Ciarlatani

Thursday 27 February 2025, 6.00 pm | Sala Musica – Teatro Donizetti

About CIARLATANI
Meeting with Silvio Orlando and the compagnia

The meeting Maria Grazia Panigada

charlatans

1. agg. colloq. He who pretends what he does not è or does not hear.
2. .
3. n. and f. desus. Theatre actor, especially of comedies.
4. .

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1.
Ciarlatani tells the story of two characters linked to the worlds of film and theatre.
Anna Velasco è an actress whose career has stalled. After acting in small productions of classical plays, she now works as a pilates teacher and does children's theatre at weekends. Between TV soap operas and alternative shows, Anna è is looking for the great character that will finally make her triumph.
Diego Fontana è a successful director of commercial films who is embarking on a big production: a series to be filmed all over the world, with international stars. An accident will lead him to face a personal crisis and to rethink his career.
These two characters are linked by the figure of Anna's father, Eusebio Velasco, a cult director of the 1980s, who has disappeared and is isolated from the world.

2.
Ciarlatani are also several works in one: each of these tales has a particular style, tone and form.
Anna's tale has an eminently cinematographic style, with a narrator who guides us, and in which dream and reality are confused. Diego's story is a more classical play, performed in more realistic spaces. And finally, there is, by way of pause or parenthesis, an autofiction in which the author of the play we are watching defends himself against accusations of plagiarism.
These stories are told in parallel, they feed off each other, they are mirrors of the same themes.
The whole is constructed with partly independent chapters, which form a structure closer to the novel than to the theatre. The intention is for Ciarlatani to be an eminently theatrical narrative, but with a novelistic and cinematographic aspiration.

3.
Finally, Ciarlatani è a play in which only four actors travel through dozens of characters, spaces and times. A satire on the world of theatre and audiovisuals, but also a reflection on success, failure and the roles we play, inside and outside fiction.

Pablo Remón