The Comedy is Over!

A Conversation with Paolo Rossi

Edited by Carolina De la Calle Casanova

Preface by Oliviero Ponti di Pino

A nightime conversation, replete with stories and thoughts, visions and dreams, between Paolo Rossi and Carolina De La Calle Casanova. Two actors exchange their views on the theatre's state of the art. In the dressing room, over dinner, or lingering outside their usual hotel the authors imagine and develop a method, they take it apart and then piece it back together in a spiral of ever-increasing audacity. They devise new tricks, for once their performance is not destined to an audience of a theatre but to all those who are out there. Once, the world itself was a stage. Today though, how can that which is on stage or hides behind its curtains, evoke a world, how can it induce laughter, thoughts, emotions? The people's theatre of the NEP (Nuova Epica Popolare, i.e., New Popular Epic) seeks to address issues such as these. Heeding the example of Brecht, the two authors must choose the wrong side, sit on the pavement, and annoy someone. Yet they believe that when the dying begins to mock death, there is hope for salvation. At the very least they will die laughing in the face of power.