Dramaturgy, costumes: Chiara Lagani | Direction, lighting, sound design: Luigi De Angelis | Featuring Chiara Lagani | Artwork: Eleanor Shakespeare | Architecture, multisource software, sound curation, technical supervision: Vincenzo Scorza | Organization, promotion: Maria Donnoli, Marco Molduzzi | Production: E Production/Fanny & Alexander | Thanks to: Ateliersi, Giovanni Cavalcoli, Silvia Veroli

In Maternità, based on Sheila Heti’s story, a woman questions, in front of an audience seated before her, what holds her back from bringing a child into the world. It’s not a monologue, but rather a strange form of dialogue, suspended between an assembly-like dimension and a play with chance. Faced with the most difficult questions, Sheila addresses the people in the room, who have been given a small remote control with which to respond to her queries. The answers are projected rapidly onto a screen suspended above the stage in an oppressive binary code: everything is yes or no, everything is white or black. Yes and no carry the tone of obsession, stubbornness, and a strange unraveling of the protagonist’s soul, who, while questioning herself with irony and ferocity on such a pivotal issue, stretches her reasoning to excess, occasionally breaking the veil of modesty and leading us to reflect on the value of choice

The dialogue with the audience fluctuates between empathy and judgment, projecting intimate and universal questions onto the text on controversial, long-standing themes..

TOUR

Debut:

July 8-9, 2023, Inequilibrio, Teatro Solvay, Rosignano Solvay (LI)
September 4, 2023, Le Città Visibili, Rimini
September 22, 2023, Mercurio Festival, Palermo
December 12-13, 2023, Fèsta 2023, Ridotto del Teatro Rasi, Ravenna
December 22, 2023, Teatri di Vetro, Teatro India, Rome
April 13-14, 2024, Angelo MAI, Rome
June 13-14, 2024, Da vicino nessuno è normale, Olinda, Milan
September 6, 2024, Festivaletteratura Mantua, Teatro Pagano, Canneto sull’Oglio (MN)
December 5, 2024, Piccolo Teatro, Padua
December 14-15, 2024, Galleria Toledo, Naples
January 17-19, 2025, Teatro Arena del Sole, Bologna
January 31, February 1, 2025, Teatro Rasi, Ravenna
March 22, 2025, Teatro Koreja, Lecce

Year : 2023

Service : Soundtrack, Set and lighting design

Ph. Antonio Ficai @ Inequilibrio Festival

Press Review

MATTEO BRIGHENTI, Pac
SABRINA FASANELLA, Teatro e Critica
ALESSANDRO IACHINO, Doppiozero
FRANCESCA DE SANCTIS, L’Espresso
ANTONELLA LATTANZI, La Lettura – Corriere della Sera
FEDERICA ANGELINI, Ravenna e Dintorni
NADIA TERRANOVA, La Stampa
MICHELE PASCARELLA, Gagarin Magazine
ELISABETTA AMBROSI, Il Fatto Quotidiano
LISA BENTINI, La Falena
SARAH PERRUCCIO, Letterate Magazine
CHIARA MOLINARI, Theatron 2.0
ELENA CIRIONI, Banquo Magazine
CAROLINA GERMINI, Limina Teatri
FEDERICA ANGELINI, Reclam

Inequilibrio 2023: “Mettersi in gioco è tutto,” by Matteo Brighenti | PAC, July 19, 2023

Theater, when it is needed, asks you a question. It hands it to you, entrusts it to you as a matter of vital importance, because it has everything to do with your life. It asks how you are living it and, most importantly, how you can change it to be more yourself, or rather, to become more yourself. This theater is a mirror of nature: yours. And not of now, but of tomorrow.

At the 2023 Inequilibrio Festival by the Armunia Foundation, between Castiglioncello and Rosignano Marittimo (Livorno), under the exclusive artistic direction of Angela Fumarola for the first time, the shows I attended left me with this question: “When will you find the courage to tell yourself completely?”

However, now that I read it again, it doesn’t seem exactly like this. Something is missing, like a dream told, when awake, the morning after. It’s there, but not entirely. This is the form I can give it now, to share it here. It’s its echo, so to speak. Because theater doesn’t question you with words: it questions you through emotions, through sensations.

[…]

There is not just one story; there are stories, which have as their mother the ability to say what is seen and, conversely, to see what is said. Our contribution is to support and reciprocate that gaze. It’s the canonical way for an audience to be in any theater. The Fanny & Alexander company, in their Maternità, gives us the opportunity to express ourselves even through voting.

We can choose, or rather contribute to choosing the directions of the performance, indicating possible outcomes, endings, solutions, through a small remote control given to us at the entrance. While the narrative follows that written by Sheila Heti in her book of the same name, the result of the voting is not decided by you or me, but by the majority. That is, the representation of the power of common sense, according to which, for example, only having children fully fulfills a woman. A “cultural” and “natural” imperative through which Fanny & Alexander’s work finds a way to another truth.

Thus, Chiara Lagani and Luigi De Angelis explore how to have a child at the threshold of forty, but also how to make a show, or rather, they explore the telling, but also the act of telling. The creation reveals itself as a co-creation. Maternità, then, before being an outcome, is a process, a continuous back-and-forth between choice and renunciation, empathy and judgment, or the suspension of judgment. Not knowing where to go, yet going there together, keeps us listening, with an expectation tied to a different question each time. Like the creator in front of their newly created being.

••••••

Maternity (Fanny & Alexander), by Sabrina Fasanella | Teatro e Critica, July 19, 2023

Maternità, the latest work by the Ravenna-based company Fanny & Alexander, debuted at the Teatro Solvay in Rosignano. Following the model of Sheila Heti’s interrogative writing, the Canadian author of the eponymous novel, Chiara Lagani and Luigi De Angelis create a theatrical device in the form of a public assembly, entrusting the audience with the progression of the investigation into the ever-controversial theme of the title. Just like the protagonist-author of the novel, Chiara Lagani speaks in the first person directly to the audience. The first hook is an exercise in skepticism: “My name is Chiara, and I am pregnant. True or False?”. With each question, to which the audience is called to respond actively and instinctively using a remote control, the key issues of the theme emerge: a woman’s relationship with her body; personal and societal expectations regarding it; the doubtful calling to motherhood; the pitfalls of choice and the deceptions of freedom. The audience’s involvement, which follows the outcome of the “vote” on a screen in real time, seems aimed at provoking the same kind of doubts: How many and what things influence our choices? What price does thought pay to the exercise of freedom? But also: how much of the choice we make is truly ours?

This (intense, at times obsessive, or seemingly superfluous) work of choice and judgment leads to a second part where the device returns to its representative function. This shift in balance, more explicitly mediated by lighting and costume conventions, does not relieve the audience of its active role but transforms it: while the mechanism of heterodirection becomes more evident, the lingering doubt remains that what happens has been decided and chosen beforehand, exactly as happens to a woman whose biology is oriented and guiding towards a destiny that does not necessarily align with a parental calling.

••••••

Fanny&Alexander, The Dilemma of Motherhood, by Alessandro Iachino | Doppiozero, September 22, 2023

The few objects scattered on the stage where Maternità unfolds seem to reveal, more than their everyday function, an allegorical nature. Like in a Flemish painting, they carry other imaginaries, symbols that the audience might interpret as literary, mystical, or even psychoanalytic: a mirror, a knife, a vase of flowers with lilies blooming. The scene designed by Fanny&Alexander for their new creation—premiered in July at the Inequilibrio festival in Rosignano Solvay—appears, at first glance, to be a charade, whose possible solution seems hidden in liminal realms of reality, where the power of individual action, decisions, and will collide with unknowable and immeasurable forces. At their origin, one might find doubts, fears, and unspoken desires, or perhaps a hostile, indifferent community, or finally, a fate inscribed in the flesh, revealed by a secular annunciation: the subtle yet clear suspicion that foreign wills, magical and esoteric suggestions, might influence the subject inhabiting this stage and this world.

Upon entering, Chiara Lagani is alone: dressed in black, with no angel by her side. The white flowers to her right, deprived of the reassuring presence of Gabriel and his wings, impose themselves as a mere fact, an unavoidable and vaguely threatening condition to which it would be senseless to respond, “Here I am!”. Yet, it is with God that Sheila Heti—the author of the novel Maternità, which serves as the genesis for the dramaturgy—imagines having to negotiate, bargain, and even struggle: not as the Virgin Mary, but as Jacob, who wrestled with the angel to gain a blessing and named the place of battle Penuel. However, in Maternità, biblical episodes overlap and merge, transforming the possibility of a child into a struggle: Heti, born in 1976, questions her own desire to be—or rather, not to be—a mother, conveying the anxieties, sudden resolutions, hesitations, and fantasies that accompany her every time, around the age of forty, she asks herself: Do I want a child? The questions follow one another in the everyday self-examination of the Canadian essayist, arising from her analysis of her status as an intellectual, her comparisons with the biographies of friends, and random encounters and spontaneous events. The yes or no decisions she makes lead to further choices and dilemmas, in an exhausting, corrosive inquiry into a calling, and into the world that has been shaping its form and characteristics for millennia: “Is having children a specific task for women?”, “Does the universe forgive women who make art and not children?”.

This may have been the first point of attraction between Heti’s writing and Lagani’s, whose relationship with narrative and literary universes—along with their twists and sedimentations—has manifested both in her work as a translator and as an author. This has manifested in her exploration of the fairy-tale universe (as seen in her long-term work on L. Frank Baum, and Lewis Carroll, with a new expression expected in the adaptation of The Trilogy of the City of K by Ágota Kristóf, debuting at Piccolo Teatro in December), as well as in the exploration of possibilities within puzzles and enigmatics, and in the theatrical adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s tetralogy, as well as delving into the galaxy of David Foster Wallace. In Maternità, Chiara Lagani first embraces the dichotomous pacing and constructs a sophisticated diagrammatic dramaturgy, tree-like, where the stages of the story unfold as antithetical alternatives, and the continuation of the protagonist’s life and narrative experience takes on shifting forms according to turns, stumbles, and possible curves imposed by the irreplaceable encounter with the audience.

In the device created by Fanny&Alexander, the textual reworking addresses the discretion of the spectators: upon entry, each person is given a remote control, with buttons corresponding to possible answers to the questions Heti/Lagani asks themselves and the audience. The results of the polls, displayed live on a screen at the back of the stage, influence the course of the story, bending the protagonist’s life to the moods of others. Audience engagement, the explosion of dramaturgy, and the use of heterodirection as a medium for exploring the possibilities of performance: with Maternità, the group founded by Lagani and Luigi De Angelis—who here takes on the roles of director, light, and sound designer—proposes many of the solutions that have made them prominent figures in the scene at the turn of the millennium. However, once again, they question the senses and the ethical and social consequences, which, in this case, become incandescent with the focus of the subject matter.

Far from being merely an experiment in narratology and theater, Maternità thus involves the transient community of the audience in atypical referendums, in consultations that entrust the power of the majority to decide not only the fate of the story but of an entire existence: the delegation of responsibility, that now-familiar act of entrusting spectators with a fraction of the absolute power traditionally held by the author, takes on sinister, unsettling contours. The pure contemplation of a biographical path thus changes into an intrusion into the fate of a single woman, her choices around the experience—possible, desired, rejected—of pregnancy, and shows us how and to what extent communities—moved by religious imperatives, moral assumptions, political values—can interfere with intimate desires and self-determinations. Once again, other women and men decide and judge, comment and weigh the reasons behind a private act, in a clear manifestation of the dominion exercised over the woman’s body. In this disturbing game, so similar to a harmless quiz published in a magazine and yet so violent in its consequences, Maternità plunges its gaze into the symbols, depictions, and interpretations that the experience of reproduction still generates, probing the unspoken core of fears and dreams we keep hidden: “Whether I want children or not is a secret I hide from myself: it’s the biggest secret I hide from myself,” concludes Sheila Heti, while Lagani turns the mirror towards us, illuminating our faces, our fears, and our hesitations.

However, regarding such a magmatic theme—on these same pages, Maddalena Giovannelli has traced some of its recent manifestations, starting with the performance Anatomy of a Suicide by the lacasadargilla company—the direction by De Angelis and the dry, cold stage presence of Lagani seem to offer us only its cerebral precipitate, depriving us of the rancor, pain, and pride that a choice—or rather, its reception by an audience—could generate. Yet, this cooling of the emotional temperature of the performance becomes an effective demonstration of the friction between life and norm, between law and individual, between majority and individual: the binary of approvals and rejections proves unable to return the ambiguous resolutions and chaos generated by the very idea of motherhood, with its recesses and its hypostases. And with philosophical intelligence, Fanny&Alexander’s creation explores the thin line between representation and the act of representing, between political power and aesthetic production, blurring their boundaries and fields, and happily confusing us. Heti/Lagani transfers onto the plane of artistic creation that of procreation, and the ideative experience of a book or a performance mingles with that of filiation: thus, the struggle with the angel changes meaning, and the place of the battle might be called Maternità, “because it is where I saw God face to face, and yet I was spared my life.” Whether the parenthood of artistic projects and objects is a substitute, an obstacle, or an alibi for motherhood is a question to which Heti, Lagani, and each of us seeks an answer in the very process of the performance—or of an entire life. In its second part—announced by a quick costume change and a brief interlude where the audience expresses their opinions on key issues of our time, such as homoparentality or surrogacy—Maternità spreads out and diverges, following the protagonist’s and artist’s journey through a grim and arcane city, with destabilizing encounters with fortune-tellers and friends’ pregnancies. Both the dramaturgical reworking and the acting seem to increasingly align with the protagonist, approaching her as in a long cinematic tracking shot, only to leave her alone at the end, finally to decide: to make a choice, and to cut an umbilical cord.

••••••

Maternità a quiz, by Francesca De Sanctis | L’Espresso, December 8, 2023

“My name is Sheila Heti, I’m 48 years old, and I’m pregnant.” Behind the actress, the answer is projected onto a screen in binary code: True or False. “So, should I be worried?” Yes, No. “Am I doing everything right?” Yes, No, I don’t know. The questions continue throughout the performance, which debuted this summer at the Inequilibrio Festival, Maternità, by the company Fanny & Alexander (currently also playing at the Piccolo Teatro in Milan with The Trilogy of the City of K). Here, the audience has a great responsibility: to choose whether the protagonist can have a child or not (and much more). How? By pressing a button on the remote control distributed at the entrance. Some press the button immediately, while others feel uneasy about having to answer all those questions on a topic that, all in all, is still taboo. After all, how many women openly talk about assisted reproduction, abortion, fertility without feeling embarrassed?

With different nuances, the historic Ravenna-based company had already touched on the topic in other works (from Discorso giallo to Addio fantasmi), but this time they tackle it head-on, starting from Sheila Heti’s text—Maternità (Sellerio, 2019, translated by Martina Testa)—in which a woman wonders whether she wants to have a child or not and consults the I Ching for an answer. Chiara Lagani, however, questions the audience. The show, directed by Luigi De Angelis, is divided into two parts: in the first, Lagani/Heti confesses her doubts to the audience; in the second, she recounts a typical day for Sheila. But be careful, because the stories change. The dramaturgy is tree-like, meaning that depending on the audience’s response, the story moves in one direction or another, as programmed by the software invented by Vincenzo Scorza—a storytelling method already experimented with by the company in Oz, where children had remote controls. What happens in the end? You leave with a question swirling in your head: Is life choosing you, or are you choosing it? In short, are we really free or not?

••••••

Tell me, please, if I want a child, by Antonella Lattanzi | La Lettura – Corriere della Sera, December 10, 2023

“Often I looked at the world from a great distance, or I didn’t look at it at all. […]. I lived only in the gray and meaningless world of my mind, where I tried to deal with everything by reasoning and never arriving at any conclusion. I would have liked to have had time to put together a vision of the world, but there was never time, and besides, those who had time seemed to have had it since they were very young, they hadn’t started at forty.” This is how Maternità begins, Sheila Heti’s novel, translated by Martina Testa for Sellerio. From these pages, the now-historic theater company Fanny & Alexander adapted the eponymous show, which will be staged on December 22 at the Teatro India as part of the Teatri di Vetro Festival (at India Theater in Rome and Teatro del Lido in Ostia from Sunday, December 10 to 22).

“A vision of the world” … It seems that the central theme of this important book and the significant show it inspired lies here. At forty, how many people tell you: I’ve finally understood who I am, I’m finally less afraid? And then there are others, and here, on the pages of the stage, there are others—meaning one other for many others—who ask themselves: and now? Now, who am I? Sheila Heti, the protagonist of the novel and the woman who says “I” in the play, has a job in the arts she loves, a beautiful home, and a partner she loves. Yes, that’s fine, but there’s something ticking, telling her: it’s coming to an end. And that ticking isn’t so much the biological clock (an unpleasant image) as the thoughts in her head: You, being a woman, do you want a child? And if you haven’t had one by forty, the question might be: why?

Written and performed by Chiara Lagani and directed by Luigi De Angelis—founders of the Fanny & Alexander company, winners of numerous Ubu Prizes, always mutable and polymorphic but whose work often focuses on bringing novels to the stage (such as Ada or Ardor by Vladimir Nabokov, Addio Fantasmi by Nadia Terranova, L’amica geniale by Elena Ferrante)—Maternità plunges into this question not as into a clear blue sea, but as into a black hole suspended in space. If you have the courage to cross it, this hole takes you to a new dimension, better, even, less guilty, less gray, we might risk saying. “Right from the start,” says Lagani, “I had the first line of the play in my head: My name is Sheila Heti, I’m 48 years old, and I’m pregnant. And since I had decided that Maternità would be a tree-like narrative,” meaning an interactive narrative where each spectator decides how the play will proceed by answering Yes or No to the questions posed by Chiara/Sheila on stage, “I thought the right beginning would be: My name is Sheila Heti, I’m 48 years old, and I’m pregnant. True or false? I didn’t want a separation between actor and audience. I wanted to create an involved community, even at the cost of creating discomfort. Some time ago, I did a show with remote controls for children. I thought: I need to find an issue to replicate it with adults. But if it’s about choice, it must be a choice that is difficult to make.” What could be more difficult than: do I want a child?

So, let’s imagine the scene. The play is divided into two parts. In the first, Chiara/Sheila is on stage. “The scene is very raw. I speak without amplification, in a bare voice.” Chiara is dressed in black. On stage are a mirror, two knives, and a vase of lilies. Chiara asks the audience the questions that, in her novel, Sheila Heti asks the I Ching. Thus, the story of a woman approaching forty who questions the ultimate question unfolds. She discovers that within this question lies everything: life, death, fertility, menopause, egg freezing, parenthood, being children, sex, work, and art. On stage, the questions chase each other, one after the other, just like in Heti’s book. “Depending on the answers from the audience, something different happens every night.” Here are some of the questions: “Now my cycle is becoming irregular. Just a year ago, it was punctual every twenty-eight days. Now it can be off by two or three days, even more. Does this make me sad? Is it stupid? How long can you hope to leave behind the life of your mother?” And then, illuminating, definitive: “But decisions are not actions. For things to happen in life, other people must participate. It’s not enough to want it, to decide it. A whole series of things must work together. Life itself must want it. A mental decision is not enough. It’s not enough to make babies. Wanting isn’t enough; finally, someone says it. But can you live,” continues Chiara/Sheila, “your whole life like this, always within a question?”

We all know the answer is yes. “During the show, I look people in the face,” says Chiara. “It’s one of the hardest shows I’ve ever done, because it’s built on the relationship with the audience, which is very hard for me to sustain.” So why choose a book like this to bring to the stage in one’s own body? Perhaps because, at some point, for a woman, this question becomes relentless, and she can’t avoid it; but the point is that it’s not just a female issue, it’s also a male one. “I’ve read so many books about motherhood in recent years because I always think about it. Maternità was the one that bothered me the most; the first time I read it, I couldn’t stand it. But there were certain questions that kept bouncing around in my head obsessively, and I thought: this book interrogates me.”

Now the scene has changed; the first part is over, while Chiara changes, the audience is bombarded with questions on more political issues—same-sex parenting, surrogacy—and they must choose in an instant: yes, no. “It’s violent, who can give these answers in two seconds?” But I was really interested in this speed, also because in some way, it stirs something inside you.” Chiara returns on stage dressed in white, the lights change. Now she is an actress performing a monologue, still taken from Heti’s book. She recounts a “particular day” in which this obsession is so overwhelming that everything around her speaks of one topic: the fortune teller, the friend whose water breaks, everything that happens draws her back to the thought of a child, “and she is like in this vortex, which becomes comical in the end, because this insistence has something comical about it, and it’s a relief too, from this kind of blood sport.”

Who would have ever thought that such a question—do I want a child?—could be a blood sport. Yet it is. So Sheila, so Chiara, are not afraid, and they ask us the questions. And what can we do when we don’t know how to decide something important? Perhaps, we can look for the answers in the dark of a theater, where sometimes we might even find fragments of ourselves.

••••••

Chiara Lagani and Motherhood: “I’m Bringing the Last Taboo to the Stage,” by Federica Angelini | Ravenna e Dintorni, December 11, 2023

Chiara Lagani, born in 1974 in Ravenna, is the founder of Fanny & Alexander, an author, and performer of numerous plays that experiment with various languages and have garnered international awards and recognition.

As part of Fèsta, on Tuesday, December 12, and Wednesday, December 13, she will bring to Ravenna—at the Rasi Theatre, 9:00 PM—one of her most recent works: Maternità. Based on the successful novel Motherhood by Sheila Heti (translated into Italian by Martina Testa and published by Sellerio), this production tackles a highly complex theme that has recently sparked debate and garnered particular attention. Heti, in a strongly autobiographical work, explores the desire or rejection of having children.

Lagani, why bring this topic to the stage? And why now? Is motherhood or non-motherhood still a taboo?

“There are two reasons. The first is political and cultural because, yes, I believe it is still a taboo, one of the few taboos that has survived in any environment, even where, such as in the artistic-cultural world, huge strides have been made on other issues like sexual identity. It’s difficult to express oneself about motherhood. Women continue to feel ashamed of something they shouldn’t feel ashamed of. They are made to feel the weight of potential infertility, but also the aspiration to have a career even if they have children. This seemed like a theme, and here we get to the second reason behind this show, perfect for artistic exploration: I wanted to involve adult audiences in an interactive show, just as I had with Oz for young audiences.”

In what sense is it interactive? What is asked of the audience?

“People are asked to express themselves using remote controls distributed before the show, offering multiple-choice answers. Sometimes these are marginal issues, other times direct ones, creating a zone of discomfort and embarrassment that must be broken down. This theme seemed ideal for exposing a collective sensitivity.”

To do this, you started with a book, not a text of your own. How did you work on it? Are the words those of the translator Martina Testa?

“Yes, I chose to use the text of an author who has sparked a lot of discussion. We contacted her, and she approved our idea for the show. The text was cut, heavily manipulated, but yes, I started from the Italian version.”

The author admits she wrote an autobiographical story. Did you find yourself in that narrative in some way?

“There are certainly some resonances. I also don’t have children, although I started from the opposite premise, because unlike Heti, I didn’t choose not to have children. But I believe the author succeeded in asking questions, in challenging anyone, because this is a theme that concerns us all.”

In the end, if we are not all mothers, we are always daughters…

“Exactly, all of us deal with the issue of motherhood, and never before, with this play, have people waited for me after the performances to tell me their experiences, saying ‘I’ve never told anyone this.’”

Actually, recently, the topic of women’s legitimate choice to not have children has been widely debated, and many important voices have spoken about it. The statistics tell us that fewer and fewer women are having children. Who do you think might find this more disturbing?

“I think no one can have clear-cut certainties on this subject. At first glance, the excessive confidence in claiming one thing or another seems off-putting to me. It’s such a complex and inevitably conflicting issue that I don’t think it can be tackled too assertively. We should all be much more forgiving. This topic deserves leniency.”

In today’s debate, people often view motherhood and non-motherhood as a question of individual women’s freedom of choice. Yet, isn’t the decision to have or not have children also a political issue that concerns society in many ways?

“Of course, the play also comes from the need I feel to keep the guard up on this topic. The real problem is that especially the left has never really addressed it. How many women are, in fact, unable to make a complete choice? How many, in the end, don’t have children because they can’t afford to before a certain age, when perhaps biology no longer allows it? On the other hand, the right tries to return women to the role of the mother who gives up her career, willing to sacrifice her public life for her private one. Finally, it should be said that, in general, not everything in life is a choice; sometimes things happen or don’t happen, and that’s it. We need to learn how to talk about it. For this reason, for the show, I also organized a meeting at Classense on November 13 (5:30 PM) with Nadia Terranova and Simona Vinci, two writers with whom to share experiences.”

••••••

We Are Not the Children of Our Choices, by Nadia Terranova | La Stampa, December 18, 2023

A blonde woman, dressed in black, steps onto the stage: “My name is Sheila Heti, I am forty-eight years old, and I am pregnant.” Which of these statements is a lie? The woman is likely forty-eight years old. She doesn’t appear to be pregnant, but we can’t rule it out. What we know for sure is that her name isn’t Sheila Heti. It’s Chiara Lagani, and we know this because we chose to see her performance. We also know that Sheila Heti is the author of the book Motherhood, from which Chiara Lagani has drawn her dramaturgy.

“My name is Chiara Lagani, I am forty-eight years old, and I am pregnant.” This introduction doesn’t quite work either. Is the woman on stage pregnant? Those who have read Heti know that her text is a long wager on the other side of the line, a game of dice with fate over whether or not to become a mother. Choice or fate? “Whether I want children or not is a secret I hide from myself: it is the greatest secret I hide from myself,” says Heti. Lagani says the same. We all say it, even those who seem more decided, more barricaded on one side or the other. We often doubt, or even just occasionally, secretly to ourselves before anyone else—our husbands, nosy friends, our mothers, society. At least once, we’ve all doubted: those who have always felt like mothers, those who have never felt like mothers. Sheila Heti used the I Ching as a literary device, while Chiara Lagani interacts directly with the audience, who are given a small remote control at the entrance to the theater with which to respond. Fate exists—says the book, fate is us—says the theater.

The woman on stage continues asking herself questions, while we surround her in a circle that doesn’t embrace her, doesn’t tighten her. She’s alone, just as we are when we look inside our own bodies, and do not reject the biology that defines us, even against our ideas and our decisions: ovulate, not ovulate, blood, menarche, menopause. The answers on the screen are green, red, white. Yes, no, I don’t know. True, false. Wait, give up, try. The dramaturgy of Motherhood branches out like a tree, diverging under gusts of wind, and the wind is the consent or rejection, the will of the majority. Being a mother or not being a mother should concern only us, but it doesn’t: we are a mass, gynecological patients, political birthrate data, a survey. The game device lays bare the pressure of all life, a pressure men never experience. I might understand it, perhaps, but not live it. I wonder how my neighbor is answering. I can’t help but ask myself, it interests me the way a postcard from an exotic country might. But I do know what my neighbor, a mother of two boys, is answering, and she certainly knows what I, a mother of a girl, am answering. And both of us know what the woman in the front row is answering, who has not had children. But look, this too is just an illusion. Perhaps no one knows anything about anyone else, even though we fool ourselves into thinking we do. I, for example, lived for more than forty years as a nulliparous woman, and I read Motherhood, the book I mean, when having children wasn’t in my horizon. Now, I’m at the theater watching Motherhood, the play, after a little girl has stormed in and occupied that entire horizon. I have the feeling of knowing how the same words resonate with children and without children, but what do I really know about others? What can I know about someone who had a child and no longer has one, or who longed for one until it hurt but never succeeded? We are here because that naked word, “motherhood,” questions each of us, each in a different way. There are as many mothers as there are children in the world, and perhaps even more. Motherhood also questions men, who remain on the edge of a mystery from which they are excluded, reacting to the inevitable strangeness with anger or disorientation, with sweetness or bitterness. Because the possibility of generating—not necessarily the generating itself, but the mere possibility, traversed or denied—is so powerful that not always, not everyone, can tolerate it. “It’s said that having children is the biggest decision anyone can make. But decisions aren’t actions,” says Lagani/Heti on stage. And then: “A mental decision is little. It’s not enough to make babies. But if a mental decision is what makes babies, why are we judged based on what happens to us as if it depended on a decision of ours?”

The play, like the book, ends without a pregnancy. We don’t know if there will be one or not, but we can’t help but ask ourselves, like in a detective story that ends by revealing the name of the culprit. Then we all take a step back. Those who decided (or life decided for them) not to have children; those who decided (or life decided for them) to have them. We’ve all been there in the middle, at least once.

It’s that threshold, that door that locks without unlocking for an instant or for a lifetime. It is that line that makes us sisters.

••••••

The Art of the Question. On Motherhood by Fanny & Alexander, by Michele Pascarella | Gagarin Magazine, December 19, 2023

“Shows, more than answers, are questions,” says Chiara Lagani at the start of her reflection on Motherhood, the new creation by Fanny & Alexander that I saw on December 12 at the Teatro Rasi in Ravenna as part of Fèsta 2023. It will be on stage at the Teatro India in Rome on Friday, December 22, for Teatri di Vetro (and again in Rome, at the Angelo Mai, on April 13 and 14, as well as in various other cities on an ongoing tour).

Echoing her, so to speak, is Francesca De Sanctis at the end of her review in L’Espresso on December 8: “You leave with a question buzzing in your head: Is life what chooses you, or do you choose? Are we really free or not?”

Between the reflections of these two remarkable women, I add my two cents: theater as the art of the question.

Far removed from any attempt to deliver unambiguous messages, or even worse, any form of preaching, Motherhood relentlessly questions the audience about the protagonist’s decision regarding whether or not to become a mother.

Small remote controls are given to the audience members, whose seats outline the stage space, allowing them to answer closed questions (yes/no, or choosing between 3 or 4 options) in response to a flurry of questions, some more or less directly related to the topic: this is the referential content.

But since the history of art is, as we know, the history of the how, before and more than the what, I would like to look now at what happens linguistically in this theatrical device.

I would like to do this by evoking the cold-hot polarities borrowed from Marshall McLuhan. It might be worth recalling that for the Canadian sociologist and philosopher, cold media are those with low definition (which require high user participation to fill in or complete the information not transmitted), while hot media are those characterized by high definition and therefore require less participation for communication to occur.

In Motherhood, participation is certainly necessary for “the device to work,” as Andrea Zanzotto would say: the story takes different paths depending on what the audience votes on each time. There is, therefore, a reliance on chance, albeit within a defined framework: how can we not think of John Cage and Merce Cunningham, who delivered certain aspects of their performative events to the I Ching (as the protagonist in Sheila Heti’s story, from which the show draws its inspiration, also does)?

Speaking of Merce Cunningham: briefly recalling the controversial opposition to Pina Bausch held by some dance historians (form vs content, abstraction vs narrative, cold vs warmth, etc.), it makes one think about how this performance, like other projects by Fanny & Alexander, pursues a different path.

In a millimetric balance between formal cleanliness and detachment, clarity of signs and their sharp precision, here – if you choose to see it that way – we are involved on many levels.

If you are a woman, perhaps also due to thematic and possibly autobiographical mirroring. If you are a man (ah, how much I agree with director Luigi De Angelis when he states that only women should legislate on these matters – perhaps even speak on them, I add), still as subjects and objects of language.

The rhythmically relentless march of the questions forces rapid choices, which leads us to realize how often we end up echoing tired clichés, being spoken more than speaking: with minimal cruelty, Motherhood delivers us to the overwhelming responsibility of speaking (Foucault teaches) on something about which we know little or nothing, and on which silence and listening would be necessary.

The urgency cleverly imposed makes it grotesquely alienating to vote on such intimate and delicate matters: suddenly, we find ourselves keyboard lions and lionesses, offering our opinions on everything, knowing nothing.

Questions related to parenthood, of course, but also to human relationships and linguistic reflections on the medium we are sharing – theater, indeed, with its inevitably agreed-upon pact of recognition and subjective translation of the ever-shifting relationship between fiction and reality.

Subjective: this is perhaps the word I took home from Ravenna after encountering this small, geometric example of an idea and practice of art as a restless and unsettling psycho-emotional activation for those who experience it.

I use the adjective “geometric” to evoke the organization of the stage space in Motherhood and the articulation of the luminous dramaturgy, but also the disorienting measurement of the place where one stands, speaks, and tumbles.

They are the tumbles of each one, those I (did not) see happen.

Being radically alone in a ritual that can only be called collective, a temporary community of bodies that together encircle a dizzying emptiness and make it exist, guided by an actress balancing between Marion from Wings of Desire and a Swiss governess: not Cunningham vs Bausch, rather Cunningham and Bausch.

Here, theater is configured as a dance of words and thoughts in the shared space. And the writing (dramaturgical, directorial, lighting, sound, etc.) is its choreography.

And leaving with a question, as Francesca De Sanctis said.

Without morals, messages, or uplifting solutions.

Rather – and what a precious fortune, especially in this time when, with a cell phone in hand, we delude ourselves into thinking we can instantly know anything – with the vertigo of having momentarily peeked into the furious chaos of others’ otherness through an extremely precise device.

It is a curious tumble: one has to know how to do it, one has to want to do it.

••••••

Motherhood, actress Chiara Lagani: “Against Taboos, I Bring Free Choice to the Stage,” by Elisabetta Ambrosi | Il Fatto Quotidiano, December 20, 2023

“It’s incredible how, even today, the choice, or the fact, of not having children is still a taboo, even for the most evolved women.” Chiara Lagani, actress and co-founder, with Luigi De Angelis, of the theater company Fanny&Alexander, is about to bring Motherhood to the stage in Rome, on December 22 at the Teatro India, as part of the Teatri di Vetro Festival. Based on the book of the same name by Canadian writer Sheila Heti, published by Sellerio, the show is also created in collaboration with the audience, who are given a small remote control to answer the actress’s questions. Men and women alike are involved, and Lagani says, “Many women (but also some men) come to me after the show and confide very personal things, and then say it’s the first time they’ve ever done so. Often, these are painful things that they usually keep to themselves. I feel that this show has the power to transform something hard and complex into something useful, creating sisterhood among various female beings. We can then look at each other with understanding, in relation to a threshold we’ve all crossed, even though with different answers.”

Can you first explain the relationship between this show and the Teatri di Vetro Festival?

Fanny&Alexander has had a relationship with Teatri di Vetro for many years. Its director, Roberta Nicolai, is an artist and curator who supports projects in a unique way. She was one of the first people I spoke to about this project.

In this show, the audience has a remote control with various options. Does this correspond to the coin toss in Heti’s book?

Yes, exactly. I thought about introducing an interlocutor, the audience, giving the story a “branching” structure. I had already done a similar show for children on The Wizard of Oz, where the children could determine the fate of the characters with a small remote control. I wanted to do the same for adults, but it had to involve a difficult topic, something that would create discomfort. And motherhood was the right theme, the last great taboo.

A woman without children is seen as unstable. And also invisible. From the outside, Heti writes, one cannot understand the meaning of a woman’s life without children.

Today, finding women without children is much more common. Yet it is true that in the common stereotype, in the outdated idea of family where a woman fulfills her role with motherhood, those who transgress this rule are less easily categorized. Seeing a woman who has made a different choice – or simply found herself without children – makes you want to know more. I never judge the lives of other women, but I have always felt a great curiosity about those lives, about their reasons, their choices or non-choices.

The author argues that the choice to have children is paradoxical, even impossible. She calls it “a worm in the brain.” Is this true for you as well?

The question of children is crucial and concerns everyone. More than paradoxical, it is a topic full of complications because it is connected to life and death. By bringing a life into the world, one accepts the possibility of death and pain, and that is something that seems superhuman to accept.

In the book, the fact that the protagonist resists the impulse to have a child is also portrayed as a victory over the time frame that women are forced into, while men can live in space.

Yes, we’re talking about biological, organic, objective time – the infamous “biological clock,” an unfortunate term. The protagonist considers freezing her eggs but ultimately gives up because, she says, “it would have been like freezing my indecision.” In some way, the author is aware that trying to resist time at all costs is also something reckless, almost fatal. But I often wonder, in relation to the passing of time, how well-informed and aware young girls are today. We weren’t so well-informed, it seems.

Another aspect is the impossibility of taking care of a child and pursuing art at the same time, in general, having children while doing something emotionally and spiritually demanding.

The first line I speak when I enter the stage is: “My name is Sheila Heti, I am 48 years old, and I am pregnant.” Immediately, the audience must decide if it’s true or not, if they choose to believe me. And from the beginning, there’s also the parallel question of artistic creation and biological creation, which I’ve tried to keep always separate but parallel, as they are in my life.

How do you view the public debate on motherhood and, unfortunately, its political use?

This is one of the reasons that led me to turn this reflection into a performance, because it’s important never to lower our guard. There are discussions that enter the show – homoparentality, pregnancy for others – that are very dangerous to treat with an ax: these are delicate topics that deserve respect from both the right and the left.

But the left hasn’t done enough.

It’s bitter to acknowledge, but this has always been absurdly considered a “right-wing” issue, which the right has sometimes appropriated in a politically instrumental way. But what has been done, in general, for women? How have they been supported, even by left-wing governments or today’s opposition, in these incredibly difficult journeys? The fact that women delay this decision is also due to social discomfort, poverty, and precariousness; parenthood is not sufficiently supported. Talking about these topics is absolutely necessary, to protect the new generations as well. I would love to take this show to high schools, to talk with young girls and boys. Knowing doesn’t solve everything, but it certainly helps.

••••••

Maternità by Fanny & Alexander, by Lisa Bentini | La Falena, February 2024

“My name is Sheila Heti, I am 48 years old, and I am pregnant”—this is the first of a series of statements that punctuate Maternità, the performance created by Fanny & Alexander based on the eponymous book by Canadian writer Sheila Heti (Sellerio, 2019). Actress Chiara Lagani appears seated on a bench, close to a vase of flowers, not just any flowers, but lilies. The scene evokes that of an annunciation, but there is no angel offering the flowers, no angel announcing the happy event, except for the one that Jacob struggles against, mentioned in the text and later incorporated into the performance. The vase of lilies is a fragmented signifier, a still life, and the announcement of pregnancy is made by a woman—one who is alone with herself, a flesh-and-blood woman.

“My name is Sheila Heti, I am 48 years old, and I am pregnant”, we read on the screen behind the actress: “True or false?”. This inscription is important because each spectator is given a remote control with which they must decide whether Chiara Lagani is indeed Sheila Heti, thereby adhering to the fictional pact, or if they don’t believe it and decide to remain in the realm of reality. From the outset of the performance, art and motherhood are inextricably linked, as they are in the book.

To write Maternità, Heti herself had relied, inspired by the I Ching, on a kind of heads or tails. In fact, the text is filled with questions through which the writer interrogates her own desire for motherhood, and between yes and no, she untangles the knots of writing: “The more I use these coins,” Heti observes—“the more I ask myself these questions,” Lagani tells us on stage—“the more I feel my brain becoming elastic.” Lagani builds the entire performance around the questioning nature of the book, but she goes even further: she gives the audience the opportunity to participate directly in the story being told and even to influence the direction of the writing.

Initially, it might seem like a game, though the questions are far from playful; they are rather ironic, with a sharp humor, as in the scene where Chiara-Sheila, after meeting her friend Marion in a pet shop, who compliments her, thinking that Sheila has decided to get a puppy, wonders whether her friend is referring to a dog or a child.

The wise decision to involve the audience in the creation of the performance is particularly significant, especially considering how thorny the theme addressed is, and how much public opinion has influenced and continues to influence the desire for motherhood. But it is also inquisitive: every time a question is posed, the answers also appear on the screen, much like a vote, and whether they like it or not, the spectators are forced to acknowledge others’ decisions, either allowing themselves to be influenced or, conversely, finding them annoying or deeply wrong. In any case, they cannot avoid them.

At the same time, the more the discourse on motherhood becomes intellectual, the more the woman’s body responds unpredictably, following entirely different logics. For example, when Sheila receives compliments from the doctor on her youthful ovaries, which he compares to two fresh figs, she asks, “How could my body betray me like this?” “Did it not know what I truly desired?” The body seems to express a different desire, but then, in its own time and rhythm, cannot help but fall into the continual oscillation between the desire to have children and not to have them, suggesting that it’s not just the mind that investigates the matter, nor does it alone resolve it.

In the performance, the intellectual and deliberately exasperating back-and-forth is softened by the material presence of the body, more precisely by how, following an ascending climax, Chiara-Sheila’s body bursts onto the scene, telling what happens inside and outside of her, not so much with words but mainly with the texture of her voice and gestures: for instance, the one where she deliriously tapes off a space, a kind of “cocoon” of body and writing, or the one where she holds a knife, waiting to find the right place to put it.

The decision to keep the audience close to the stage is also a choice of proximity, meant to remind the spectator never to forget the body before them: it suggests that the discourse on motherhood is at once an intimate and a public conversation.

“At 48 years old, you can do a performance… but not have a child. True or false?” Beyond provocatively alluding to the equation of art and children, this, like many other reflections in Heti’s work, makes evident the fear of a female artist losing her creative ability, and more generally her freedom, when she has a child. This brings to mind The Life’s Work by Rachel Cusk (Einaudi, 2021), where the author recounts how, after giving birth, her husband quit his job, and together they decided to leave London. When asked by those who were surprised or even worried, Cusk simply replied that her husband took care of the children while she was writing a book about taking care of children. No one found that response amusing, and it’s easy to understand why, just as it’s not surprising that a journalist asked Siri Hustvedt, “What is it like to be a wife, a mother, and also a writer?” because such a question would never have been asked of a man (Mothers, Fathers, and Others. Notes on My Real and Literary Family, Einaudi, 2023).

One of the first discussions Sheila has with her partner Miles, who embodies many male stereotypes and prejudices about motherhood, is precisely about female artists who become mothers. “But does the universe forgive women who make art and don’t have children? Does the universe care if women who don’t make art choose not to have children?” Whether one makes art or not, the real issue is in that “not”, which for centuries has been seen as a flaw and viewed with suspicion. Choosing to have or not have children is, even more than a choice, a genuine dilemma, because the very desire to bring children into the world is unfathomable and ambivalent: wanting or not wanting a child remains, as Heti writes, “the greatest secret I hide from myself.”

On the other hand, motherhood, as Hustvedt has keenly observed, “has been and is smothered by so many sentimental nonsense and punitive rules on how to act and feel that even today it remains a kind of cultural straightjacket.” What strikes in Hustvedt’s discourse, besides the striking image of the straightjacket, is the adjective sentimental. Heti herself defines sentimentality as “a feeling about the idea of feeling.” In one of the clearest passages of the book, Heti realizes how her inclination toward motherhood was closely tied to an idea of “feeling about motherhood” and, to explain herself better, she cites the story told to her by her cousin of a young woman who cooked chicken exactly as her mother did, and her mother had done it the same way as her grandmother, and so on. When asked why they cooked it that way, the answer was always the same: “Because my mother did it this way.” Besides highlighting the close connection between the feeling of motherhood and one’s own mother (“How much can you leave behind your mother’s life?”)—a connection repeatedly brought up in the performance—Heti perfectly defines her own relationship with motherhood: “I think the idea of having children for me is a bit like this: a once-necessary gesture that has become sentimental.” In short, the dream of motherhood is a bit like the dream of love: a constructed, sweetened, sometimes mannered feeling, in other words, sentimental.

Perhaps it is the feminine side of patriarchy. Only by collectively deconstructing the discourse on motherhood can we be freer to choose. And everything hinges on the meaning of that choice. Maternità by Fanny & Alexander is a theatrical performance that could not be more incisive and original, and at the same time true to the book.

••••••

Mothers, Not Mothers. Freedom and Obsession, by Sarah Perruccio | Letterate Magazine, April 11, 2024

Those who have read the book know it well. The protagonist of Maternità, Sheila Heti’s novel, can be unbearable. The woman, who narrates everything in the first person in a direct and often diary-like manner, is easy to confuse with the author herself. She is hyper-rational, whiny, self-judgmental, judgmental of her friends, restless, lethargic, and submissive to her partner’s opinions. Here, just as she might wish, I start by judging her, as the author encourages us to do, and challenges us not to do. Yet, this unpleasant woman asks a fundamental question, which she asks continuously and obsessively to us readers: Should I or should I not procreate? Do I desire it? Is it right to do it? Does it make sense? This question/obsession repeats and expands into every imaginable variation, also taking the form of dreams, with hypothetical children, wanted or not. The book creates this distance; the reader can evaluate all the questions the author poses but, in my opinion, will struggle to identify with her. It’s hard to feel pity for the woman even when she tells us she suffers or recounts her childhood loneliness because the way she does it is of a chilling coldness, a disarming neutrality. At least that was my reading experience.

The tone, the distance the woman places between herself and the reader (and seemingly between the various parts of herself), is something I found in the theatrical work Maternità by Fanny&Alexander, inspired by the book. The protagonist, playwright and actress Chiara Lagani, appears in a black jumpsuit and speaks directly to the audience. The questions that obsess her are posed to us as she reflects aloud, and this time, from the theater chairs, we are given the opportunity to answer. “Should I have a child?” “But does the universe forgive women who make art and not children?” Just like in the book, reflections and short narratives are interspersed with many questions. On the printed page, the woman tosses three coins, vaguely inspired by the I-Ching divination method, and from simple yes and no answers sprout new questions, memories, and reflections.

The undefined higher power the woman consults in the book is embodied on stage by us, the audience. There are only a few seconds in which we can choose and select our answer. It will be the stomach that decides, the instinct. The flow of the narrative follows what the majority has chosen by using a small remote control. This mechanism, on the one hand, makes the story take a different path each night, and on the other hand, makes us feel the responsibility of our opinions since the woman will make decisions in response to our preferences. The opinion of the majority, or at least the way it appears and resonates, has a strong impact on a woman at the end of her fertile years, both in the theater and in reality. This is what the play seems to show. The audience, in choosing quickly, must decide based on instinct, and perhaps this only reveals each person’s prejudices. We are asked the most complex questions, but we cannot argue; the yes and no of the mechanism reflect the polarization that often characterizes a certain style of public debate. The mechanism also activates for questions less laden with ethical problems—simple crossroads that lead the story in one direction or another. This overflow of questions, on one hand, makes the experience more playful and active, and on the other hand, deliberately creates that sense of excess, typical of a mind that incessantly ruminates, making us live in the head of the author of the novel.

The performance is divided into two parts, marked by a change of costume and atmosphere, which leads from this inquisitorial beginning to a second, more dreamy and profound part.

This work is certainly not a reassuring experience; it calls us into question, challenges us, just as Heti’s book does. There is little comfort to be had sitting in the theater chairs if, alongside Chiara, we are at times interrogated and at times take on the role of the interrogators. The process is the one done to the woman who “wants children? Doesn’t want them? Is she indecisive? Does she want them for others? Does she want them too late?” Pressures that we all feel at different stages of our lives, knowing that any choice will be deemed inadequate. In the end, a rapid-fire barrage of questions on the more openly political issues surrounding procreation and the right to parenthood leaves us breathless and reminds us just how limited a seemingly free choice really is (after all, every choice is a manifestation of some level of freedom). These limits are imposed by cultural, biological, biographical, political, and legal factors. Thus, even the obsession with the decision to be made feels a little lighter. It’s certainly not all in the hands of Chiara/Sheila, or in ours. There is a small margin of choice, after all, among all the limits imposed by reality. And for that small margin, by the end of the performance, we are left wanting to continue reflecting and fighting.

••••••

The Greatest Secret I Hide From Myself: Maternità by Fanny & Alexander, by Chiara Molinari | Theatron 2.0, April 19, 2024

“If I want children or not is a secret I hide from myself: it is the greatest secret I hide from myself.”

It is on the edge of this abyssal question that Maternità (Sellerio, 2019), Sheila Heti’s novel that inspires the eponymous play by Fanny & Alexander – written and performed by Chiara Lagani and directed by Luigi De Angelis – moves. The performance was staged at Angelo Mai on April 13 and 14.
Starting from radical and unsolvable questions about one’s desire – navigating between cultural imperatives and those dictated by one’s biology – the Canadian writer turns to divination and the I Ching: each coin toss offers an affirmative or negative answer, thus directing the narrative in an unexpected, unpredictable way, in a tight confrontation with Fate that becomes a long session of self-analysis.

Chiara Lagani’s effort is to transform the interior monologue, which belongs to the realm of writing, into a form of dialogue with the audience. The audience is invited to explore, in political, social, and psychological terms, issues such as the responsibilities linked to motherhood, homoparenting, the right to abortion, and surrogacy (which was called, just the day before the Roman performance, a “inhumane practice” by the Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni).

The reflection thus expands to become a communal one: the audience – sometimes dazzled by the reflection of a mirror, singled out individually – is invited to expose itself through a choice, which can be made within a very short time frame using a small remote control provided at the beginning of the performance: “Should children be had or made?” “Are there too many or too few of us on this Earth?” “Will this performance be useful to me and to you?”

The piece – just like the novel – proceeds in jolts: the response that gets the majority allows for only some of the possible futures imagined for the protagonist and, more concretely, only some of the dramaturgical solutions hypothesized for the performer, closing off the realization of all others.
The graphs that appear on the screen suspended over the stage for each question bring the weight of the choice to a fully human, assembly-like, almost referendary connotation, allowing for a “social geography” of the audience to be sketched. The composition and the willingness to confront the crucial knots of the performance vary significantly depending on the space in which it is staged.

The theatrical game – whose playful dimension is accentuated by the use of electronic devices – becomes progressively more unsettling and ambivalent when considering that a “tribunal” of many literally holds the power to choose the fate of the woman before them, directing her actions, even intruding into the intimacy of her body (“Am I fertile or do I have pre-cancerous cells?”).
In this sort of staged trial, the actress asks the audience which role she should take: “Defendant, judge, or witness?” “Is tension needed to create something, like sand inside a pearl?” Sheila Heti writes: “…they are good things and force me to live with integrity, to question what is important to me, and thus to truly live the meaning of my life, rather than relying on conventions.”

Chiara Lagani seems to radicalize the theme of self-determination in terms of self-awareness and collective responsibility, making it evident – through the proposed scenic dynamic – that there can be no free choice on whether to be a mother or not, on whether to continue a pregnancy or terminate it, without that freedom being materially protected. This protection comes through a political discourse that guarantees the legal recognition of rights, as well as adequate economic subsidies and access to safe healthcare services.

“Does the universe forgive women who make art and don’t have children?” is one of the questions posed in Heti’s text, opening the theme of the Platonic dichotomy between generation according to the body and generation according to the soul: “Of thought and every other virtue” are indeed “all poets and all artists said to be inventors.”
In the transition from writing to stage, it is Chiara Lagani herself who reminds us – in a debate with Rosella Postorino – that theater makes possible the experience of “being two,” in a sort of phantasmal gestation where one is always accompanied by one’s character conceived for the stage. Thus, once again, the words with which the actress opens the performance resonate, taking on a new degree of seriousness and complexity, and we must decide whether to trust them or not: “My name is Sheila Heti, I am forty-eight years old, and I am pregnant.”

••••••

The Taboo of Motherhood, by Elena Cirioni | Banquo Magazine, April 19, 2024

“When books don’t leave you in peace, you bring them to the stage.”
The performance by Fanny & Alexander starts from literature, based on the book Maternità by Sheila Heti, published in Italy by Sellerio and translated by Martina Testa.

On the bare stage, composed of a white bench, a vase with a lily, two knives, and a roll of tape, a woman appears with a sympathetic air (Chiara Lagani). She works in the arts and has had a successful career, but something is missing: “There’s a child growing in the back of my throat.”

This woman doesn’t just want to become a mother; as an intellectual and artist, she begins to question the reason behind this desire and, beyond herself, asks the audience.
“I’m forty-eight years old, and I’m pregnant.”
True or false?
Do you make children or do you have them?

Each audience member is given a remote control upon entry to respond to the questions and choose the path of the performance:
Who do I meet?
A friend?
A psychic?

As in the most enlightened democracies, the majority chooses.
A dramaturgical device that engages the audience, making each spectator a co-author.
A brilliant stage representation that clearly conveys the writing style of Sheila Heti, who in Maternità continuously questions herself, the I Ching, the dice… whether she wants to become a mother.
An intense interrogation that forces us to confront one of the greatest taboos of our time: the desire to bring children into the world.

In recent years, there have been numerous attempts to address this theme. Just think of Antonella Lattanzi’s book Cose che non si raccontano (Things You Don’t Talk About), published by Einaudi and nominated for this year’s Strega Prize, or the book that won last year’s Strega, Come d’aria by Ada d’Adamo. The reflection on the desire to procreate is finally becoming a public and political issue, detached from being a woman.

Maternità by Fanny & Alexander is not just a performance that seeks to modernize and bring a social issue into the public eye; it is, above all, an artistic composition, and as such, it creates symbols to interpret. In particular, one part, also described in Sheila Heti’s book, relates to one of the most mysterious stories in the Bible: Jacob’s struggle with the Angel. One day, Jacob finds himself fighting with a mysterious man, the Angel of the Lord. The fight seems wondrous, the Angel cannot defeat him, and Jacob wins. His reward is a blessing, a new name, the possibility to confront one of the greatest taboos of the Jewish religion: to stand before God.
Thus, to confront this taboo, a story is born. To integrate taboos, humanity needs to transform them into art, into stories of how we have fought them. The same goes for the desire to become a mother or father; Jacob called the place where he fought the angel “Peniel,” which means: “Here is where I have seen God face to face.”
Maternità by Fanny & Alexander presents us with one of the great taboos that has not yet been fully confronted and is often hidden: the desire to bring a human being into the world.

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The Impossibility of Tracing the Boundaries of Motherhood, by Carolina Germini | Limina Teatri, April 23, 2024

There is a beautiful novel called La figlia unica (The Only Daughter) by Mexican writer Guadalupe Nettel, which surprisingly addresses the theme of motherhood. The protagonist observes, with almost an anthropological eye, how this phenomenon takes shape around her: in the life of her best friend, in that of her neighbor, and even in a pair of pigeons living on her building’s roof. Her perspective is privileged, that of someone who can afford the time to observe with curiosity and fear something that doesn’t belong to her. But is it really that way? Can motherhood truly belong to us? And when? Are we maternal only when we become mothers, or also in the desire, in the waiting to one day live this experience, or even in the awareness of not wanting to go through it? After all, the protagonist experiences something akin to motherhood, caring for the people around her. However, this is not enough in the eyes of others, nor even in her own. And so, she is not spared the persistent and exhausting question, which eventually becomes an obsession, as if, at a certain point in life, there were only one tool to measure a woman’s worth: do you or do you not want to have children?

The same condition is faced by Canadian writer Sheila Heti, who in her autobiographical novel with the unmistakable title, Maternità (Motherhood), questions the possibility of becoming a mother. What initially seems like a question involving only one aspect of her life ends up overturning her entire existence. Sheila comes to terms with a cultural and natural imperative from which it is impossible to escape. These fierce reflections, which become gnawing thoughts that devour her mind, transform into the theatrical adaptation of the novel, imagined and created by Chiara Lagani, in the form of surveys directed at the audience. In Maternità, the play by the Fanny & Alexander company, directed by Luigi De Angelis, the spectator is called to live the intense experience of entering Sheila’s thoughts, gradually transforming into a collective unconscious, which is at once a witness, judge, and defendant in a trial in which everyone is called to participate.

The strength of Lagani’s scenic intuition is therefore to assign the audience the task of guiding the dramatic direction of the performance. It is the responses of the people, given through a remote control, that trace the actress’s path on stage. In this silent interrogation, which happens only through a screen, one’s own desire for motherhood is investigated, along with one’s stance on abortion, until the audience must completely decide the actions of Lagani: which of the two knives on stage she should pick up, or what the next circumstance she will face will be. While in the first half of the performance, this mechanism works, making the spectator’s participation active, in the second half, the device ends up exhausting its potential, showing all its technological limitations, as if it were a game from which we no longer feel the enjoyment or beauty. However, despite the gradual weakening of the audience’s involvement due to a system that doesn’t fully make them feel included, the strength of the dramaturgical text and Lagani’s live, authentic interaction with the audience manage to keep their impact intact until the end, succeeding in articulating such a complex theme as motherhood, and allowing us to delve into the depth of a text like Sheila Heti’s.

But perhaps this is precisely the directorial intention of using flawed methods like a questionnaire and a technological device like the remote control to answer such intricate questions: to show the audience the impossibility of exhausting a complex discussion like motherhood with a system that, due to its coldness and sterility, brings us back to the social pressure that women constantly face on this topic. But Maternità brings us right back to this, showing us how, on this theme, it is absurd to formulate judgments or pass sentences, and how it is therefore impossible to trace the boundaries of the maternal.