Lo zoo di vetro

A play by the celebrated American playwright and screenwriter Tennessee Wiliams, the story, with a clear autobiographical imprint, tells the story of the Wingfield family consisting of the mother Amanda and her two children, Tom and Laura, a shy, limping girl.

Abandoned by her husband, Amanda has to face the difficulties, fears and anxieties arising from her desire to ensure a peaceful future for her children. A story that has become part of all our memories also thanks to numerous film versions; one of them being the one Paul Newman directed in 1987 starring Joanne Woodward and John Malkovich.

It is as if I were embarking on an amusing personal journey through the families of the theatre. After playing the role of the father Agamemnon in Antonio Latella's Holy Ecstasy in The Atrides - and after staging Ibsen's Spectres and The Alving Family's Hearth at the Venice Theatre Biennale, it seemed time to knock on the door of another House that was fundamental to my training: the Wingfields.

The Glass Zoo, the most autobiographical text by Tennessee Williams, allows me to continue this search among the most basic and elementary dynamics of our beginnings and to do so in an active manner, breaking down and touching without concern the universe proposed by the author. How does the family move through time? How does the theatre move between centuries? Bourgeois drama needs limits dictated (also) by love, and analysing the thickness of the walls that surround us from time to time remains my primary interest in this directing experience. Tom/Tennessee, like his father, learns the art of escaping, but still remains caged in an album of photographs, constantly living in limbo between times, and the only thing he can do to try to progress and reach a new place is to tell the audience a piece of his own story.

- Leonardo Lidi