This year, as the play’s title indicates, the Teatro Povero’s attention was focused on the struggle for land rights in the Val d’Orcia zone around Monticchiello. A struggle which organized peasant forces conducted in the aftermath of the Second World War.
But the play’s narrative began with the early 1920s, and threw light on the complex and difficult conditions which beset extended peasant families at that time of fascist domination.
Those same families broke up towards the end of the 1950s, in a huge social diaspora, when large numbers of peasants, especially younger ones, saw that their struggle had failed, and went off to succumb to the mirage of newly available work in local industry.
Just a few had the courage to stay on, became owners of their land, and by 1980 were running large or small agricultural businesses. They were seen by some as deserving relics of a peasant society which by now was evolving and disappearing.
The pivotal figure in this whole drama was a single old peasant who reviews and relives the history of his family and social class between 1920 and 1980.
(During this year, the Teatro Povero consituted itself formally into a non-profit-making Co-Operative with legal status: this fact too was addressed in the script of the autodramma.)
(During this year, the Teatro Povero consituted itself formally into a non-profit-making Co-Operative with legal status: this fact too was addressed in the script of the autodramma.)
