BOUNDS
By Tino Caspanello
Five women stand in a wide parallelogram of sand, lined by wooden boards. I don’t know their names, the city where they were born, their age . . . The five belong to an unbreachable perimeter: as if they were closed in a cage . . . Time is an incalculable now . . . in which waiting takes shape . . . Place is a flat and vacant area in which ‘the architectures of interpersonal relationships arise.
—Alessandro Toppi, “At the Edges: Between Text and Show,” Pickwick Italy
Caspanello has produced one of the most important and noteworthy dramaturgical experiences on the Italian scene.
—Dario Tomasello, from the afterword to Teatro di Tino Caspanello, Editoria & Spettacolo, Italy
In the game of musical chairs, the one who loses dies, and every death speaks of a different space that we have closed, of different hopes terminated.
—Luca Lòtano, “Palermo and the Edges of Europe,” Teatro e critica
Caspanello . . . proposes . . . existences that, in order to save themselves, preserve themselves and survive, must halt upon a threshold, within a liminal space, and remain for a prolonged period in the present.
—Alessandro Toppi, “First Notes on Tino Caspanello’s Teatro,” Pickwick Italy
There is a place, a word, that any migrant who lands in or passes through Italy knows . . . Sicily . . . The land that has become an access to Italy and Europe is striving to respond to the multiethnic demands that migratory flows are invoking. —Luca Lòtano, “Palermo and the Edges of Europe,” Teatro e critica
Scenes from the Suttascupa Theater Company production in Palermo, Italy. Directed by Giuseppe Massa. Set and costume design by Simona D'Amico. Photos by Marcella Giuffré and Alessia Lo Bello.
About Tino Caspanello
Drawing by Biba Kayewich
The figures of Caspanello . . . advance in front of the public taking advantage of the physical component of the performers but never completely eliminating their pseudo-phantasmic dimension.
—Alessandro Toppi, “First Notes on Tino Caspanello’s Teatro,” Pickwick Italy
Tino Caspanello is a playwright, novelist, scenographer, actor, and director from Messina, Sicily, as well as the founder of the Pubblico Incanto Theater Company. He has written over twenty plays which have been translated into many languages and widely performed in Europe and internationally. In 2008 he received the playwright’s prize from Italy’s National Association of Theater Critics.
