What a pair! Just like us two
A One Act Play
Written, directed and performed by Maria Angela Baiardi e Fabiola Crudeli
It’s been twenty-one years (1989) since we wrote this play, and almost as a game we went back to it quite recently. As we read it, we discovered two women who aren’t so different from the people we are today in this third millennium.
Is it still possible that women in the present day only feel fulfilled if they are wives and mothers?
And do the women not in that category feel themselves a failure, a fish out of water?
That’s why we felt we had to publish our play, and of course in the process we did a little tweaking and restyling!.
Two women in their forties, “on the edge of a nervous breakdown”, confront each other regarding their different life choices. Giulia’s an independent woman whose attitudes to men depend on her past in the feminist movement. Instead Lulu’s a desperate housewife, utterly romantic who needs a husband to feel satisfied. Everything in her life depends on a man.
The two protagonists, two women with experience, go through a transitional phase, a need to get over a difficulty, a crisis dictated by the fact they no longer have recognizable reference points determining their female identity: Lulu’s no longer got a man around, Giulia no longer gets any pleasure out of being single.
We focused closely on the comedy that triggers questions and answers from the words which flow along in the racy dialogue typical of sitcom. Here we have a spirited couple who enjoy bouncing their lines back and to, as if they were playing ping pong.
Giulia’s flat, the symbolic elements, the objects, bodies, rhythms, music and sounds amount to the communicative stuff of theatre and aim at enhancing both the intimate psychology of the characters and the social context in which they live.
Through the laughter of popular culture, we throw a particularly sensitive and aware gaze at the tragic situation women find themselves in.
At times things are exactly as they seem ….
A sequence of misunderstandings makes the comedy fresh and entertaining sino a ??? it reveals why Lulu’s husband has left her and how a woman’s resources may be manifold …but in the end a man is “the thing” she can’t do without, and for whom she often puts in motion a number of search strategies: “for that man who looks at me like he wants to eat me whole”.
Every woman dreams of a Prince Charming. We’re told about him from being very small when our parents read us our first stories: and they all lived happy ever after.
