Teatro Litta di Milano, Sala Cavallerizza, Apache
Milano, IT 2014
Written and directed by Margarita Egorova and Gianluca Panareo
with Alberto Baraghini and Mike Kahle
sets and costumes: Saverio Assumma De Vita
sound: Federico Moschetti
The audience is waiting to enter the room. A sketch of dialogue, interrupted by thuds, comes from behind closed doors: it is FBI agents searching the room of the recently deceased Nikola Tesla. When the doors open wide, the audience finds itself in a space placed underneath. They must find a chair or cushion to settle on. Darkness falls, commercial lightning erupts (Tesla was born during an electrical storm) and a human voice finally comes from the stage, or rather, from the cliff, where the actor will be stuck for the duration of the show, leaving it only “dead,” packed into a slave sack.
The show stands as the intersection of installation, performance and theater, where the monologue restores voice to the only human element amidst the technical embellishments of contemporary research theater, telling the story of Nikola Tesla, a Prometheus betrayed by his time and by those men who had been given light and preferred sparks.