Wit, the show on stage at the Teatro Due in Parma until 30 April, is eighty minutes of patient-doctor conversations, hospital neon lights and lines of poetry in which the comma is taken seriously: a quick and painless watershed between life and death . The poems are by John Donne: the eighteenth-century English poet, preacher and metaphysical scholar, that of “No man is an island.” The comma accabadora is contained in the ending of the tenth Sonnet: “And after a short sleep, we will be awake forever and Death will no longer be, Death you will die”. This verse is repeated, shaken in the still-ears of the spectators to distil the wit well (only partially translatable with the word “wit”), that is, a chilling and ironic paradox, an intuition which the moment it is grasped slips away again ( John Donne is a mine of wit, it is no coincidence that he often appears in the Baci Perugina showgirls).
The text staged is the first directed by the artistic director of the Due, Paola Donati (exterminated CV as a theater manager and teacher in Rome, Parma and Venice) who received it from Luca Fontana, who passed away a year ago, and it is the Pulitzer Prize winner for dramaturgy won in 1999 by Margaret Edson who wrote “Wit” to investigate the pain that accompanies the search for self-awareness during an illness, when the thirst for knowledge loses its share and needs to be tempered by sharing human relationships. She is also willing – in the end – to stop and open up to the “time of simplicity and sweetness” which does not offer scientific progress or even career leaps.
Rome, Top girls by Caryl Churchill at the Vascello theater: what happens if a manager, a concubine and a popess go to dinner together