Loosely based on Nicola Lagioia’s bestselling novel, directed and adapted for the stage by Ivonne Capece, The City of the Living brings to the stage a descent into a moral hell that belongs not only to the protagonists, but to an entire society.

An absurd and brutal crime, one of the most shocking cases in recent Italian crime news, is turned into a play. The play is based on the murder of Luca Varani, which took place in Rome in 2016: two young men, seemingly well-integrated and with no apparent motive, tortured and killed a peer. Taking this real-life event as his starting point, Nicola Lagioia constructs a narrative investigation that does not seek simple explanations, but delves into the darkness of the human conscience, questioning the boundary between guilt and normality, between monstrosity and everyday life.
In La città dei vivi, Lagioia places at the centre not only the crime, but also Rome, which becomes a powerful metaphor for humanity: alive, sprawling, dark, capable of attracting and devouring. A city pulsating with desires, illusions, loneliness and failures, transforming itself into a true character on the stage.
The protagonists move within a spiral of fascination and repulsion, through sharp dramaturgy and a language that blends narrative, confession and testimony, calling on the audience to look where they would normally avert their gaze. 
The show plays on the alternation between presence and absence: the flesh-and-blood actors confront virtual presences, projections and holograms that expand the stage space, placing the action in a dimension suspended between theatre and video art.