Museo dell'assurdo, Tour teatrale Visite guidate

MUSEUM OF THE ABSURD - Theatrical Tour
Guided tours blending history and theater at the PRINCE ROMANAZZI CARDUCCI DI SANTO MAURO CIVIC MUSEUM in PUTIGNANO (BA)

The museum meets the theater of the absurd. The guided tour inside the Prince Guglielmo Romanazzi Carducci di Santo Mauro Civic Museum becomes an immersive and interactive experience where visitors encounter quirky characters conceived as guardians of the palace's stories and channels for the emotional and perceptual reactions of the guests.

The theater becomes a channel of exploration and an exceptional cognitive tool aimed at building a creative bridge between the past and the present, between history and contemporary society, between the memories of the place and the visitors.

A friendly yet nosy concierge, a role taken from Eugène Ionesco's "The New Tenant," welcomes the visitors, impatient to show her noble "condominium," hoping that someone might become a new tenant. A woman of generous spirit but inept at life, she seeks to somehow claim the place, longing for a sense of belonging undermined by latent individualism.

Lucky, a role inspired by the eponymous character from Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot," is an odd man with a contemporary and youthful appearance, the soul of a servant and confidant of Prince Guglielmo. He guides the guests, gauging their reactions and seeking their help to write a new story where past, present, and future can coexist, to assert and confirm the museum's value as a shared and collective cultural heritage.

Together, Lucky and the concierge accompany the guests on a museum tour full of surprises... Inside the noble palace, four characters, extracted from some of Samuel Beckett's plays, linger illegally, stuck in an undefined time between the two world wars, waiting for someone to arrive—perhaps a certain Godot, perhaps the Prince, perhaps the Prince's guests. The nosy concierge, in her absurd plans, aims to evict them to rent the rooms to visitors. Lucky intends to free them from their imprisonment in space-time and their eternal waiting, to ignite a virtuous encounter between history and modernity, between memory and the contemporary.

During the museum tour, we meet Vladimir and Estragon: two tramps with no particular skill who have "seen a lot" of the 20th century but, for some reason, remain stuck in the short century, in that in-between time, waiting for someone to tell them how to live in the 21st century, how to change a place's history, and their own.

In the bathroom, a lady with curious features, eternally in search of love, embodies all the female figures that characterize Prince Guglielmo's life: Winnie from Beckett's "Happy Days." In the studios, we find the character of Hamm, extracted from the play "Endgame" by S. Beckett, who echoes the figure of the prince, both in his most authoritarian and fragile traits.

The museum's history intertwines with more popular anecdotes, the characters' stories, references to the contemporary age, and the impressions and emotions of the visitors, so that from an old story, a new one is always born.

CAST: Alessandro Accettura, Vittorio Goffredo, Tiziana Maellaro, Eliana Palmisano
TEXTS: Eliana Palmisano, Silvia Mastrangelo
GRAPHIC DESIGN: Alessandro Accettura
ORGANIZATIONAL MANAGER and STAGE DIRECTOR: Francesco Mastrangelo
IDEATION AND DIRECTION: Silvia Mastrangelo

Originating from the desire to appreciate the historical cultural heritage of the city of Putignano, a sentiment shared by the entire administration, particularly the Cultural Affairs Councillor, Dr. Mariano Intini.