Venue: Abandoned Auto Repair Workshop
Production: Teatro del Mantice
Author: Arthur Schnitzler
Stage Director: Edoardo Zucchetti
Cast: Sofia Busia, Archimede Pii, Cinzia Bagni, Davide Arena, Carolina Pezzini, Marco Gargiulo, Alessandra Panzone, Mirco Risaliti, Anastasia Ciullini, Marco Bartolini
Photography: Marco Borrelli

Trailer: Watch

“To what extent does a character confess, and when do they begin to draw their own caricature?”

The language of inauthenticity lies at the heart of Arthur Schnitzler’s dramaturgy, shaping the characters’ relationships through relentless repetition and giving the work its unmistakably grotesque tone.

The characters are portrayed in moments of sexual encounter, yet the play’s true focus extends beyond their exhausted psychodramas and the social conventions that define them. Instead, it reveals a deeper and strikingly contemporary contradiction: individuals are no longer overwhelmed by society itself, but by the absence of shared ideals and points of reference, forcing them to retreat into self-created illusions from which they cannot escape without losing their own sense of identity.

The performance unfolds within a vast abandoned auto repair workshop, a symbolic landscape of structures and assemblages where identities are continuously constructed, dismantled and rebuilt. It becomes a place where Eros and Death coexist, exposing the parody of existence, the corrosion of compulsive repetition, and the unsettling ease with which human beings become trapped by their own language.