Himmelweg – La via del cielo
Marco Plini
24/05/2013
, 
19:00
25/05/2013
, 21:00
by Juan Mayorga
direction Marco Plini
direction assistance Thea Dellavalle
translation Adriano Iurissevich
with Giusto Cucchiarini, Marco Maccieri, Luca Mammoli
and with high school children of Reggio Emilia and Scandiano Gioele Ballestrazzi, Edoardo Bocedi, Elena Castagnetti, Cecilia Comastri, Kristian Ferrari, Luca Goldoni, Brian Oliverio, Giulia Vivi
set design Serena Zuffo
costumes Nuvia Valestri/Cecilia Di Donato
light designer Fabio Bozzetta
Centro Teatrale MaMiMň, Corte Ospitale di Rubiera
Running time 1h 30'
World premičre
After having directed Ifigenia in Aulide, the result of the “Advanced Theatre Training Course” of Emilia Romagna Teatro, Marco Plini, a young and talented director who, since 2005, alternates the activities of directing with the one of teaching at “Scuola Civica Paolo Grassi” in Milan, puts on stage Himmerlweg – La via del cielo, one of the main texts of Juan Mayorga’s literary production.
Born in 1965 in Madrid, Mayorga is considered one of the most representative playwrights of his generation, honored with awards including “Best Spanish playwright” , he owes its success to the great attention to the word, and to the relativism that leaves an open road to the freedom interpretation of the viewer and to its ability to reread the past in the light of the present, in a constant comparison with today's real problems. Himmelweg is inserted in this research, a work in which Mayorga revises the most tragic event of the twentieth century, the Holocaust, from a new and cruelly paradoxical perspective. “In the ‘40s, before that the truth about concentration camps came out, a Red Cross Commissioner, suspicious of these camps, asked for and obtained a permission by the Nazi high command to visit one of them” says Marco Plini, who continues “the camp Commander plans for the occasion the transformation of the lager in a model village that has the aim to experience the ideal life for the Jewish community. The text follows the meticulous tests of this big stage, where the Commander takes the role of the director and the prisoners become actors. In the days before the arrival of the Commissioner of the Red Cross, scenes of fake happy life take place under the control of the Commander of the camp; at the end the Commissioner will undergo this gigantic manipulation and write what he saw in the camp, becoming an unwitting accomplice of the massacre. It is an extremely fascinating point of view, in which Mayorga sees this terrible tragedy. The text contains a wealth of suggestions on reality and its manipulation, but also a great conservation of a livid and not pathetic memory, especially useful to a young audience that now refers to the Holocaust more or less like the Crusades: an historical and unrepeatable event, buried in a distant and nebulous point in history”.
In Plini’s re-reading the camp Commander assumes the role of a teacher-director while the role of prisoners is entrusted to a group of students from middle and high schools with which the director has started an artistic workshop-training, a true pedagogical path conducted with the schools.
www.ctmteatro.it
Marco Plini
Marco Plini begins his career like director in 2002 with Spring Awakening by F. Wedekind. Two years later he directs for Venice Biennale Cleansed by Sarah Kane, and in next years he has directed texts by O'Neill, Soynka, Francesca Angeli. For Emilia Romagna Teatro he directed Cold by Lars Norén and Iphigenia at Aulis by Euripides.
