Lino Guanciale al Piccolo in Zoo

From 26 March to 5 May at the Piccolo Teatro Grassi Lino Guanciale, a highly regarded actor not only of television dramas but above all of theatre, is at home with Zoo a unique show that describes the meeting between a writer (Lino Guanciale) fascinated and at the same time troubled by the figure of Edda Ciano - Mussolini's daughter, a veterinarian (Sara Putignano) and the gorilla (Lorenzo Grilli) who lives in the laboratory of doctor. If initially the playwright - Sergio Blanco's alter ego - meets the gorilla with the sole purpose of writing a text about monkeys, as the narrative progresses under the scientific gaze of the veterinarian, the relationship between the two begins to intensify more and more, until it flows into a "love story", taking on a passionate dimension that leads both to slip into erotic desire, questioning every certainty and distinction between human and animal, trained and wild, "civilized" and "barbarian".

Supporter of the narrative technique of self-fiction, through which the raw material of one's own experience is transformed into fiction, the author and director Sergio Blanco created the text at the Paris Zoo, actually standing next to a real gorilla: "I needed the his closeness to be able to write – he declared –. Every time I went to see him at the zoo, my heart rate increased as I got closer to the enclosure. As soon as he arrived, we looked at each other, made gestures, then, little by little, I began to write. One day I realized that I wasn't writing about him but for him, and this fascinated me. Another day, the vets explained to me that the animal's heart rate also accelerated when he saw me approaching. I had to be away for two weeks. When I returned, he came in front of me and cried. I cried too. And it was there, at that precise moment, that I realized that we were both heading towards something unnameable. The only thing I could do was abandon myself, that is, give myself body and soul to writing. And that's what I did." Not to be missed at the Piccolo Teatro Grassi: info and reservations www.piccoloteatro.org.