Prose Season 2025-2026

Long journey into the night
with Gabriele Lavia and Federica Di Martino
April 11 to 19 at the Donizetti Theatre

After a plunge into commedia dell’arte with Harlequin Dumb for Fright by the Stivalaccio Teatro company, the Donizetti Theater Foundation’s Prose Season 2025-2026 opens a window on the best American theater in its variety of proposals, hosting in the city’s main theater from Saturday, April 11 to Sunday, April 19, Long Journey to Night., a masterpiece by American playwright Eugene O’Neill. Bringing it to the stage will be one of the pillars of Italian theater, Gabriele Lavia, who also signs the direction, and Federica di Martino, assisted on stage by Jacopo Venturiero, Ian Gualdani and Beatrice Ceccherini.

A meeting around the show with Gabriele Lavia and company is scheduled for Thursday, April 16, 2026, at the Music Room of the Donizetti Theater at 6 p.m. Coordinated by Maria Grazia Panigada, Artistic Director of the Prose Season and Other Paths.

Long Journey to Night is considered-along with Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman and Tennessee Wiliams’ A Streetcar Named Desire-to be one of the greatest masterpieces of 20th-century American theater. Written by Eugene O’Neill between 1941 and 1942, it was first performed in Stockholm in 1956 and won the Pulitzer Prize the following year after the author’s death. Sidney Lumet directed its first film adaptation in 1962, starring Katharine Hepburn and Ralph Richardson. Set in 1912, the powerful and poignant drama recounts a day in the life of the Tyrone family, amid conflict, addiction and painful secrets. Gabriele Lavia and Federica Di Martino bring to the stage this work-confession, “a backward journey” through O’Neill’s life, a pitiless precipice into the bitterness of failure without redemption.

Gabriele Lavia himself writes in the director’s notes, “The prison-house of the “bad family” that O’Neill tells us about is, after all, his own home. And therein lies the winding path of a possible mise-en-scene-travel of this truly bitter work, written by O’Neill now close to death to take a “backward journey” through his life. An unapologetic journey inside the bitterness of failure without redemption. Men’s lives are made up of tenderness and violence. Of Love and contempt. Understanding and rejection. Of family and its ruin.”