PITECUS is one of the most iconic works by Antonio Rezza and Flavia Mastrella, Golden Lions for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale Teatro in 2018. This unique artistic duo blends physical theatre, visual art, and absurdist language into an unrepeatable stage experience.
The show is a surreal, irreverent journey through a chaotic microcosm of humanity, inhabited by grotesque, marginal, yet deeply human characters: Gidio, shut indoors; Fiorenzo, restless and sick; Professor Stella, a media-addicted “videodictator”; a verbose father unable to accept his son’s homosexuality; Saverio, carefree and superficial; Mirella, praying for a job; and Roscio, mocked by his friends. There’s Sleeping Beauty with insomnia, a king exhausted by fatherhood, disillusioned husbands seduced by Saverio’s shallow charm.
Each character speaks in a fragmented, apocopated dialect and emerges from an ever-shifting landscape made of silks, nets, and jute—echoes of a working-class world where fantasy becomes survival. Their stories are absurd, comic, tragic, and raw.
PITECUS explores perversion, loneliness, and moral hypocrisy. There are no heroes—only flawed individuals who buy love and dignity, who hide in plain sight. In this grotesque theatre of humanity, vulgarity becomes strangely poetic, and even the darkest themes provoke laughter.
