based on texts by Edith Wharton, translated by Chiara Lagani (Einaudi)

with Andrea Argentieri and Chiara Lagani
music, sound design, and sound direction by Luigi Ceccarelli
direction, set design, lighting, and video by Luigi Noah De Angelis
dramaturgy and costumes by Chiara Lagani
multimedia set construction by Voxel
voice recording by Riccardo Pasini (Studio 73)
musical contributions by Gianni Trovalusci (flutes), Diego Conti (violin), Paolo Ravaglia (clarinets)
organization and promotion by Andrea Martelli and Marco Molduzzi
administration by Stefano Toma
produced by E-Production, Ravenna Festival
in collaboration with Fabbrica Europa, L’arboreto – Teatro Dimora di Mondaino, and Istituti Culturali – Performing Arts of the Republic of San Marino

Year : 2025

A ghost, however, should not be allowed to forget that its only chance of survival lies precisely in the stories told by those who have encountered it—whether in reality or in imagination, and perhaps preferably the latter. For a ghost, it is far better to be vividly imagined than dully “experienced,” and no one knows better than a ghost how hard it is to be told in words that are both obscure and transparent.

— Edith Wharton, Ghosts

What is a ghost?
It’s the question that Edith Wharton poses in her final collection of short stories, aptly titled Ghosts. A ghost is a shadow, an essence, a foreign figure that inspires fear because it comes from an unknown world or a distant time. The ghost connects us with the threshold, with death, but also with the deepest part of ourselves.

In a pure, evocative, supernatural environment made of sounds, lights, and shadows, a man and a woman appear and disappear: they embody, in turn, the elusive characters of the five ghostly stories they will gradually recount.

A woman who has taken her own life finds herself in the afterlife. The gatekeeper asks what made her life so unbearable. “A husband deaf to my needs,” she replies. But now everything will change—she is destined for a perfectly happy love. But is that really what she wants?

A young man visits an older acquaintance. Upon arriving in the remote place where she lives, just before seeing her, he suddenly remembers hearing that the woman had become gravely ill and had died. And yet she appears before him, and though terrified, he speaks with her at length. Who is this person really?

A couple obsessed with ghosts buys a house inhabited by a spirit reluctant to show itself. Their lives are consumed by the desperate wait for the specter—but who or what are they really waiting for?

There’s also a couple worn down by time, routine, and the regret of not having had children. They’ve grown to detest each other. One evening, as they’re watching television, something terrible and unexpected happens. The arcane presence that appears in their home—is it a dream, a hallucination, or reality?

A married couple returns home after a long stay in another city. He doesn’t have long to live—he is ill—and she can’t wait to reach their family to find comfort. But during the train journey, the man dies. Gripped by the irrational terror of being made to disembark and finding herself alone, in an unfamiliar town, with her beloved husband’s corpse and the burden of dealing with all the bureaucratic formalities, the woman decides to hide his death from the other passengers. Will she manage to carry out her plan and endure this nightmare journey?

Between explosive apparitions, unexpected twists, and subtle unease, the universe of Edith Wharton—author of these tales—opens up before us and questions us on the meaning of endings, nostalgia, regret, remorse, fear, and the love for the invisible.

Premiere

Teatro Alighieri, Ravenna, Thursday, July 3, 2025, at 9:00 PM

Tour

July 3, 2025 | Ravenna Festival, Teatro Alighieri, Ravenna (WORLD PREMIERE)
October 2, 2025 | Fabbrica Europa Festival, Teatro Cantiere Florida, Florence

NEW DATES:

November 11,2025 | San Marino, Teatro Titano at 9:00PM

January 39, 2026 | Vicenza, Teatro Astra at 9:00 PM

ph. Marco Caselli Nirmal

MASSIMO MARINO, Doppiozero
MICHELE PASCARELLA, Gagarin Magazine

Ghosts, by Massimo Marino | Doppiozero, July 4, 2025

The new show by Fanny & Alexander also debuted at the Ravenna Festival, precisely at the same time as Einaudi released the collection Mrs. Manstey’s Window and Other Stories by Edith Wharton (430 pages, €22), translated by Chiara Lagani, who also wrote the dramaturgy and designed the costumes for the Ghosts production, performing alongside Andrea Argentieri. The sound — evoking mysterious atmospheres, overwhelming waves, misty landscapes, otherworldly calm, and decidedly horror-like screeches — is by Luigi Ceccarelli. The company states: “We called Luigi Ceccarelli, master and sculptor of sonic worlds, to design a panicked sound dimension that accounts for the many expressive and emotional registers of the ghost’s epiphany.” Direction, set design, lighting, and video are by Luigi Noah De Angelis.

Edith Wharton (1862–1937) lived and wrote at the end of the realist era, when new themes and new forms were transforming literature. In 1921, she won the Pulitzer Prize with what remains her most famous title, The Age of Innocence, later adapted to the screen by Martin Scorsese. Although she lacked the innovative power of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, her many novels and eighty-nine stories feel the urgency of new times. The Einaudi book collects stories written throughout her life and is organized by curator Lagani as a selection of her main themes. Among others, the writer favored the theme of ghosts, partly because of her connection with Henry James, who introduced her to literary society, and whose aestheticism she eventually distanced herself from, showing greater attention to social issues.

Especially in the shorter narratives, less compact than novels, Wharton felt free to explore new paths, so much so that Lagani writes in the introduction to the volume: “The stories are the black box of her existential journey: here all themes, experimental styles, poetic and political claims surface; here the autobiographical elements emerge most strongly.” And later: “Recurring themes are woman, social constraints and hypocrisies, ghosts, motherhood, death.”

From the book, the show extracts five stories, which reveal different ‘manifestations’ of ghosts — without sheets or chains, mainly as projections of the unconscious, of fears and desires.

Fog envelops the stage, revealing and hiding spaces that expand onto side screens and a luminous window, ready to host video apparitions or to dim, shrink, focus, and enlarge the places of action.

“However, the ghost should not be allowed to forget that its only chance of survival lies precisely in the stories of those who encountered it, whether in reality or imagination, and perhaps preferably the latter. For a ghost, it is much better to be vividly imagined […]” (Edith Wharton).

At the center of the five staged stories are five couples, with a mixed dramaturgical technique alternating dialogues and narrative passages, effectively conveying a sense of waiting, suspense, and exploration of that mirror of our anxieties represented by the specters of ghost stories. They are stories of unhappy relationships or mysteries buried in one member’s life, of misunderstood deaths and people—like Miss Mary Pask—transformed into grotesque doubles of the mother’s mummy in Psycho. There is a husband and wife who want to break the routine with something unexpected (a daughter in the story, a tiger bursting into the house in the play), only to find harmony again after the devouring beast leaves (or after the dictatorial daughter gets married). We find ourselves in a train compartment with a sick man traveling, cared for by his wife, and with the passing landscapes flowing by in acidic colors and shifts toward abstract images. When he dies in the berth, she doesn’t know what to do to avoid being left with the corpse on the station platform, and she conceals his death until arrival in New York, leading to a dramatic surprise ending.

The show’s tiger episode has funny moments thanks to the perfect timing of the actors, who in other moments manage to condense suspensions and fears, hysterical laughter and calm glances toward eternity, or transform into flickering electronic images in the back window, making the audience suspicious of their ectoplasmic nature. Atmospheres of danger are not lacking, such as the foggy night on the cliff near Miss Pask’s house, which reminds the visitor that (perhaps) the woman is dead. Sound, together with lighting, milky veils, and treated video images, creates an atmosphere of projection into an elsewhere that expands the viewer’s gaze, only to bring it back to very everyday stories, like that of a man haunted by the ghost of an old partner who caused his bankruptcy and suicide, enriching himself and leaving the city to live quietly in the countryside.

The elsewhere lurks behind, inside, beneath normality, and normality is ready to snatch any elsewhere, so the wife in the first scene, driven to suicide by the husband’s betrayal, later, invited by a silvery afterlife guardian to seek life’s pleasures, chooses to wait for her husband, the annoying (and reassuring) creak of his boots, the slam of the door.

Videos expand the vision, sound brings it inward, and Wharton’s texts create a magical short circuit between reality, imagination, joy, and the malaise of living, in a show of refined interweavings.

Source: Doppiozero

Being and Not Being: From Ghosts by Fanny & Alexander to Ministry Cuts and the Appointment of Elena Di Gioia
by Michele Pascarella | Gagarin Magazine, July 8, 2025

The word “ghost” derives from the Greek phántasma, which in turn comes from phaínesthai, meaning “to appear.” But even before that, phaínō means “I illuminate.”

A ghost, then, is not only that which manifests itself, but also an act of light: something that crosses the shadow for a moment and then withdraws.

An apparition, yes, but also a luminous sign that cracks the continuity of the visible.

An interruption.

A fissure.

It is in this twilight zone that Ghosts, the new work by Fanny & Alexander, takes place. It premiered on Thursday, July 3, at the Teatro Alighieri in Ravenna during the Ravenna Festival.

It is a show that literally speaks with the dead—not as a gothic exercise, but as a way of remaining faithful to absence.

In the opening moments, on the large screen in the backdrop, a pair of wings: uncertain, barely visible. An apparition that repeats but never fixes itself. It is a signal: we are inside a theater of retinal persistence. Where seeing means holding for a moment, then letting go.

Reading the Invisible

Ghosts arises from the stories of Edith Wharton, a U.S. writer of refined complexity, almost never included in the canonical realms of Italian theater. Her writing is inhabited by lateral forces, by unnoticed tensions: it works through omission, allusion, and echoes. It is a language where the unsaid weighs as much as what is expressed, where meaning is generated in the margins, in the backgrounds, in the connecting voids.

Chiara Lagani has intercepted this oblique energy and made a double creative gesture: on one hand, curating and translating the stories for Einaudi (2025), and on the other, the stage adaptation.

On stage, her voice is suspended, made of pauses that sound like sentences. A voice that moves forward by approximation, as if approaching something that can never be fully spoken.

Andrea Argentieri, in counterpoint, offers a more physical vocality, rooted in gesture and body vibration. He is a dense presence, anchoring the scene to an earthly matter, while Lagani’s voice tends toward evanescence.

Together they compose a binary system, balancing between manifestation and withdrawal, between the visible and its reflection, like a daguerreotype that holds for a moment the light of what no longer exists.

Luigi Ceccarelli’s sounds are presences themselves. They do not comment or accompany. They arrange themselves in space like concretions: sometimes tactile, sometimes abstract. They are lines of tension, sudden mists, resonances that pass through the body more than through the ear. Each sound is an apparition, a substance, a breath that leaves its mark.

Blurred Figures

In 1735, Alexander Baumgarten wrote that between concrete perception (sensualia) and the inner image (phantasmata) lies an elusive intermediate territory.

A mobile area of contact, where the here and now of seeing overlaps with the elsewhere of remembering.

It is in this interference zone, where nothing ever fully settles, that Luigi Noah De Angelis’s directorial intervention in Ghosts takes place.

Wharton’s stories are neither represented nor summarized: they are touched upon, traversed along lateral lines. It is a perimeter action that favors edges, drifts, and interstices. The stage does not become narrative but a sensitive place, a resonance.

From this emerges a theater that does not produce clear-cut figures but surfacings. It does not confirm but raises questions. The ghosts here are not silhouettes or apparitions: they are tensions, zones of density. What is shown is never fully visible, and precisely for this reason it remains.

“The ghost is a beacon that illuminates human consciousness for a moment,” was said during the post-show discussion. But it is an intermittent, imprecise beacon, incapable of fixing a meaning. It does not indicate a route, nor offer salvation. It exposes, for a brief instant, the surface of darkness. Then it withdraws.

Source: Gagarin Magazine