Imagine living in a world where your freedom is measured in sidewalks crossed quickly, keys close between your fingers as a improvised weapon, low looks so as not to attract unwanted attention. Imagine that world is yours every day. For millions of women, today, it is not imagination: it is daily reality. But what would happen if it were the opposite, if they brought this burden to men? It is from this question that takes shape In his placethe latest work of the Teatring Company, staged at the Fringe Milano Off Festival from 2 to 5 October and then to Fringe catania off from 16 to 19 October.
A show that It does not stage torn victims or violated bodies, but chooses a lateral and surprising road: to tell gender discrimination by overturning the roles. In his place He takes us to a matriarchal universe, where four friends at the bar discuss the problems of all males in the world: reconciling career and paternity, keeping themselves young and beautiful, face the discrimination of a world led by women. In a frame that initially seems like an American comedy, the viewer laughs, enjoys, recognizes himself. But the smile becomes bitter when the plot slips into the shadow areas of abuse and abuse, faithful and disturbing reflection of what women live every day.
The strength of the show lies precisely in this game of mirrors: to drop men, literally, “instead” of women. Bring out with simplicity – and by contrast – everything that is too often removed or considered normal. Whistles, vulgar phrases, unsolicited hands on them, continuous checks on their body and on their own spaces: small and large violence that, added, become the invisible cage of a patriarchy that still suffocates our societies. A weight that men, mostly, are not forced to bring.
Direct and written by Marianna Espositowith Diego Paul Galtieri on stage, Giulio Federico Janni, Francesco Meola and Libero Stelluti, In his place He is the winner of the “6Contolavio” announcement of the Municipality of Milan. It is not only theater, but a civil act: an invitation to listen, to put on the other’s shoes, to understand in depth what often remains relegated to the chronicles of femicides and daily violence that no longer make news.
The company Theateractive since 2004 and has always been engaged in the search for a poetic and civil theatrical language, he manages to combine lightness and commitment, irony and denunciation here. There are no bloody scenes, nor the re -proposal of blood events: there is rather a reversal that obliges the viewer to look inside. Because laughing at four men who fear walking alone in the evening makes you smile, yes, but shortly afterwards he opens a gash of awareness: this is the fear that thousands of women have always lived.
In this case, the theater becomes a “safe place” to say what you often don’t want to listen. Not with proclamations or statistics, but with stories. With the art that pushes to break down walls of indifference. And precisely in the choice of telling the discrimination “on the contrary” there is the power of a language that shakes without guiding, which accompanies without discounts but also without frontal accusations.
From the Milan Park Center to the Murgo di Catania Palazzo Scammacca, In his place It promises to be not only a theatrical show, but a collective consciousness experience. Over the time of the feminicides that fill the chronicles, the debates on the patriarchate and the new forms of violence against women, theater delivers an opportunity to change the public to change perspective and try, at least for one evening, to look at the world with different eyes.
And if the theater cannot stop violence, however, it can stop the distracted gaze for a moment and turn on understanding lamps. It can force us to ask us the most uncomfortable and necessary question: “What if I was in his place?”
