To mark the 150th birth of Luigi Pirandello, the Embassy of Italy, the Italian Cultural Institute and KIT-Kairos Italy Theater present a reading of Pirandello’s play Enrico IV with a performance by Rocco Sisto. Play translated by Gloria Pastorino and directed by Laura Caparrotti.
Meet the King! Or better, meet a man who fell, hit his head and now believes he is “the” King Henry IV. Is he mad or is it just a way to tell the truth to his visitors?
Pirandello’s main theme of madness vs the mask that society forces us to wear is the focus of this new adaptation where mad Henry speaks to the audience who is more of a fool than him without knowing it.
This play is in English
LOCATION
Embassy of Italy
3000 Whitehaven Street NW
Washington, DC 20008
Luigi Pirandello, (born June 28, 1867, Agrigento, Sicily, Italy—died December 10, 1936, Rome), Italian playwright, novelist, and short-story writer, winner of the 1934 Nobel Prize for Literature. With his invention of the “theatre within the theatre” in the play Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore (1921; Six Characters in Search of an Author), he became an important innovator in modern drama.
Rocco Sisto has received an OBIE for The Winters Tale, an OBIE, a Drama Desk nomination and a Drama League Award for his role in the Broadway hit “Quills” and an Obie awards for Sustained Excellence. In film, he has been seen in several movies, such as the cult hit The American Astronaut, Donnie Brasco where he was playing Johnny Depp’s colleague Rickie Gazzo, Carlito’s Way, Illuminata, Frequency, Lorenzo’s Oil among many. His voice work includes Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. On television, Sisto played young Junior Soprano in the HBO series The Sopranos. He has also appeared in Law and Order, Law and Order C.I., Law and Order C.S.I., Close to Home, Star Trek: The Next Generation, “Alias”, “N.Y.P.D. Blue”, “J.A.G.”, and CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. In theater, he is one of the founding members of Shakespeare & Co., and he has often acted in the New York Shakespeare Festival at the Delacorte Theater in New York. On Broadway and Off-Broadway, he has appeared in numerous successful plays such as Quills, Amadeus, A Month in the Country, The Comedy of Errors, KAOS, “Souls of Naples “, The Harlequin Studies and Iphigenia 2.0, Treasure Island, among many others.
KIT-Kairos Italy Theater is internationally recognized as the Italian Theater Company in NY. KIT’s mission is to spread Italian Culture and to create an Italian Culture Network in order to maintain and spread the knowledge of Italy in the United States. KIT has produced more than 20 performances and events over the years, collaborating with Off-Off and Off-Broadway theaters and with US as well as Italian Institutions. KIT brings never before translated Italian plays to the US and it has created the Double Theatre Experience, where One-Act plays are performed first in English and then in Italian in the same evening, by different casts. KIT also offers workshops on Commedia dell’Arte and other traditional Italian theater techniques as well as Italian&Theatre classes. In 2013, KIT inaugurated In Scena! Italian Theater Festival NY, the first Italian Theater festival to take place in all 5 New York City Boroughs. KIT is the Theater Company in residence at Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimo’ at NYU. www.kitheater.com