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INTERVIEW: In Scena! Italian Theater Festival returns for 2025 edition in NYC

Photo: The Perky Theresas, written and performed by Alessio Piazza, will play the In Scena! Italian Theater Festival NY, May 12-13. Photo courtesy of Giuseppe Farina / Provided by Emily Owens PR with permission.


The In Scena! Italian Theater Festival NY continues to be an annual celebration for lovers of imported theatrical projects, and 2025 is no different. The festival kicked off today, May 5, and continues until May 19, with performances set in all five boroughs of New York City. The expansive programming is a combination of efforts, with the New York-based Kairos Italy Theater joining forces with the Italy-based KIT Italia. They combine their creative minds with Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò at New York University to make this two-week-long event a success.

This year’s edition of In Scena! has many interesting productions featured, including Mater Familias by Pier Lorenzo Pisano, Lampedusa Beach by Lina Prosa and In the Name of Mary by Chiara Gambino, to name a few. A special treat this year is that Marco de Simone will be honored with the In Scena! Playwright Award for his show La Regola dei Terzi.

Recently Hollywood Soapbox exchanged emails with In Scena! artistic director Laura Caparrotti and associate director Donatella Codonesu to learn more about this year’s festival. Questions and answers have been slightly edited for style.

​​How does the selection process work for each festival?

CAPARROTTI: After 12 years, the process has really consolidated. In July, we publish the call for submissions. Then, in September, myself and my associates review all the shows, looking to select productions that aren’t too similar to ones from the previous edition and that are flexible enough to travel to different venues across the five NYC boroughs. After careful consideration and a couple of further steps, we select about eight shows.

CODONESU: Every year, a few weeks after the festival, we launch a call for the next edition. The call is open to all Italian theatre companies, to all theatre languages/styles, and to any kind of story and topic. We usually receive about 100 submissions, and we watch all of them in order to get to a pre-selection of 12 shows and finally confirm eight of them. Besides the call, we sometimes include one show by American artists working on Italian plays, as we did this year with a new adaptation of [Luigi] Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author by Nick Gabriel.

As general selection criteria, we try to present each year a diversified program, spanning from drama to comedy, including solo shows and performances with many actors, with music, sometimes even slam poetry (this year we have a young slam poetry world champion!). As for the content, we love deep, poignant stories but also clever humor and irony. We look for stories that are rooted in the Italian culture and relevant to the present time, and that are also universal because of the topic, the humanity of the characters, the dynamics of the plot.

Do you need to choose shows that can easily transfer to New York City? Big productions won’t work, right? 

CAPARROTTI: We do, of course. The shows we bring to New York are flexible and can be adapted to spaces with limited capacity. I dream of one day presenting larger productions alongside the independent ones we already showcase. Bigger productions require bigger venues and bigger budgets — resources we don’t have yet. But I’m a very stubborn person, so I believe (and hope!) it’s only a matter of time.

CODONESU: In Scena! presents off-off Italian theatre, often in non-theatrical spaces, therefore each production need to be very flexible both in terms of set and lighting. We never hosted a show with big scenography; however, we happened to build some set pieces in New York in the past rather that transferring sets from Italy, and we provide projections both for the set, when needed, and for the supertitles. And we did host medium-size productions with more than seven actors on a few occasions.

Are all the pieces translated into English for New York City audiences? 

CAPARROTTI: Yes, definitely! There’s always an English version of the shows, in order to be accessible to everyone — either through supertitles, bilingual performances (English and Italian) or sometimes entirely in English. This year we have two shows already in English: one from San Francisco, a fresh adaptation of Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, and one from the UK called The Popess. The other shows are translated and supertitled. We actually run a tutoring program in Milan at the School for Translators and Interpreters Altiero Spinelli, where young translators work on translating these plays and making supertitles from it. Supporting young artists is a big part of In Scena! mission. On this subject, we offer two mentorships as well: one in translation and adaptation (in collaboration with the prestigious Hystrio Award) and a new one that gives a young director the opportunity to direct one of our winning plays in translation. It’s our way of leaving a legacy — or at least, we hope so! It makes our work even more meaningful.

CODONESU: Most of the shows come from Italy exclusively for In Scena! and are performed in Italian with English supertitles. In fact, [over] the years, In Scena! gained a reputation in professional live supertitling as a form of accessibility of foreign culture. In the last decade, I have become an expert in the field, and I have been personally tutoring Italian university students on theatre translation and supertitling. Part of the In Scena! supertitles are currently provided by the students of the Altiero Spinelli Civic School for Interpreters and Translator in Milan. However, sometimes the artists are eager to address the audience directly, so they might choose to act some lines in English. And, of course, we also present performances entirely in English, when we host Italian theatre made in U.S.

A lot is happening in Italy right now. A lot is happening in the world. Do you see issues impacting the country represented in these works? 

CAPARROTTI: This year, we have a show that addresses an issue common to every country: immigration. It’s based on a book and tells the story of a young girl trying to make the journey from Africa to Italy. To find out what happens, you’ll have to come see Lampedusa Beach — that’s the title of the show!

CODONESU: All the arts reflect the world where they were conceived. That is particularly true for theatre, and off-off theatre more specifically, that is generated by the artists’ urgency and is therefore a mirror of its time. So yes, the works presented at In Scena! are impacted by everyday challenges in Italy and in the world, and they are always quite relevant with respect to urgent matters, such as diversity, inequality, environmental issues, misuse of power and politics in general. Even when the plays deal with intimate, personal stories, the impact of social issues on the fragility of the individual is always evident.

What do you love about Marco de Simone’s work? Why award him the Playwright Award? 

CAPARROTTI: You should really ask the judges! Every year, we have a different group of judges, and each of them votes for the plays they love most. The play that receives the most votes wins. That said, we couldn’t be happier with this year’s winner. Marco de Simone was actually part of In Scena! 2023, where he presented We Puppets, a play he wrote that spoke out against racism and violence. It was so poetic and carried such an important, powerful message. His new play continues in that spirit — it’s a story about understanding one another, and it involves the famous photographer Robert Capa during his time in Italy.

CODONESU: The winner is awarded by an international jury of artists, directors and theater experts. Their statement with regard to Marco De Simone’s work was: Refined text, which through clear and effective writing and dialogue cutting, manage to combine history, introspection and cinematic imagery. Its strength lies in its hooks with Italian historical memory, which become universal reflections on war, memory and the representation of reality. The use of photographic metaphor applied to the structure of the story gives it an original slant and provides several directorial cues.

I am personally glad that their choice fell on a small story becoming a universal and sadly relevant reflection on war. And I am also particularly glad that Marco De Simone, a 2021 In Scena! artist, is coming back to the festival as the In Scena! Playwright Award winner.

What’s the barometer for success? Ticket sales? Sponsorships? News coverage?

CAPARROTTI: Audience participation — especially since the entire festival is free admission — along with support and media attention definitely matter. But for me, real success is about what stays with the audience and the artists after the festival ends. It’s about seeing audiences deeply moved, hearing them talk about the performances days later, and knowing we helped a story travel across cultures. When artists tell us that In Scena! made a real difference for them, that’s when we know we’ve truly done something meaningful. Creating a family through the stage — that’s what success means to me.

CODONESU: The art of theatre provides the privilege of physical meeting and sharing occasions, therefore, I think that the measure of success in theatre is: first, the impact of each performance on the audience and second, the experience of the artists on stage, that changes at every performance, according the reaction of the different audience at their same show. This artist-audience exchange is a unique characteristic of live performing arts and undoubtedly the measure of their value — a measure not easy to take, though.

Besides that, all the In Scena! events are free, so I wouldn’t say that for us ticket sales can be significantly measured, even though the growing audience number over the years, in all the five boroughs, is certainly a source of pride for us. The attention of the press and theatre critics has also grown up, and now we even have media partners following and reviewing all the events. The interest of theatre journalists and critics is really rewarding, not just for the extent of their coverage, but also for the quality indicator that they provide by analyzing and commenting from the American point of view the In Scena! Italian program. Reading their articles has always been to me a quite interesting form of cross-cultural confrontation. 

By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com

In Scena! Italian Theater Festival NY continues in all five boroughs through May 19. Click here for more information and tickets.


John Soltes

John Soltes is an award-winning journalist. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Earth Island Journal, The Hollywood Reporter, New Jersey Monthly and at Time.com, among other publications. E-mail him at john@hollywoodsoapbox.com

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