‘Un brulichio di dialoghi in testa’. Conversazione con Natalia Ginzburg e Adriana Asti

On 1 August 1991, in an interview with Emilia Costantini for the Corriere della Sera, during the stage of 'L’inserzione' at the Valle Theater in Rome, Natalia Ginzburg said: “When I have a swarm of dialogues in my head, I start writing for theater. While, instead, if I have in mind a relaxed story, with introspective reflections and thoughts, then I choose the path of narration”. A contrast of the synaptic, etiological, authorial self, which fades and attenuates in the physiological and emotional identity of the reader/spectator, as we read in the article Il teatro è parola, which appeared in La Stampaon June 25, 1970: “What I love in the theater is not profoundly different from what I love and look for in the novels or verses that I read or remember in solitude. [...] I think poetry and theater require the same things. [...] An absolute stillness, a complete abandonment, a full attention, a profound silence”. She has grasped the ineffable poetry of the theater or has created a theater of poetry not made of verse, where the spoken-recited nods at Čechov, the dramaturgical writing of Ginzburg, an essay of theatrical communication, in a phonic texture essential and sometimes silent rhythmic, with its puzzles concealed in a flat surface, it returns “pain, joy and mercy for the life that knots and undoes itself”, above all through the stray existences of the protagonists. From the first sketches of short stories to novels marked by tragic and indelible lives, to editorial work, the dramaturgical adventure began in 1964 and has the flavor of a challenge. Here we propose an open, multiple reflection on the female dimension linked to some of the writer’s dramaturgical tests and essays and the scenic interpretations that bear the seal of Adriana Asti and Giulia Lazzarini.