On Friday 19 April at 21.00:14 pm, Fine pena Ora will be coming to the stage of the Teatro Civico 34 in Caserta, the story of an impossible friendship, a correspondence that lasted XNUMX years between a life prisoner and the judge who sentenced him.
On stage, Salvatore D'Onofrio, Costanza Maria Frola, Giuseppe Nitti. Based on the true and autobiographical story, described in the homonymous text by Elvio Fassone, magistrate and former member of the Superior Council of the Judiciary, the dramaturgy of the show, adapted and directed by Simone Schinocca, was born from a series of interviews made to Fassone in which the author recounts the evolution of his friendship with the lifer Salvatore in the years following the publication of the book.
The show is co-produced by Tedecà and the Teatro Stabile di Torino – Teatro Nazionale in collaboration with the Festival delle Colline Torinesi. Tickets are €12 (full price); €10 (concessions) for those under 30 and over 65. Tickets can also be purchased online at www.teatrocivico14.it.
At the heart of the adaptation is the human encounter between the President and Salvatore. Two apparently irreconcilable worlds, opposite and contrasting, even if the two men, in 34 years of correspondence, become a point of reference for each other. The words of Fassone's book have been enriched by an interview, in which the magistrate tells what happened in the ten years following the publication of the text, how his relationship with Salvatore has changed and how even today, this story struggles to find a solution. From this long interview, the incipit of the show is born: it is the sleepless night before yet another hearing for Salvatore's conditional release. 38 years of waiting, which are condensed into a dream, in which Salvatore retraces letter after letter his relationship with the President. Salvatore and the President have been writing to each other for 34 years, but have never met again. Salvatore has sent some photos of himself to the President, Fassone has not. In this dream, the President appears as young as he was 38 years ago, at the time of the trial. Salvatore could not imagine him differently, and the viewer, instead, sees a sixty-year-old Salvatore, tormented by yet another hope that that “never-ending sentence” could become an “end-ending sentence now”.
“We chose to bring out in our adaptation the figure of Rosi, the woman who for 20 years accompanies Salvatore on a pilgrimage from prison to prison throughout Italy,” says Schinocca. Rosi becomes the emblem of waiting, a contemporary Penelope who with her presence helps and assists Salvatore in untying the knots of his labors and his change. Precisely by immersing oneself in Rosi’s study, a sacred iconographic image resurfaced in the mind, a simple and disarming image for its communicative power. A Madonna who has a rope full of knots, which in her hands becomes a rope free from obstacles and constraints. From this image comes the inspiration for the scenographic setting: a cell full of ropes, snares, laces and objects forbidden and banned in prisons, because they could become nooses with which to take one’s life. In Salvatore’s dream dimension, the banned object fills the space, crowded with knots to be untied. The dream accompanies the viewer in Salvatore’s cell, throughout his 38 years of detention. In the reconstruction of a new possible life, Fine pena ora speaks to our lives and becomes a universal message, because a space of humanity and hope is always possible, even when everything seems to suggest the opposite”.
