Theatre that unites, questions and transforms in Sabaudia

There is a time that has been returning for fourteen years, when summer evenings are lit up with stories and words, and theatre meets nature in the green heart of Sabaudia. It is the time of "Il Parco e la Commedia" (The Park and the Comedy), and on Saturday 19 July the curtain opens on the 14th edition of the theatrical review promoted by the Pro Loco Sabaudia, in collaboration with the Circeo National Park and the City of Sabaudia, with the patronage of the Lazio Region, Confcommercio Lazio Sud, and Uilt-Unione italiana libero teatro. Seventeen new stories in sixteen evenings - until 3 August - weave the tale of an adventure that renews itself, transforming itself, since 2011, hosted in the cavea, one of the most popular stages in the area.

"Welcoming the 14th edition," says Gennaro Di Leva, president of the Pro Loco Sabaudia Association, "gives us the privilege of recognising the maturity of a project that has been able to grow over time, without ever losing its original identity: to be an authentic space for sharing and dialogue, an open gaze capable of crossing languages and genres. The Park and Comedy is an experience that unites people, languages, energies - many - in an event that thrives on the silent work of many professionals and the generosity of a community that supports it". With a passion "if possible even more intense, The Park and Comedy continues to be a gift for the City, for all its guests, for the times we live in. A difficult time, no doubt. But which through theatre we can still inhabit, in the possibility of recognising ourselves in the stories of 'others',' Di Leva concludes.

Among expected returns and novelties from all over Italy, opening the festival on the inaugural evening of Saturday 19 at 9pm will be the company Insieme per Caso with "Le Voci di dentro". The comedy, perhaps the bitterest written by Eduardo, directed and interpreted by Angelo Grieco, suspended between reality and illusion, sketches the theme of ambiguity, making the voice of all those who, painfully, want to place themselves outside the petty affairs of the world their own. Change of scene and on Sunday 20, again at 9 p.m., the La Rete association returns with 'Inter-Ferenze'. The show, conceived and directed by Claudio Corinaldesi, is the outcome of the integrated workshop promoted by the voluntary association for differently abled people, conducted with the collaboration of educators, teachers, volunteers and all families. To distract us from the dystopian world we are living in, where freedom of thought and differences create dangerous dichotomies, comes 'Inter-Ferenze'. It might seem at first glance like a football match between an existing team and a fictional one, a team where there is no 'less' and no 'more' and where everything is equal.

Seventeen performances, seventeen different ways of crossing opposites, the conflicts that are as much interior, that force us to measure ourselves with the other, as with our own present, its rules and its partiality. On the open-air stage, narratives are woven together that explore the relationship with memory, history and myth, the still open wounds of our time. The 14th edition is an invitation to explore these vital frictions: between irony, poetry, lightness and depth. A theatrical journey that does not offer solutions, but opens up questions. Conflict, understood as a guiding thread, a dramaturgical knot, becomes an engine of transformation, a mirror of the restlessness that runs through human beings, their relationships, their spaces and their time. From the disillusioned words - and silences - of Eduardo De Filippo to the poetics of Calvino, from the battles of history to the fractures of the soul. And again that nature that surrounds everything and is not always understood, or that diversity that enlivens everything and plays the music of hope and solidarity.

Fairy tales reread - always the appointment of children's theatre dedicated to the youngest - epic stories and reflections on identity, from myths to the neuroses of everyday life, passing through peasant struggles, partisans, superstitions and loves that resist - or implode - in therapy. Seventeen stories for a single tale that speaks of transformations, separations, rebirths, going back to listening to that shared word, that theatrical gesture that unites and questions, that welcomes and surprises, while embracing lightness as a form of depth.