In March 2020, in full pandemic, during the first lockdown, I thought of "photographing" in a theatrical comedy that incredible time for each of us. From the window of the house I see a large square in the center of Roma. That square was completely deserted. Loneliness, isolation, disorientation, bewilderment. Every day, at six in the afternoon, we were all nailed to the TV listening to the death report.
How "There are days that never happen" was born
I wanted to tell about the impotence of feelings in that time when we were like suspended from life, as we had always experienced it. So I thought of two adults who had met years ago on Facebook and who make a habit of call every day, breaking with that little rhythm the idleness of days that are all the same.
The two protagonists could not be more different, he a Roman intellectual, she a saleswoman in a shop in the Piacenza hills. That loneliness pushes them to confide, they let themselves go, they tell each other about their mutual dissatisfaction with their partners. Reports tireddull, opaque. Loneliness amplifies the crisis. Soon the sentimental confidences turn sexual. They start acting up as if they were together, physically together, as if they were engaged.
Music by Ennio Morricone, Castellitto and Ferrari the protagonists
But it is a virtual love born on the virtual platform of Facebook, it is a mental journey that becomes a game of massacre. A hallucination. For the music I asked for help Ennio Morricone, who knew me when I was a teenager and who was like a second father to me. He asked me the plot, he told me to call him back after two days. I called him and he started to whistle beautiful music on the phone, epic and melancholic, a Morricone doc. A circular, spiral music that reflects one hundred percent that crazy story, a story that flourishes and curls up on itself before even being born.
I wrote the play in March, we went on stage in July, when the theaters reopened, albeit with limited seats. It was a real miracle. I managed to have as protagonists Sergio Castellitto, returning to the theater after sixteen years, and Isabella Ferrari. They had never worked together.
"There are days that never happen" becomes a novel
The show is called There are days that never happen. He was represented at Ravenna Festival and Torre del Lago Festival. Three days before debuting on July 6, 2020, Ennio Morricone died. That for my play was thereto his latest music. Also and above all for this reason, the show had great resonance. Tg1, Sky Tg24, my newspaper, the Corriere della Sera, devoted ample space to it, and so did other newspapers. Requests came from theaters in Milan, Rome, Palermo. But the halls, due to the pandemic, closed. And I was fond of those two characters. So I revived them, took them off the stage and transferred them to the paper from a novel. The casa editrice Goware wanted to keep practically the same title: from There are days that never happen to There are loves that never happen.
Someone asked me why such a painful story. There are a thousand answers. I choose one, which is not found in my two writings pervaded by the defeat of feelings. If Peppino Patroni Griffi wrote the play "D'Amore die", it is equally true that you live on love. Off the beaten track, as I said before, I wanted real-time narration, I searched the feeling of the time. People, coming out of the performances, had identified, said they had shared similar experiences in those days, many had re-established relationships with classmates and friends they hadn't heard from for years, fantasizing who knows what between regrets and remorse. The lockdown, the harsh one, has awakened dreams, nightmares, obsessions, demons, ghosts in many of us.
The challenge was to try to make a story that you already know from the title how it will end, keeping the suspense high. Aldo Cazzullo, who wrote the foreword to the novel, defined it a soul thriller. I also wanted to tell about a love story in adulthood, usually it is told very little. Those two love each other like teenagers love each other. They are two young men of a certain age who behave like two inexperienced. A broken, crooked, wrong story. In a flash they screw up certainties, ties, their past. But if he offers himself with all his fragility and vulnerability, and is not a Peter Pan in search of adventures, she, the former beauty queen of the hills of Piacenza, little educated but sophisticated, with a great aesthetic sense, has a drawing…I'll stop here. One last thing. I belong to the world of classical music and in writing I searched a percussive rhythmstubborn, relentless. I thought of an image that recurs in Truffaut's films, the swaying of a woman's skirt on the knee as she walks.
Happy reading, for those who want.
