by and with Giuseppe Carullo and Cristiana Minasi
set and costumes Cinzia Muscolino
stagecraft Pierino Botto
lighting design Roberto Bonaventura
assistant direction Veronica Zito
artistic collaboration Ivana Parisi, Simone Carullo, Giovanna La Maestra
and with the collaboration of Centro Diurno di Salute Mentale “Il Camelot”, Teatro Vittorio Emanuele, “Casa del Con”

production Carullo-Minasi and La Corte Ospitale

Duration 1h
World première

“The insanes <rave> often less than you think, perhaps they never rave ”
Eugène MinKowski_1998

A Mental Health Centre and two characters: one, “fool for assignment”, spends his life to question the stars, discordant with the present time; the other, perfectly integrated woman, obsessed by career, but warns an incipient insanity. Neither mad nor healthy, Mimmino and Sofia in a dense dialogue – tug of war between two completely opposite life experiences – they will find themselves similar, human, smiling, self-mocking, though unconscious parts of a sophisticated thought-out mechanism to make the man a prisoner of himself itself. They meet in a border land, the Day Center of Mental Health “the Castle”, where the line between those who are inside and those outside fades into a blurred resistance, including protocols to be respected and lives to be normalized.

“Light as a rock” is the oxymoron that it takes us in the paradox of contemporary, two seemingly different worlds, but coincide in that misery called life. Within the walls of a house of cards, of codes and categories, last Cathedral of an alienated interruped identity of the modern man, the dialogues of this two solitudes are echoing silently, in the logic of a world that tries to categorize but that continuous to exclude.

The dramaturgical process came from comparisons and exchanges with patients of psychiatric institutions, dialogues that enable to collect pictures of life lived. The experience of mental illness care has been transformed into a pretext, in a metaphor for society and its dysfunctions, landing in a fully contemporary insanity. Behind the simple aim of sharing life experiences, a very unique research, and the real surprise was the difficulty of operating sharp distinctions between the healthy and the sick, between the verifier and the certificated. Nothing happens if it is not recorded, out of the list there is nothing, there are no operators, there is no cure.

Who knows maybe that sufferers do not exist. Maybe we are the sufferers.

The present day waits to be historicized, we can only be afflicted from a strange delusion that involves all of us.

“The madness free from the worries”
Praise of Folly, Erasmus Rotterdam_1511
Carullo Minasi 

carullominasi.wordpress.com