DALL'ALTRA PARTE

A house divided by a border, that men have drawn following a temporary truce, becomes a metaphor for waiting, for existing in suspension, poised between reality and illusion, a scenery where one can make out the remains of some old furniture, while voices, blasts, sirens, and the noises of a battlefield blare all around. Atom and Levana, survivors in this near-apo- calyptic landscape, are a tragicomical pair. This couple of dust-covered and worn spouses, looking like they have emerged from an old silent mo- vie, or a suitcase full of memories, tells us the story of their son, lost amidst the turmoil of a war of which they cannot even remember the name. Atom and Levana’s time goes by inside their small, broken, dented, worn-out house, as they constantly search for ways to deal with the absence of their beloved son and wait for his return to brighten their lives with hope again. There is a war, then, somewhere in the world, that creates and sustains

a condition of constant bewilderment; a condition in which Atom and Levana, compelled to live a monotonous routine of repetitive, mechanical actions, embody in fact an utterly human, contemporary condition. But despite the utter uncertainty that dominates their day-to-day life, Atom and Levana are driven by a constant desire to be reunited with their son, to reach the other side and rebuild their ideal of a united family, to find peace and closeness at last. Always on the brink of becoming a part of what was and is no more, Atom and Levana’s precarious existence must be constantly reinvented, using the only resource still available to them: imagination. And it is indeed thanks to their keen imagination that Atom and Levana manage to create a new life, dreaming up the most fantastic and bizarre things, to the point of believing that their worn-out clothes can embody their far-away son.

As for the structure of the pièce, in the director’s intention the time of the play is ideally broken down into ‘three acts’ (Always together; Borderland; Son), through which the main plot points of the story flow and overlap. A combination of theatre, dance, and puppetry, the performance strives to encode a hybrid theatrical language, where inanimate objects and the human body interact with one another and with the scene. This sort of interaction has the power to evoke different levels of reality that convey the themes of Dorfman’s play to inspire an in-depth reflection on the present day, on ourselves and our relationship with the world of today.