• Production: E / Fanny & Alexander In collaboration with: Solares delle Arti – Teatro delle Briciole
• Concept: Luigi De Angelis and Chiara Lagani
• Dramaturgy: Chiara LaganiSound
• Design: The Mad Stork
• Director: Luigi De Angelis
• With: Chiara LaganiSound
• Editing: Sergio Policicchio
• Costumes: Chiara Lagani and Simonetta Venturini
• Masks: Nicola Fagnani
• Promotion: Paola Granato and Marco Molduzzi
• Organization: Serena Terranova
• Logistics: Fabio Sbaraglia
• Administration: Marco Cavalcoli and Debora Pazienza

Year : 2013

Service : Performance

“But the credit for teaching one and a half million people to read and write through TV isn’t all mine. I was just the ‘TV puppet,’ the one who sparked people’s interest…”
— Alberto Manzi, on “Non è mai troppo tardi”

“So, what do you want to be when you grow up? Oh, a veterinarian? Really? And you, do you get involved in politics? No? I thought I heard you had some clear ideas already! No? Really?”
— Sandra Milo, “Piccoli Fans”

“You’ll have three traffic lights: Green means you’ll immediately go to the evening show. Red means you’re out of the program. Yellow means you’re still in the running, but we’re not sure about you yet.”— Maria De Filippi, “Amici”

“What exactly do we hate so much about TV culture? And why are we so immersed in it if we hate it so much?”— David Foster Wallace

Discorso Giallo raises questions about the complex nature of educational television. Is TV a good or bad teacher? From early efforts to combat illiteracy and educational deficits to programs showcasing children for adult entertainment, such as “Piccoli Fans,” and meritocratic talent shows like “Amici,” Chiara Lagani embodies a metamorphic figure—an emblematic adult/child, student/teacher/host. She personifies famous TV characters like Alberto Manzi, Sandra Milo, and Maria De Filippi in a concert-style performance.

Yellow signifies control and restriction: the referee’s caution card, road markings forbidding parking, or construction zones. It also represents waiting and uncertainty, as with a traffic light’s yellow signal. Bright and acidic, yellow illuminates human systems filled with potential and contradictions, sometimes casting a harsh light on the complexities and paradoxes of our educational and media cultures.

PAST DATES

• April 19, 2013 | Parma, Teatro delle Briciole (national preview)
• May 10/11, 2013 | Ravenna, Artificerie Almagià, Fèsta
• June 14/15, 2013 | Turin, Cavallerizza Reale, Festival delle Colline Torinesi
• June 18/19, 2013 | Milan, Teatro La Cucina, Da vicino nessuno è normale
• July 12-14, 2013 | Santarcangelo di R. (RN), Santarcangelo 13
• September 11, 2013 | Rome, Short Theatre
• December 13, 2013 | Vicenza, Teatro Astra
• February 8, 2014 | San Lazzaro di S. (BO), ITC
• February 21-24, 2014 | Milan, Teatro I
• February 28, 2014 / March 1, 2014 | Scandicci (FI), Teatro Studio
• June 21, 2014 | Gibellina (TP), Orestiadi
• November 19, 2016 | Terranuova Bracciolini (AR), Auditorium Le Fornaci

PRESS REVIEW

• Maria Dolores Pesce, “Discorso giallo. Discorso grigio”
• Osvaldo Guerrieri, “Grigia è la politica, gialla è la tv”
• Alessandro Fogli, “Discorso Giallo a Torino. Fanny & Alexander bacchettano la televisione”
• Maria Grazia Gregori, “Bambina in viaggio al termine della notte tv tra De Filippi e reality”
• Michele Pascarella, “Una Maria De Filippi da incubo. Conversazione con Chiara Lagani”
• Laura Gemini, “Educazione e televisione nel teatro riflessivo di Fanny & Alexander”
• Bruno Bianchini, “Educati dal tubo catodico. Il Discorso Giallo di Fanny & Alexander”

Discorso giallo. Discorso grigio, by Maria Dolores Pesce, dramma.it, June 2013

At the Festival delle Colline Torinesi 2013, on June 15 and 16, “Fanny & Alexander” presented these two stages of their dramaturgical project aimed at investigating discourse in the ways it has evolved and continues to evolve historically and aesthetically in relation to the forms of existence. A project that inevitably moves from syntax to the ultimate meaning of the word as a distinguishing sign of being human.

Two different moments of a single reflection opened in Turin, starting with “Discorso Giallo,” addressing the theme of pedagogical formation and the discourse that accompanies it. On stage, Chiara Lagani, excellent in her role, is both the ideator of the project (along with Luigi De Angelis) and the dramaturgist of the two moments. The dramaturgy plays and investigates the transformation and simplification of educational discourse as it becomes incorporated and dominated by the syntax of television, traced from “Non è mai troppo tardi” to “Amici.” Lagani insightfully points out that this transformation is not neutral but deeply alters the sense and direction of pedagogical discourse toward a progressive abandonment of the connection, feeling, and reason that could give it human substance. Pedagogy, and the distant reference to Maria Montessori, is evidence of this, veering toward coercion and prohibition, abandoning and forgetting what is “not simplifiable” and “controllable,” namely the feeling of existence that is the foundation of human essence and freedom.

With “Discorso Grigio,” political discourse is explored, which ideologically precedes and encompasses all other discourse as the main syntax of the “community.” This time, the protagonist is an excellent Marco Cavalcoli engaged in a hypothetical yet very concrete presidential address to the nation, where, through effective insertions of famous and lesser-known political figures, the “nation,” as a community of free and aware individuals, practically disappears, diminished by the simplifications of a modernizing and televisual discourse that cuts away and abandons.

There is, in my view, a conscious common sign in both dramaturgies, the discovery that the syntax and the very word of our contemporaneity, diminished and simplified, exhausted in its very sense of Sanguineti’s intuition, neglects, almost willingly abandons, part of our humanity—those parts that constitute the sense of our existence in a freedom that makes the connection with others a springboard for knowledge.

Excluded from communal discourse, this part of us does not evolve into words and therefore cannot be recognized nor recognized, but does not disappear. It remains in the sense of anxiety we feel in front of the emptiness that is proposed and imposed on us, remains in the background noise surrounding the empty stage, in the beautiful music accompanying both dramaturgies. It remains hidden behind a mask, which, devoid of joy, on stage appears more as an instrument of oppression, even physical torture, rather than a liberating carnival.

Chiara Lagani and Marco Cavalcoli are excellent at expressing this anguishing divide in the sense of distance and sometimes repulsion in their acting bodies in relation to the words they painfully carry, in their sudden shifts, in repeated ticks, in forcing their voices into tonalities that both reproduce the deceit of the word and simultaneously reveal it.

It is a mimetic effort that also manifests as physical struggle and constitutes a test of great acting maturity. It is a word and a discourse that, structurally, is no longer able to reveal but only to censor and cut away parts of our essence and existential awareness. The theatre thus appears as the last place, for Fanny & Alexander, to attempt a shared awareness of this painful significant shift, which, from sign-like, becomes concretely and anxiously existential.

Given that resistance is necessary, and perhaps rebellion, will we be able to do it? This is a question that runs through both dramaturgies, and probably the entire project, denouncing the danger of a world where everything becomes external to us and thus abandons us to anxiety.

It is a contemporaneity in which the strength of such deprivation seems invincible, but against which it is worth opposing, once again, an ancient and effective thought: <<If ever it happens, to please someone, that you turn to external things, you will have lost, be sure of it, your moral program. Therefore, in every circumstance, content yourself with being a philosopher, and if you want to appear as a philosopher, show yourself as such to yourself, and you will be able to do so.>> (Epictetus, Manual).

Given the depth of exploration by the two dramaturgists, and the acting wisdom in handling the body and stage movements by Chiara Lagani and Marco Cavalcoli, the skilled direction of Luigi De Angelis, and the excellence of all those, technicians and assistants, involved in the project, particular mention should be made of the sound design, whose unquestionable dramaturgical effectiveness we have already noted, by The Mad Stork.

Grigia è la politica, gialla è la tv, by Osvaldo Guerrieri, La Stampa, June 2013

Do you remember Rimbaud’s “The Vowels”? The poet of Illuminations linked a color to each vowel in an attempt to create a monochromatic poem. The same approach is proposed by the Fanny & Alexander company, which, in Discorso, creates a theatrical series of six colors connected to different aspects of our life. At the Festival delle Colline, we saw the first two creations, Gray and Yellow, focused on politics and educational television, respectively.

In the project by Luigi De Angelis and Chiara Lagani, there is nothing mimetic, no “acting as if.” Everything is based on communication models that, through their allusiveness or mellowness, should shape and guide a country. Gray is a patchwork of clichés and rhetoric that does not distinguish between ideologies. The words are all the same—absurd, mechanical (and true). Yellow starts with teacher Manzi, continues with Sandra Milo’s “Piccoli fans,” and ends with Maria De Filippi’s Amici. While early TV fought illiteracy, the latter invades the first and contaminates it.

In Gray, actor Marco Cavalcoli portrays a sort of puppet directed through a headset, engaged in a kind of sonic-gestural concert from which recognizable public figures emerge: Berlusconi, Di Pietro, Bersani, etc. It is up to Chiara Lagani to dive into the TV jargon and travel through the integrated, without being apocalyptic. She, as a schoolgirl sitting at her desk, looks at us, presses a button on the remote control, and turns us off. Only then can the show begin.

Discorso Giallo a Torino. Fanny & Alexander bacchettano la televisione, by Alessandro Fogli, Corriere di Romagna, June 2013

The second and final performance tonight at the Festival delle Colline Torinesi of the national debut of Discorso Giallo, the show with which the Ravenna company Fanny & Alexander continues the “Discorsi” project, now dedicated to the theme of education, specifically the pedagogical discourse of television. In Discorso Giallo, Chiara Lagani embodies, in a concert-like style, an emblematic adult/child, now a pupil, now a teacher, and finally a host, subject and object of several famous TV programs always intertwined and overlapped. The TV figures portrayed include teacher Alberto Manzi from Non è mai troppo tardi, Sandra Milo and her “Piccoli fans,” up to Maria De Filippi.

As the audience enters the show, the portrait of Maria Montessori, engraved on the famous thousand-lira note, greets them. A great figure in the history of pedagogy, the educator is now a face, an icon, a mask. After the preview in Ravenna at Fèsta, Discorso Giallo finds its more definitive form and continues beyond its hometown to other festivals and theaters. After Turin, the company will head to Milan on June 18-19 for the “Da vicino nessuno è normale” festival, curated by Olinda, an artistic institution that has revived the spaces of the Ex Ospedale psichiatrico Paolo Pini, gaining cultural relevance and intervention across Italy, as well as in the Lombard capital.

The first phase of Discorso Giallo’s tour will conclude in Santarcangelo di Romagna at the International Theatre Festival in Piazza, where Fanny & Alexander will present multiple special projects, including several performances of the show. Chiara Lagani, dramaturg and performer of the new work, will lead two children’s workshops, continuing the “Pianeta Giallo” project that was started in Ravenna earlier this year.

Bambina in viaggio al termine della notte tv tra De Filippi e reality
by Maria Grazia Gregori, L’Unità, June 2013

But is TV a good or bad teacher? Having reached the second stage of their investigation into the relationship between the individual and the world around them, focusing on forms of public discourse, Fanny & Alexander, after exploring politics in Discorso Grigio, now addresses Discorso Giallo, which examines the theme of the formation of a society increasingly dependent on television models. On stage, there is always a single character with many faces. In the first part, it was Marco Cavalcoli, presenting with harshness the Berlusconi-era drift of the country. Here, it is Chiara Lagani, the ironic, sparkling, and cruel protagonist of a journey in which, by choosing key moments of manipulation from behavioral models, she stigmatizes the disastrous allure of reality TV.

In a dark scene, a spotlight illuminates only the desk where a young girl sits, wearing a black apron, a white collar, a yellow bow, and blonde hair tied in pigtails. She watches us in silence. It is a dive into the past that begins its journey to transform into our present, marked by TV programs that show how the small screen has influenced our way of feeling. With her remote control, the girl is the deus ex machina of herself, a student, a teacher, a host. She is the one who, changing her mannerisms, clothes, and shoes in full view, throws herself into time, assuming different identities. Here she transforms, wearing a large collar and a black tie, with metallic voice inputs, into the famous teacher Manzi from Non è mai troppo tardi, a 1960s program designed to fight national illiteracy (“If we want to conquer slavery and ignorance, we must study”), with listening groups in bars, churches, and even prisons. But it takes little for the acrobatic Chiara Lagani to change her skin and rush—amid giggles, Jessica Rabbit-style gestures, and a red bow matching her lips—into the universe of Piccoli fans, a place where little monsters grow, hosted in the 1980s by Sandra Milo with her microphone, asking questions to children, whose counterpart are the reflections of a child interviewed by director Silvano Agosti in his documentary on love. Then, the actress transforms into the child/child-like figure chewing gum, speaking in her own way, saying terrible truths about the contrasting worlds of adults/children and opposing war in the name of a “magical life,” where studying isn’t exactly a priority.

Our Virgilio in a skirt explodes in an elementary behavioral dance, a kind of bodily alphabet of animal, masculine, and feminine gestures, almost in real-time becoming Maria De Filippi: from Piccoli fans to the talent show and the so-called “traffic light rule.” Lagani recreates her gestures, suggests the typical voice, and the attitude of command. And here, in this world, where to succeed you must always cheat someone else, the adjective “yellow” in the title reveals its meaning: like a traffic light, yellow is the waiting, the limbo that is neither fish nor fowl, where everything or nothing is possible between despair and disillusionment.

A striking moment occurs with the impossible dialogue between two Maries—the lady of talent shows and the one depicted on the thousand-lira note, Maria Montessori, who concludes this disorienting and fascinating performance, intelligently staged by Luigi De Angelis. We hear her distant voice recounting her travels in India after breaking with fascism, while Chiara Lagani transforms into her puppet, wearing the huge rubber head representing the face of the educator. An unsettling puppet, but also a totem behind which appears the face of a child-woman with an empty gaze. Then, darkness. Only her laughter remains. And the anticipation for the next episodes.

Una Maria De Filippi da incubo. Conversazione con Chiara Lagani
by Michele Pascarella, gagarin-magazine.it, June 13, 2013

MP: Three words to summarize Discorso Giallo?
CL: Education, television, and yellow.
MP: Why?
CL: “Education” is the context of this work, the second step in our project on Discourses: six shows that, starting from the rhetorical form of public discourse, aim to interrogate the relationship, today certainly in crisis, between the individual and society. Two of these shows already exist, while the other four are in the works. The first area of human research was politics, with the show Discorso Grigio, performed by Marco Cavalcoli. This second step, Discorso Giallo, is performed by me, where I engage on stage with a kind of dreamlike, incubatory class. “Television” because this project, exploring the toxicity of the contemporary, made us think about what passes, whether rightly or wrongly, under the name of education, in the most invasive media of our culture. Each of the Discourses is associated with a color, which symbolically characterizes it, opening a semantic area. “Yellow” is the color used when something needs to be forbidden: yellow lines on the road, the yellow card in soccer. But it is also associated with the sun, with light. And its opposite: yellow also refers to something harsh, something that blinds and therefore causes pain. For me, this color carries a specific temperature in the work.

MP: Can you tell us about your experience as an actress in this specific work?
CL: Discorso Giallo, like the first show in the project, is characterized by a device we call “hetero-direction,” which involves being passed through by a text that reaches the actor via an earpiece. These are voices of characters from current or recent history: in this case, from the history of TV and television pedagogy. We have Alberto Manzi, the teacher from Non è mai troppo tardi, Sandra Milo with Piccoli fans, and even Maria De Filippi from Amici. The actor must make space inside themselves for these characters, allowing their voices to leave an imprint on their way of speaking and gesturing. It is very different from imitation: here, it’s about welcoming a strong human temperature, letting oneself be crossed by this energy, sometimes toxic, sometimes positive, and then returning it to the outside. It’s a process quite different from what I’ve done in other shows, and it requires a complete surrender to this kind of device. And it’s also a lot of fun for the person on stage.

MP: Speaking of education, it’s easy to get to the question of teachers. Who do you recognize as such?
CL: There are three types of teachers: those of your travel companions, those of the fundamental historical figures of theater, and those of unfamiliar figures you encounter by chance and from whom you can learn essential teachings.

MP: Those are the “unconscious masters” Grotowski referred to.
CL: Exactly. For each of us, for example, these are the family figures: we unconsciously carry within us their voices, their wisdom.

MP: There are some obvious parallels between the first two shows of the Discorsi project.
CL: Besides the fact that they are monologues performed by the actor, a characteristic common to the entire project, there are at least two big parallels between Discorso Grigio and Discorso Giallo, which may or may not recur in the upcoming episodes. The first is the hetero-direction, being crossed by a voice: for us, it’s a metaphor for the fact that certain issues, certain thoughts, reach us unwittingly, often unconsciously, especially because we are all exposed, to varying degrees, to the influence of television. The second is at a rhetorical level: if you analyze these two works from a dramaturgical perspective, you can easily see that they are built in the same way. There is an initial moment of preparation, a development that leads to an emotional peak of gestures only, and finally the appearance of the character-mask, a kind of archetype that summarizes the issues raised by the show.

MP: One of the offspring of this work, the live radio drama Giallo, will debut at the Santarcangelo Festival in July. Speaking of the “incubatory class” you mentioned earlier, was there an explicit thought of Tadeusz Kantor and his La Classe morta during the preparation of Giallo?
CL: Sure, I kept it very much in mind, reading it and looking at images from that show: you can’t disregard that idea, which marked the history of 20th-century theater, when working on what “education” means in today’s human society. But I wouldn’t say there is a direct derivation. Of course, in the live radio drama, which is the dialogue between me and a ghostly class, at an archetypal or even symbolic level, the weight of La Classe morta can certainly be felt.

MP: What do you mean by “live radio drama”?
CL: Something that works on the radio dramaturgical level: there are voices, sounds, and the physical presence of an actress on stage, tangible elements that, however, refer to an elsewhere, to something that is not there. The live radio drama constantly alludes to the radio component, which ontologically contrasts with the presence, the hic et nunc, which is characteristic of theater.

MP: Does this positioning between here and elsewhere also invite the audience to reflect on the quality of their gaze, an encouragement to “watch themselves watching”?
CL: Definitely. In my workshops with actors, I always use Gilles Deleuze’s metaphor of the sentinel who stands watch inside the sleeper: a sort of attentive abandonment, which should be the attitude of the actor on stage. Even at the level of education, you could answer affirmatively: just think of Maria Montessori’s wonderful theory of self-education, where, with the humble wisdom of a sage, she claims that the process of formation is so delicate and mysterious that it can only be observed from the outside, as a witness to something that happens autonomously. I like to apply this Montessori idea to the audience as well: someone who questions the gaze, who lets a phenomenon happen, and at the same time, guards it with the quality of their gaze, thus making it meaningful.

Education and Television in the Reflective Theater of Fanny & Alexander, by Laura Gemini, incertezzacreativa.wordpress.com, July 18, 2013

Discorso Giallo (Yellow Discourse) is among the performances in the first week of Santarcangelo 13 and is the second stage of the Discorsi project—comprising 6 performances and 6 radio plays (including Giallo. Radiodramma dal vivo during the Festival)—by Fanny & Alexander, which investigates the forms of public discourse and its various expressions: political, pedagogical, religious, trade union, legal, and military, each associated with a color-symbol. While grey is linked to politics in the “first episode of the series,” Discorso Grigio (Grey Discourse), yellow is attributed here to education.

The colors of discourse are emblematic flags on one hand, while on the other, they represent colors of a denotative language that is not immediately decipherable. Yellow, in human symbols, is the color of prohibition and coercion (yellow lines, yellow card, yellow traffic light); on the other hand, if you say yellow, you see light, the sun, childhood. But yellow is also acidic, blinding, painful (Chiara Lagani).

For F&A, education, as an area of both individual and collective experience, is not limited to the traditional agencies responsible for the formation, growth, and identity of the individual, but also pertains to the media system, particularly television. Television is understood here as an environment for socialization and the development of a rhetorical form, much like Discorso Grigio with politics, of extraordinary effectiveness.

The dramaturgical device can first be described as the sequencing of modes and expressive styles of three television figures, who in F&A’s spectator and generational history, can be considered the emblems of both societal transformations and the television that narrates them.

Chiara Lagani gives life to the three figures that allow the reconstruction of the social history of the televisual educational rhetoric. The first is Alberto Manzi, better known as the teacher from the show Non è mai troppo tardi (It’s Never Too Late), aired on Rai1 from 1959 to 1968, an expression of that early television era with an openly pedagogical vocation. This mission drastically changed in the 1980s with the development of new televisual languages and pure entertainment, epitomized by Piccoli Fans (Little Fans) on Rai2 from 1983 to 1984, hosted by Sandra Milo. It then evolved into a new form of pedagogical characteristic, with all the ambiguity that the media and television world can express, embodied by Maria De Filippi and her show Amici.

Thus, Discorso Giallo can be considered an additional element of what, as I’ve previously emphasized, could be defined as a reflective theater, one that uses contemporary elements both aesthetically and content-wise with great awareness. For these reasons, it stands as a sociologically interesting theater, capable of providing observation parameters that are not necessarily “realistic,” but suitable for building meta-commentaries on the world—our world—that are essential for the reflective quality of the performance.

I had the pleasure of discussing this and many other issues with Chiara Lagani in a long and enlightening conversation/interview, of which I will present an excerpt related to the definition of Discorso Giallo as an example of reflective theater.

LG: Discorso Giallo seems to have all the characteristics needed to define it as “reflective theater,” using a concept that, recognizing reflexivity as a quality the theater has always had, serves to characterize the tendency of a part of contemporary theater to confront “reality.” I wanted to start here: if such an urge really exists, where does this new need come from?

CL: I must say that I am struck by the choice of the word “reflective,” because it retrieves an almost etymological meaning of theater and also of our Discorsi project. Each of the discourses, beyond their outcomes and different forms/colors, explicitly expresses the will to serve as a mirror for the audience, reflecting, even if only for a moment, the image of a community that sees itself in it, even in a horrific way, because it is still an investigation into the toxicity of the contemporary. This aspect is already evident in Discorso Grigio, which stages, through the body of an actor, the faces, words, rhetorics, and methods of politics over the last twenty years that somehow mirror a cultural system we are all involved in.

Discorso Giallo speaks of the televisual imaginary, of which we are all deeply soaked, beyond our will. The figures that pass through the actors’ bodies on stage come from the world of politics and television entertainment, from our deep cultural terrain and our daily imaginative horizon. They speak of the material we are made of, of what stirs in the remotest and deepest parts of our psychic universe, inextricably mixed with dreams, archetypes, and memories. Therefore, the term you’ve chosen—reflective theater—seems to point to this willingness, capacity, and possibility of theater to act as a mirror, starting from many types of material: from a text, a myth, history, as well as from reality. (Chiara Lagani).

Educated by the Cathode Tube: Discorso Giallo by Fanny & Alexander, by Bruno Bianchini, klpteatro.it, June 17, 2013

From a tool in the fight against illiteracy to a global medium spreading a new kind of illiteracy? What would the late Alberto Manzi think today, the protagonist in the 1960s of an educational and public service TV, internationally imitated for its proven usefulness?

In Discorso Giallo by Fanny & Alexander, we witness the fragmented wavelengths of edu-cathodic grammars from over fifty years of Italian television history. The woman-child Chiara Lagani, in a black apron, a slave to the remote control, flips through channels and spews words, alternating the sublime and the nauseating, from Manzi to Maria Montessori (the flyer for the show even features Montessori on the old thousand-lira note), passing through Franck, the child from Silvano Agosti’s D’amore si vive, and ending with Sandra Milo and Maria De Filippi.

The succession of scenes presents Lagani transforming, possessed in turn by monstrous televisual deities: the prima donna with eerie sound effects, constantly searching for the spotlight; the ‘little fans’ genetically engineered by some Frankenstein doctor to be ‘little repulsive adults’; the ‘powerful woman of the powerful,’ who elevates the tyranny of public judgment in yet another talent show to a meritocratic dogma, where the contestant’s fate is decided by a traffic light: green for go, red for home, yellow… the limbo of uncertainty, suspended judgment, the humiliation of going home anyway, but perhaps suffering a little more.

Three pieces of Italian television history (Manzi/Milo/De Filippi), when ordered chronologically and reflected in the present, produce, in three words, an evolution of mass pedagogy as an escalation of shudders: literacy, mushiness, antagonism.

Discorso Giallo takes on a delicate torch passed from Discorso Grigio, the first of the six tracks that will make up the ambitious project of Fanny & Alexander on the rhetorical form of discourse, brilliantly interpreted by Marco Cavalcoli, and which, about a year after its debut, has achieved almost perfect scenic effectiveness.

We admire the Ravenna-based company for its ability to defy conventions (whether contemporary theater conventions or their own previous research paths), abandon tulle in the trunk, and take risks, showing their muscles with complex, programmatic projects like this. The next four—celeste/religious, rosa/syndical, viola/legal, rosso/military—will be entrusted to the bodies and voices of Lorenzo Gleijeses, Francesca Mazza, Fabrizio Gifuni, and Sonia Bergamasco.

The performance interpreted by Chiara Lagani highlights, at certain moments of this debut, some rigidity in the blend of words, gestures, and characters, as if the flow of vibrations had not yet fully spread along the actress’s spine to generate the shocks needed to create the desired short circuit. Moreover, an additional shift is necessary to definitively free itself from the risky satirical inclinations (which it balances cleverly, as shown in the previous episode) and instead plunge as deeply as possible into the grotesque recesses of this powerful and lethal (for anyone, even those who don’t watch it) tool of education toward “criminal stupidity” that is television.

We are, after all, drug addicts who continue to proclaim our hatred for what we cannot live without (television today, mobile technologies tomorrow?).

Let’s close with a question for good old Manzi, if he’s listening from above: “Is it ever too late” to curve the parabola of a new literacy season upwards? Perhaps this too will happen—he might answer us—but perhaps not thanks to television; and not before Montessori’s thousand-lira notes complete their metamorphosis into new, shiny fifty-euro bills featuring the image of Belen Rodriguez.