The young Alice Sinigaglia directs Madri, a play by the equally young playwright Diego Pleuteri, one of the most promising figures in contemporary drama: an intimate production, a tense dialogue between mother and son that explores the fragility of family ties, the weight of silences and the inability to communicate emotions.

A young man returns to visit his mother on a rainy afternoon. Upon entering the house, he finds the living room cluttered with boxes, scattered across the table, on the floor and on the chairs. Amidst the chaos, the woman moves about ceaselessly, talking non-stop. She is looking for an old newspaper article, read some time ago and then kept, in an attempt to recall the final words of a quote: “All that remains of intimacy is…?”. As if her life had remained suspended there, waiting to complete the sentence.
Before long, the son finds himself drawn into the search. Any resistance is futile: the pull of that forgotten word is too strong, even for him. Old photo albums, novels and small, unsettling cockroaches that are difficult to get rid of then emerge from the boxes. Suspended between dream and reality, between action and thought, mother and son sink into what we might call a collective unconscious, in an attempt to rediscover the lost words.
Madri was nominated for the 2025 Ubu Awards for best new Italian text or playwriting.

“Directing,” says Alice Sinigaglia, “works with words and therefore with sound, the most elusive of all stage elements (just as elusive as the tender uncertainty of the two characters). Whether polyphonic or monolithic, split or layered, a thorough and complex exploration of sound seeks to convey all the layers of thought—the true protagonist of this text. The dramaturgical and directorial devices merge; stage directions become dialogue, dialogue becomes thought, thoughts become monologues, and the monologues are heard by those who are meant to deliver them.”