, a strong emphasis.

Fulvio Fulvi

Renzo e Lucia a teatro sfidano la malattia

It spies, fleshes out, and thrills the “total spectacle” that is performed every evening in the Mayakovsky Hall of Lenz Theatre. […] Protagonists, ten former psychic long-term carers, people with mental disorders, hypersensitive actors who know how to tear deep disturbances and fears from their souls and lend them to Manzoni's characters. Who, thus, come back to life arousing new stupors. Even the language of Gran Lombardo here becomes multiple and impure following the forms of despair: strangled screams, laments, dialectisms mix with the poignant and powerful notes of Lacrimosa from Verdi's Requiem Mass. But the word is never overwhelmed. […] There is no stage in the great hall of the former box factory on Via Pasubio, transformed into a theatrical place of inevitable contemporaneity: spectators and actors move on the same plane, chasing each other's gazes in ever-changing perspectives, separated only by transparent canvas bulkheads that divide, like windows of a medieval basilica, the enormous central space into 6 rooms where they happen, in the most disarming originality, the famous events of the novel. […] Twenty-four dramaturgical situations reinforced by video-images where the characters are shown in their solitary and raw madness. […] Schizophrenics, autistics, psychotics, downs: everyone has their own history of suffering, their cravings for tenderness, inhibitions, ambiguities, and an unexpressed internal revolt. Voice changes, mood changes, sudden silences, bodies vibrating or curling up like fetuses: everything is shown to the audience, without the intent of causing their morbidity but to bring them closer to the Mystery that reveals itself through the limits of humanity.

Alessandra Bernocco

How sensitive Renzo and Lucia are

[…] set in six communicating, symmetrically arranged ‘cages’ with tulle walls that blur the vision and invite modesty. Each returns a fragment of life torn from the flow of human experience, a snapshot, an encounter, a brief dialogue that timidly takes place between characters we know well, surprised by their friability. […] In The Betrothed there is everything: nostalgia, hope, desire, detachment, courage and cowardice, the coherence and rigor of the humble and the arrogance of the strong, and borrowing the adventures of these little heroes who somewhat’ resemble us is a thrust into the soul and into the mechanisms that regulate our relationships with others.

Andrea Alfieri

Come sono cyberpunk Renzo e Lucia

A condensation of fading metaphysical places towards a call to the lazaretto, or to the underground of the creative soul. […] Renzo and Lucia couldn't have asked for anything better: to see their troubled story materialized, stripped of Manzoni's romanticism and scrutinized in its most intimate torments, its anguish and its nightmares, to restore concrete value to their intricate experience. […] But the dramaturgical composition is not limited to the original fragments of the novel; it is immersed in a flow of identities and dissertations from real or even imagined life, conveying the actors through the landscapes of the literary events, to allow them to take possession of the psychological essence of the protagonists of the authentic text and reconstruct them in a fusion of common paths. […] We therefore find ourselves in a sensory cosmos parceled out by a musical research based on Verdi's Requiem, reassembled within the dramaturgy and woven into a sonic magma that dialogues with scattered and hallucinatory voices, which run through these tunnels installed in the concrete of the former industrial spaces of the Lenz theatre, where the turmoil and fears that these “humble magnificents” tear from their psyches are deposited to offer them to the Manzonian characters.

Diego Monfredini

I Promessi Sposi del teatro Lenz: un folle requiem per Manzoni

What is striking every time is the Lenz theatre's ability to restore the monumentality, the epic carature of a text, […] The Betrothed are re-edited in a singular staging of “communicating vases”, the stage space is in fact regularly parceled out into a series of cubes, real habitats that literally turn on and off to bring the episodes to life. The viewer's visitation is free and walking, with ample opportunity to choose their point of view on each moment of the story, while all ten actors simultaneously populate the “light rooms”.

Melodrama and novel blend together thanks to the electronic score mixed by Andrea Azzali who reworks Verdi's Messa da Requiem in an original way. The suggestion is once again cinematic in flavor because the reinterpretation of the drama involves the omnipresence on stage of audiovisual installations that complete, and increase to the point of paroxysm, the acting of the paintings.

Valeria Ottolenghi

Chiare stanze e luminose emozioni

[…] The story of Renzo and Lucia and the other characters, especially those “sensitive” actors who have been banned, have fallen ill, who know about separate life, loneliness. The jokes therefore acquire new dimensions, shades of sincere suffering […] And the costumes are barely evocative, as for a Marat-Sade […] each wall with movable, elongated images, as in Gothic stained glass windows, with the music, the voices that flow everywhere enveloping the performers and spectators together, who move freely in the corridor/perimeter intone to a cube with such light walls: thus, the audience's point of view changes with contemporary actions, but with a dominant narrative thread, which is precisely that of Manzoni's ‘The Betrothed’.

Christian Donelli

Manzoni 'illuminato' dagli attori sensibili

A unique song that smacks of tragedy, in the characters and in the description of the historical framework. The philological reconstruction of the text is done with precision and contemporary grafts make the picture more tragic, representative and unique. If the Unnamed appears on video, reading what seems like a philosophical and psychological litany about the human soul, sensitive actors give the theatrical and narrative discourse on stage a sense of transience and tragedy.

The foundation of the new language according to Manzoni: the contact between the courtly Italian of actors and the ‘natural’ language of sensitive actors. A reinterpretation that is contextualized in the contemporary: if the farewell to the mountains becomes a farewell to the scenes and the images are those of the window of the Mayakovsky Hall from which, until a few years ago, one could see Parma Cathedral, then the connection with the space is evident. The characters in this contemporary work dialogue in a single text, modulated by the presence of close-ups on video, a reminder perhaps of an ended and artificial world, perhaps of some television images from the last decade.

Laura Bevione

Se I Promessi Sposi illuminano il presente

Manzoni our contemporary? How many students would laugh at such a hypothesis. Yet if one delves into The Betrothed abandoning idiosyncrasies and boring scholastic notions, one can recognize unsuspected illuminations and reflections on the state of humanity in the twenty-first century. A journey that Francesco Pititto and Federica Maestri have undertaken accompanied, in addition to the historic performers of Lenz, by a large group of “sensitive” actors, namely former mental long-term offenders and people with intellectual disabilities.

A heterogeneous community, therefore, yet united in questioning a work and its author, in a sort of pressing collective brainstorming that allows us to recognize new but clear parallels between the assault on Milan's ovens and the descent into the streets of today's overly disestablished people; the farewell to their hometowns and the threatened eviction from a living and vibrant theatrical space; the candid love between Renzo and Lucia and the legitimate desire of many couples to live together. Mediations and suggestions harmoniously interpolated to the novel's tension, which in turn has been dismantled and reassembled, with care and impeccable fidelity. A dramaturgical work in twenty-four scenes, acting within an articulated and evocative space: six “bright rooms”, connected to each other by semi-transparent curtains. […] These, occupied by bare mattresses, certainly hark back to the lazaretto but also reiterate, with discreet but explosive power, the perspective chosen by Manzoni and adopted by the Parma company: telling the story through the eyes of the least fortunate. An action that, when performed without paternalism but with sincere conviction, can lead to a show full of emotions and thoughts like this: a generous revolt against all the injustices that the music, inspired by Verdi's Requiem –composed specifically for Manzoni–, amplifies with poignant ethical impetus.

Ambra Notari

Un cast di attori 'sensibili' porta in scena I Promessi Sposi

Gli attori sono ‘’sensibili’’, ex lungodegenti psichici e persone con disabilità collettiva. La compagnia è la Lenz Rifrazioni, che da più di 10 anni ha intrapreso un percorso di ricerca unico in Europa per intensità ed espressività. L’opera portata in scena, è ‘I Promessi Sposi’ di Alessandro Manzoni, pietra miliare della letteratura italiana. La musica – curata da Andrea Azzali – è realizzata sul ‘Requiem’ di Giuseppe Verdi. L’occasione è il Bicentenario Verdiano, che ha permesso di riportare al Lenz Teatro di Parma, dal 13 al 23 maggio – dopo il grande successo di pubblico e critica ottenuto lo scorso novembre alla 18a edizione di Natura Dèi Teatri – questa versione innovativa del romanzo storico manzoniano firmata Lenz Rifrazioni, una creazione di Maria Federica Maestri e Francesco Pititto. Il romanzo della riscossa degli umili e degli esclusi dalla cittadinanza viene qui scomposto in 24 quadri performativi, riscritto attraverso visioni contemporanee e il linguaggio estremo e antiretorico di Maestri e Pititto. Tutti i concetti chiave dell’opera – oppressione, debolezza, viltà, sottomissione, giustizia e ingiustizia, sofferenza, espiazione, speranza – trovano, così, una forte enfasi. “L’universo che attraversiamo è estremamente complesso – spiega Maria Federica Maestri – Si parte dall’idea che gli attori-personaggi siano degli sconfitti, sconfitti per non avere accesso alla normalità; si arriva a un ribaltamento, un riscatto, un rovesciamento del destino che, nelle vesti della Provvidenza racconta una nuova forma di bellezza”.

In scena per questa nuova riscrittura drammatica sono gli attori ‘sensibili’ Frank Berzieri, Giovanni Carnevale, Carlo Destro, Paolo Maccini, Andrea Orlandini, Delfina Rivieri, Vincenzo Salemi, Carlotta Spaggiari, Barbara Voghera insieme con Valentina Barbarini, Monica Bianchi, Roberto Riseri ed Elena Sorbi. Le loro storie personali si intrecciano con i personaggi del romanzo: “Lavorare con attori ‘sensibili’ e attori non disabili è un grandissimo potenziale artistico, meravigliosamente duro, soprattutto quando si entra in contatto con ex lungodegenti, uomini e donne con passati estremamente duri e dolorosi”, continua Maestri. La più giovane è una ragazza autistica di 21 anni, la più anziana, con un’esperienza di lungodegenza alle spalle, ne ha 79. Lungo e complesso il lavoro che porta all’assegnazione dei personaggi, mai calati dall’alto ma assorbiti naturalmente nella loro pienezza.

A fondersi, sono anche i tratti manzoniani e quelli verdiani: il prodotto finale è un mosaico di identità perdute e ricostruite che ritrova percorsi comuni, identiche scoperte e uguali sofferenze. I personaggi si moltiplicano: ci sono 2 Lucia e 3 monache di Monza (bambina, donna, anziana), mentre un solo attore veste i panni dell’Innominato e del Cardinale Borromeo. “Abbiamo pensato fosse particolarmente interessante dal punto di vista scenico attraversare tutti questi mondi, quelli della monaca di Monza nelle tre fasi della vita e quelli di Lucia, da un lato oggetto del desiderio di Don Rodrigo, dall’altro soggetto della realtà quotidiana. L’attore che interpreta l’Innominato e il Cardinale Borromeo ha

portato in scena le sue esperienze di polarismo, facendosi confessato e confessore”.

Senza intervalli, lo spettatore può soffermarsi sull’azione principale, ma può anche cambiare focus, perché tutti gli attori abitano la scena contemporaneamente: le stanze sono tutte in trasparenza. “Forte è anche il richiamo alle costanti che attraversano i secoli, come il lavoro e il dualismo affamati-affamanti”, aggiunge Maestri, riassunto emblematicamente nella sequenza della rivolta del pane ripetuta da Renzo/Paolo Maccini mentre raccoglie da terra mucchi di abiti da lavoro. Il progetto è realizzato con il sostegno del Dipartimento assistenziale integrato di salute mentale – Dipendenze patologiche Ausl Parma.

Massimo Marino

La ballata degli umili I Promessi Sposi di Lenz

And those humble Manzonians in The Betrothed, according to Lenz Rifrazioni, become today's outcasts, the speechless, the ones who struggle to progress, with bodies marked by some syndrome, with heads tossed by life, by old age, by that abandonment that some call madness. The novel that founded our Italianness is transformed into a labyrinth of small rooms where the tongue struggles, where bodies sometimes explode, and so does fury, amazement; other times those offended bodies remain abandoned on mattresses, as if under bridges of rubble, listening to someone speak, a voice screaming, legs, arms, trunks that roar a little further on. The walls are transparent, veiled, and shaded: it's up to the viewer, who can move around the stage cube in the center of a bare room, to choose what to look at, what to listen to, whether to blur the bodies and images by getting too close to the grid of curtains or whether to see away from or peek at the open corners; whether to follow the plot or get lost in the details, absences, and visions. Actors often move from one environment to another, their language strained, which reduces the plot to a few spoken sentences, while in each environment they flash and stare at each other, like paintings, images. They evoke, at the beginning and at the end, in a ghostly way, that suburb surrounding the Lenz warehouse, raped by a megalomaniacal and failed renovation (that of Parma), with many empty apartments or offices, demolished areas, a new station, a little further away, oversized for a left “provincial” railway hub, without high speed (if that means anything). But immediately, vertical or horizontal, deformed or defined, stand out figures that recall Manzonian characters as if filtered through a grotesque carnival, reviewed by the distorted brush of Francis Bacon, elongated by the severe deforming art of El Greco, Modigliani, Giacometti.

Lenz has been working for years on projects around authors he dissects, reverses, misplaces, and makes shine. With Manzoni, we are in the midst of a search for the language of Italy, between interrupted, jarring, impossible memories, and a deserted current affairs, where we can also rediscover a sense of communication. Manzoni comes after the Aeneid, and after The Betrothed Adelchi will arrive. The strength of this show lies in the performers, who mix professional actors ready to experience every extremism and those extraordinary “sensitive actors” that Lenz has trained and brought to the stage on various occasions. We still have in our eyes the slow, itinerant, shocking ghost sonata Hamlet seen at the Rocca dei Rossi in San Secondo in 2010, and other works with the long-term carers of Colorno. They, former patients in the Psychiatric Hospital, currently in the care of the Mental Health Care Department for Pathological Addictions of the Local Health Authority of Parma, plus some women with Down syndrome, now firmly established as actresses of the company, such as the formidable Barbara Voghera, give the characters an indefinable aura, which immediately makes them stand out from our school memories towards a material reality of oppression, tribulation, agrarian life, of deep suffering that is close to us (and that we do not see), with that everyday language, ready to spring into ʼanger, ʼinsuffering, ʼincontinence, ʼinane rebellion. “Sensitive actors” call them: like few others capable of giving internal echoes, threatening, fearful, but also in search of a truth and solidarity, of a different human possibility. The scenes intersect, in those milky rooms, under the notes of Verdi's Requiem manipulated, pulverized and made almost unrecognizable by Andrea Azzali_Monophon. The morality of Verdi's figures is reflected in Manzoni's tragic characters, one of the show's assumptions. Everything has something sacred and very popular, simple, like a story told, but with fury, indignation, fury and hope, before a fire in the night.

The fear of Don Abbondio, the violent screams and attempts at rebellion, the desire of Don Rodrigo, the separation, the creation of that monster which is the nun of Monza, with her face covered in gauze to represent incurable wounds, and then the revolt and the escape, the kidnapping of Lucia, the Unnamed and the Cardinal, the vow, the plague, the death, providence flows as acts of a modern sacred representation, astonished, interpreted by witnesses involved in the facts, in the sufferings, who still do not want to accept defeat.

The protests sometimes seem like those of children, like insults, like clashes, in the episode in which Fra’ Cristoforo kills a knight who blocks his step with a wooden sword, ready to transform into a penitent's cross. Forgiveness, the soothing pain of bodies, the helpless cry, the repressed desire often embodied by the serpentine bodies of actresses against the abandoned, static, imposing ones of sensitive actors, create an atmosphere of ritual, of suspension, of magical inner investigation.

The tongue shines with luminous simplicity. Renzo and Lucia's farewell generates a simple: “Don't leave me. I love you”. Don Abbondio is a small figure crumpled with fear, clogged like a nun, always in unstable balance on a stool. Renzo, corpulent, like Don Rodrigo, passes through the rooms, while the spectators circle this carousel of opalescent images (like memories, like something we have inside, profound), which ends with other words that give splendor to the banal, everyday language of affections: “Tomorrow we return home. Me at my job, you at yours. And after that? We'll see”. It seems to us in the last images projected before dark to see again the courtyard of the Lenz shed, which managed to survive the threats of demolition, renovation and eviction, but which is still not “safe”. Long life, then, and means, we invoke within ourselves for this ever-living outpost of an experimentation that is not an empty exercise, but a provocation to our intelligences, to our cultural belonging, to our lost feelings. Which is concentration. With the direction, the installation, the monastic or proletarian costumes of Maria Federica Maestri, the dramaturgy and imagoturgy of Francesco Pititto, and the excavation of both of the text, which shines with “linguistic and anti-rhetorical extremism” (the hall notes say well), so as to restore Manzoni's voice and the consistency of the language of the times.

On stage, worth mentioning are Valentina Barbarini, Frank Berzieri, Monica Bianchi, Giovanni Carnevale, Carlo Destro, Paolo Maccini, Andrea Orlandini, Roberto Riseri, Delfina Rivieri, Vincenzo Salemi, Elena Sorbi, Carlotta Spaggiari, and Barbara Voghera. Lights (and above all shadows, twilight of vision) and sound by Gianluca Bergamini and Nicolò Fornasini.

Daniele Rizzo

I Promessi Sposi

Manzoni's is a work that anyone can say they know, at least in principle. Because compared to the precise events narrated in the famous text that laid the foundations for the modern Italian language, this popularity is accompanied by a proportional ignorance of the internal references and extraordinary interactions between characters and environment that characterize scenic and psychological descriptions on whose details experts could (pedantically) debate endlessly.

Going beyond the simplistic interpretation that The Betrothed reads in terms of witnessing the fulfillment of divine will, we are faced with a powerful text, now institutionalized as essential school reading and which has determined a precise historical and ideal, pedagogical and cultural model. Aimed at guaranteeing the sacredness of authority, whatever it may be, through the separation of personal and social virtues, it represents the outcome of a cultural operation triumphant because it is capable of having practically permanent consequences from a material point of view (the Manzonian useful for purpose). Paradoxical consequences being simultaneously revolutionary (due to the reversal of history and the protagonism of the humble) and reactionary due to the confessional nature of the original intentions. Intentions that we can identify in that concept of Providence that always justifies current suffering by entrusting happiness to the future (therefore to the continuous tomorrow) and which, in the age of full secularization, we can find materialized in that inescapable resignation to which the postmodern/industrial individual has destined the weakest, effectively isolating them in their own fragile subjectivity, from the moment he chose merit (fake because it is often hereditary with respect to social and cultural extraction) on the search for the (real)

equality. This duplicity, an affirmation at the same time of provident misfortune that sublimates suffering by elevating it to status and of redemption by those who truly find themselves at the bottom and immobile of the social ladder, exists with prodigious realism in this new production by Lenz Rifrazioni, staged by «former long-term mental patients and people with intellectual disabilities». Given the simultaneity of musical, video, and recitative elements, and the possibility of voluntarily directing one's attention, the audience is faced with a bold attempt at harmony. What –in fact – is achieved between a scenography covered by overlapping veils that allow (intra)seeing differently and at different levels of depth, and the free interpretation of an original text (on which the interpreters converge anyway) is a complete balance. A

aesthetic balance that runs through twenty-four performance frameworks in which the dramaturgical substance acquires a formal structure capable of allowing the real existential presence of each individual actor to emerge disruptively. Despite the narrative coherence –always recognizable and traceable to precise textual references – the way in which the dramatic personality of each interpreter manages to remain intact is vigorously imposed, allowing an emotionality tinged with «incredible contemporary credibility» to emerge.

Between exposition (textual) and production (stage), between recording (vocal and video) and interpretation (physical), a rhythmic and cadenced counterpoint is constructed that is particularly surprising given the psychological fragility of the actors on stage and the confusion around them caused by independent spectators in choosing to position themselves with respect to them and to each other. Spectators who, masters of their own autonomy, by opposition discover themselves in the existential condition of having to witness life, accepting it without the possibility of choice, helpless participants and in perpetual discomfort in the face of the fate that chose them (healthy or otherwise without having any merit or guilt). Spectators who, invited to take a physical position with respect to the point of view from which to watch the unfolding of the representation, are in this way led to experience a personal interpretative perspective of absolute solitude in the multitude, failing to strip themselves of their subjectivity and to enter in a positive way into intersubjectivity (the relationship with others).

The abyss is unsurpassed because it does not depend on the amount of strength the individual can possess, that is, on the level of knowledge, competence, and ability compared to standards (a paradigm from which contemporary pedagogical and didactic practice attempts to free itself). As long as he remains such (individual) he remains incapable of eliminating incongruity, the error in which a disenchanted world confines imagination and feelings when lacking control, rationality and usability in the instrumental sense of the term.

Because it is in this way that social and political organization has proceeded to label the claims of singularity as destructive, turning the realization of the person to the objective (external) world and distorting its otherness into a false because sterile contemplation and freedom into a negative because non-informative concept.

In this way – and in this sense Lenz's The Betrothed are exemplary – anyone can look at a different person feeling at ease, having someone in a much worse condition than their own in front of them and marginalizing themselves in a conception of life incapable of truly glorifying themselves through the acceptance of everything that would seem contrary to it (baseness and poverty, derision and contempt, suffering and death, illness and madness).

The setting inside a factory is enlightening. It embraces the idea of a society that conceives itself in terms of production and consumption, that believes it has transcended the concept of citizen (already alienating/limiting compared to that of living being) into that of consumer, and that thus sees its children dispersed in the illusion of having created eternity through the establishment of a universal and perennial memory in new digital tools.

In this apocalyptic context, art plays a decisive role. It's up to her to help the person draw back from themselves, from that self that now represents the denial of their instincts and values closest to life, giving them the opportunity for new, free and creative forms of expression.

A function that the chorality of these Betrothed, proposed in the absolute and most intimate existential solitude of the humble of our days, fulfills with inescapable effectiveness.