Misericordia

Anna, Nuzza and Bettina have a lot to deal with. The three Italian full-blooded mothers fight against poverty, are unprotected, living from knitting and offering up their bodies. They represent a female proletariat that is doubly and triply displaced to the edge in the patriarchally dominated shark tank that we call “society”.

Only one person is worse off, and that’s Arturo, the young autistic boy whose mother was murdered by his father. The three women take him in and are caring for him. Together, they basically create a Mother Courage character, somewhere between Bertolt Brecht, Pina Bausch and Maxim Gorki. But in contrast to the stranded people in Gorki’s NIGHT ASYLUM, Emma Dante’s heroes from daily life confront the violence around them with warmth and solidarity. They don’t beg for MISERICORDIA – for compassion – but the sacrifice themselves for a young individual who couldn’t survive save for their care.

The idea for the piece came to her when this theater author and director from Palermo, now well known throughout Europe, adopted a son and thus made the founding of a family into an act of solidarity. She then met a young autistic boy who kept on spinning around his own axis. Both experiences resulted in MISERICORDIA, carried by a feeling of community that is missing on a daily basis throughout the world. Dante leads us to the edge of a chasm but still provides us an optimistic piece, because Arturo, played by a professional dancer, is released into life at the end. Perhaps released to his own happiness… .

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