L’appuntamento, ossia la storia di un cazzo ebreo
(2022)
adaptation Fabio Cherstich and Katharina Volckmer
and with Riccardo Centimeri
original music Luca Maria Baldini
Thanks to Artemide for the light, in memory of Ernesto Gismondi
photo by Luca del pia
production Teatro Franco Parenti and Festival dei due mondi di Spoleto
In an elegant London doctor’s office, a young woman is lying on the couch. She can barely make out the sparse hair and refined hands of her doctor, Dr Seligman, to whom she has entrusted the most radical and revolutionary choice of her life. From the subversive, irreverent and audacious novel by Katharina Volckmer – Un cazzo ebreo – comes this new play that lays bare the most unarmed core of the protagonist’s inner life, questioning the power of reparation and showing us how we can remedy the facts of history with our most intimate personal choices. The protagonist, who was born and raised in Germany and then moved to London, swirls through a stream of thoughts between unconfessable sexual fantasies starring Hitler, crazy and liberating idiosyncrasies, the memory of an authoritarian mother and a volatile father, the shame of an irremediable inheritance, the sense of isolation in a society that wants us to be normal, without contradictions in our happy bodies, and the story of an unconventional love, never sufficient, yet total.Through a visual device that makes the stage a laboratory for images, the audience follow the mental journey that leads to the change of gender of the protagonist, a kaleidoscope of thoughts that invade her brain and seem to modify her perception of her body and her story. The explosive debut of a great new international literary voice in the face of our irreducible loneliness suggests the only possible answers: accept, forgive, love.