That they are abbeys, hermitages, sunny and solitary countryside, Letizia Cesarini, aka Maria Antonietta, He always finds the place and way of exercising his communicative disposition, declining it from time to time in different artistic expressions, from music to poetry, up to now also landed at the theater. The singer -songwriter and writer took part in the project conceived by Luca Doninelli for the Oscar Theater Desider The Bible you don’t expect: a cycle of shows that has seen authors and authors try with the Judaic-Christian tradition for a personal and hermeneutic reinterpretation of the Holy Scriptures and now on stage with God is not an accountant. Short story of a money Signed by the Marche singer -songwriter. The parable he has chosen to stage is that of the workers of the vineyard, present only in the Gospel according to Matteo, in which a master hires numerous workers to work in his vineyard and, At the end of the day, he distributes the same pay to everyone: a money, both to those who had worked since the first light of dawn, and to those who had started only in the last hour. Maria Antonietta, which also leads the Sacred beauty series series on Sky Arte, has measured itself with an airtight text, uncomfortable enough to undermine an entire socio-economic system. We interviewed it to make us tell the dramaturgical approach to the biblical text.
Music, medieval art, poetry and theater: what unites these artistic expressions?
«My main activity is the songwriter, at least at a hierarchical level. I usually write my records, I make concerts, tours, but I have always had a great love for poetry. Often I happened to do reading and, in a fairly natural way, this passion for poetry and books in general led me to get closer and to contaminate myself with the world of theater and, more generally, with that of the written word. I wrote a book of poems and one of stories for Rizzoli, seven unforgivable girls. Now this proposal has arrived by Luca Doninelli, to whom I have enthusiastically joined. It must also be said that I have always been against the ghettoization of the arts: everyone lives their own world – in my case that of music – but the risk is that, after a while, he becomes self -referential. Instead, I think it is beautiful when the languages, the arts and even the people who belong to different worlds meet and make unexpected things happen ».
You have already written the music for the text of Dario Fo and Franca Rame, All home, bed and church. God is not an accountant is But your first debut in dramaturgy. What approach have you had to theatrical writing?
“It is first of all a monologue, recited by a single actress on stage. I wrote it without asking too many questions, with the unconsciousness of those who try something for the first time. The challenge was this: trying to do something new without imposing too many stakes. The starting point was to choose a song from the Bible that was particularly close to my heart, which concerned me and that could act as a pretext for a more poetic narrative. I wanted to not make it too academic or too heavy or philosophical. I wanted to maintain a certain lightness, because often, when we approach the Gospel or the Bible, there is a risk of formalizing and becoming excessively serious. The speech is obviously very deep, but I wanted to preserve some freshness, with a thin thread of irony. At the same time, I wanted that poetry would also find space in the text, so that this parable is imbued with it. There is a lot of beauty, beyond any type of reasoning or teaching. Therefore, poetry and irony were the two coordinates that led me in writing ».
Why, among all the vast biblical corpus, have you chosen this parable?
«I have not had too many doubts in the moment of choice, because it is a parable that has always affected me deeply. Usually, the readings that concern you and destabilize you are those that contain a value for you: it means that there is something you need to face, tell, understand. In this case, the text questioned the concept of justice and goodness, things we often take for granted. For example, when the owner pays the workers of the vineyard, he does it to an equal extent for everyone, regardless of the time they worked. At first glance, this thing surprised me: I did not consider it right. The master seems to behave as he likes, almost trying to cheat. But if the judgment is suspended and we read more attention, one wonders if perhaps there is no other purpose, a drawing that we do not immediately understand but that exists. For me it was important to try to understand why an action that initially seemed unjust to me, in reality, could have a different meaning, perhaps even higher. No longer that of accounting, where two more two does four and if you work an hour earning a money, while ten you work with ten. It is a question of emancipating from what I call the dictatorship of the accounting, so each balance must always return and, if it does not do, we shout to the injustice. It is an arid approach, in which everything is accounted for: time, energy, even the soul. It is a concept that has always fascinated me ».
In the drafting of the monologue you managed to find your personal answer?
«I came out satisfied but also challenged: reaching its own conclusion does not necessarily mean being able to adhere to you. Those who see the show will probably come out with an extra question rather than with a definitive answer. I believe that it is a common feeling that everything in our society becomes commodity. I perceive it a lot. For this reason, to discover that an ancient writing – beyond faith or personal beliefs – still asks such a powerful question today fascinates me. If a text continues to put us in difficulty after centuries, it means that it touches fundamental issues, which remain valid and current ».
