#ConfiniAperti 2023 – Teatro Area Nord: Saturday 22 April at 19.00 pm and Sunday 23 at 18.00 pm “Peggy Pickit guarda il volto di Dio” by Roland Schimmelpfennig directed by Marcello Cotugno
On April 22 and 23, the Teatro Area Nord will perform the show PEGGY PICKIT LOOKS AT GOD'S FACE, directed by Marcello Cotugno and starring Valentina Acca, Valentina Curatoli, Aldo Ottobrino, and Emanuele Valenti. The show is produced by Teatri Associati di Napoli /TAN with the support of the Goëthe Institut Neapel. Peggy Pickit is a scathing satire that highlights the complexity and intrinsic contradictions of the Western view of the African continent. It is part of Roland Schimmelpfennig's African Trilogy.
The play centers on Karen (Valentina Acca) and Martin (Aldo Ottobrino) who return home after spending six years working on the staff of an organization like Doctors Without Borders in an unspecified African country. Upon their return, they are invited to dinner by their old friends Liz (Valentina Curatoli) and Frank (Emanuele Valenti). The two couples had met in medical school, but from then on their lives had taken extremely different paths.
While Karen and Martin chose to provide medical care in places of extreme poverty, Liz and Frank instead practiced their profession pursuing more traditional goals: career, earnings, building a family. What binds them in this long distance is the presence of a little girl, Annie, whom Liz and Frank adopted from a distance, and whom Martin and Karen took care of during their stay in Africa. During dinner, alcohol begins to flow and brings out mutual misunderstandings and jealousies between the two couples.
The inert protagonists of the action unexpectedly become two dolls. The first, Peggy Pickit (which gives the work its name), is an expensive toy of Western manufacture intended by Liz and Frank for Annie, the other is a simple handmade wooden doll, brought as a gift from Africa by Karen and Martin for Katie, the biological daughter of their friends. The two dolls become the symbol of the enormous gap between the advanced capitalism of the Western world and the poverty of developing countries.
Credits:
PEGGY PICKIT – LOOK AT THE FACE OF GOD
by Roland Schimmelpfennig
translation by Marcello Cotugno and Suzanne Kubersky
with Valentina Acca, Valentina Curatoli, Aldo Ottobrino, Emanuele Valenti
direction soundtrack and lights Marcello Cotugno
