What happens when the enemy you fear knocks on your door? Elisabetta Pozzi is the protagonist of this powerful text by Dorfman together with Gigio Alberti and Giuseppe Sartori. A powerful theatrical allegory on the border, which unmasks the absurdity of fear of the other and of the walls that divide us.

Directive notes

In a modest house in the middle of the mountains, a couple survives by identifying and burying soldiers, anonymous victims of an ongoing war. The sudden announcement of its conclusion is the event that changes the rhythm and habits of the two characters, in a crescendo of situations that reach the absurd and even the ridiculous. But it is the arrival of a third character and the border that brings with it that changes everything: from that moment on, the demarcation line will cross between the house, the bed, the couple. Ariel Dorfman is an author of Argentinian birth, of Jewish origin, but with a life lived elsewhere. I, of Istrian and Lebanese origins, born in Argentina, share with Dorfman the love for ambiguity and the complexity of the gaze that distances us from the reality we are told by the media, so simplified that we feel the need to distance ourselves from it, fearful and turned back into children, protected by a vision of the State. With The Other Side, we will take a journey towards the archetype, towards the action that determines a horizon, towards a comic tragedy, an oxymoron that will evoke the evil games of war, that will talk about survival and borders, real and metaphysical. An allegory of the wall that separates good from bad, husband from wife, child from parents, past from present, lie from truth. Grotesque and paradoxical, the play accompanies us to experience our most intimate fears in a homey yet enigmatic and mysterious setting, a house divided in half, and at the same time a daily life immersed in the din of war. The characters in The Other Side live in a house in a place of war, yet this place is not defined by the author. Here, those who immerse themselves in this story will be able to name this place, will be able to name things, facts, events. They will be able to interpret and perhaps recognise the ambiguity that The Other Side places before the spectators.

Marcela Serli