«The play was composed during Bertolt Brecht’s exile from a prosecuting Germany, and prophetically melts fragments of history, political issues and ethical matters into outstanding drama, that subverts conventions, calls in the audience, balances between genres, from cabaret to philosophical dialogue, through invectives and love scenes, with a cold, analytic attitude meeting poetical inspiration. While working on this project we had to cope with important past productions and with changing fortunes of an uneasy author. In a hard time for arts, we chose to use the instruments of an ancient Italian tradition: revisited masks and postures of the Commedia dell’Arte. We fused different languages, as we trust in the cathartic power of drama to turn contradictions into encounter. We tried to investigate the abyss between self and mask, to face troubling subjects such as welcoming, hunger, inequality, overpowering, gods, and much more else. We follow the scission of the young prostitute Shen Te, between her charitable attitude and a pragmatic view, embodied by the good angel Shen Te and her alter ego, the greedy businessman Shui Ta, created to defend her interests and rectify her ingenuity. Shen Te operates as a magnifying glass to show the ambivalent feeling of comprehension and fear towards a new poverty; her split affects other characters, namely the devoted water seller Wang turning into Yang Sun,  the aviator without an airplane, who represents the flattery of love, but also the unscrupulous rich in the district and the grotesque changing chorus, that gives voice to a mankind justifying their egoism and criminal acts by their misery. Despite Shen Te bitter, desperate gesture of stretching her arms to heaven in a fruitless prayer, we cannot be indifferent to the final author’s call to try again and again, with all our efforts, to make the world better, although we are going to fail: these painful, moving failures are worth telling».
Elena Bucci and Marco Sgrosso
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