Il teatro ai tempi della peste

A testimony of this suspended time, an optimistic approach for a transformation from forced paralysis to an opportunity for redemption.

In the millennial history of the theater, it is not the first time that the halls have been closed, with the prohibition of representing public performances. The plague has struck like a scourge since ancient times and the reaction of peoples and governments to its devastation has often led to the painful but perhaps inevitable choice of suspending every opportunity for gathering, first of all the live show, which naturally feeds on and proliferates by gathering, just like the virus. The reaction, confused and irrational, which overwhelmed the world of live entertainment between the end of February in Lombardy and the end of March 2020 throughout Italy and, after a while, throughout all the Western world, arises from the fact that in our memory the theaters of the West had never been closed. But, as we know, our memory is short, and dates back to a maximum of a century, while the history of theater has made twenty-five centuries, crossing times in which epidemics hit with much more frequency, and met more prepared peoples – especially from the psychological point of view – to face the inevitable periods of quarantine. Not always and not everywhere the choice was to close the theaters by banning their activity, but all the epidemics have shocked the world they have found, without exception. The theater has always been transformed and reinvented.