Martin E. Segal Theatre Center | The Graduate Center, CUNY

Elisa Casseri - Event Orizon (translated by Adriana Rossetto)

Olga is stuck in a studio apartment, she cannot figure out what has happened, she only knows that she cannot escape. When she tries to open one of the doors on the wall, she immediately comes back from another one and continues to stay there. Marco is her boyfriend but sometimes he isn’t, her father is alive but later dead, her mother left when she was a little girl but she is suddenly back. Olga struggles to understand and does not know what reality is and what she can do to change what happened and what didn’t happen. She cannot surrender to the real time, to past events, to those journeys into a grief which is too true to be science fiction.

Giuliana Musso - My Hero (translated by Patricia Gaborik)

My Hero is made up of three distinct monologues. Three mothers of as many Italian soldiers who took part in the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) mission in Afghanistan during the years 2008-2010. The three women are very different from each other for social extraction, geographic origin, cultural level and personality, but they share the experience of having a soldier's son. Characters are inspired by existing people and real-life events

Armando Pirozzi - A Notebook for WInter (translated by Adriana Rossetto)

A Notebook for Winter is a two-actor-piece which in three acts and tells the story of an introvert professor of literature who finds a burglar on his way back home. The knife-wielding burglar wants something unexpected from him: it is a question of life or death.

Fabrizio Sinisi- The Great Walk (translated by Thomas Simpson )

The president of the International Monetary Fund, Frederic Jean-Paul, is arrested and kept in an anonymous New York police station: he’s accused of sexual violence inflicted on a waitress. His two bizarre jailers, Donald and Frank, have been ordered to guard the prisoner until the following morning, when he will be brought to a safer location. However, things don’t go as planned

Italian and American Playwrights Project is curated by Umanism’s Artistic Director Valeria Orani in collaboration with The Martin E. Segal’s Director Frank Hentschker. The project brought together some of the brightest, innovative, and most engaging Italian contemporary playwrights, developing their pieces through translation into English. Italian Playwrights Project restarted an artistic dialogue between Italy and US adding continuity to what had been an on-off relationship between the two countries for the last decades.

This book has been translated thanks to a grant by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation

edited by Frank Hentschkerwith Valeria Orani

Thanks for the Cover Image to Duccio Burberi photographer.

(the image is fromUn Quaderno per l'Inverno, by Armando Pirozzi, with Luca Zacchini & Alberto Astorri, directed by Massimiliano Civica and produced by Teatro Metastasio Prato with the support of Armunia)