Theatre season 2024/2025: L'inferiorità mentale della donna

Theatre season 2024/2025: L'inferiorità mentale della donna

At 8.45 pm

In italian language

An evergreen of reactionary thought in music and words loosely inspired by Paul Julius Moebius' treatise The Mental Inferiority of Women.

by Giovanna Gra

with Veronica Pivetti

directed by Gra & Mramor

with Anselmo Luisi

soundtrack and musical arrangements: Alessandro Nidi

costumes by Nicolao Atelier Venezia

lighting by Eva Bruno

production: ArtistiAssociati in collaboration with Pigra srl

duration: 75 minutes, without intermission

Can the idea that women have been considered, for centuries, physiologically deficient suggest anything to us?

Our show stems from this question and stages texts that few people know, among the most discriminating, paradoxical and, despite themselves, hilarious rational writings of the last century.
Veronica Pivetti, modern Mary Shelley tells us, thanks to bizarre theories of science and medicine, about the only true, horrifying Frankenstein of modern history: WOMEN.
‘How are things about the sexes? An old proverb suggests: long hair, short brain'.
So began Paul Julius Moebius - assistant in the Leipzig neurology section - in the little compendium ‘The Mental Inferiority of Women’ written in 1900, aptly called an evergreen of reactionary thought.
Women with small skulls, insufficient brain weight... according to Moebius, ladies are endowed with a total lack of their own judgement. ‘What is more, after a few pregnancies they decay and, as they say very vulgarly, go senile’.
Not only that. Women who pretend to think are harassed and ‘reflection only makes them worse’.

These statements are echoed by the Italian physician, anthropologist, jurist and criminologist Cesare Lombroso: women lie and often kill, say the proverbs of all regions.
Fortunately, the brains of healthy women weigh more than those of criminal women. And here is a quick excursus on excellent crimes, for example that committed by Agrippina, or by Leonarda Cianciulli, the soap-maker of Correggio.

‘Women have only one enemy,’ Moebius raises, ’time, to which, however, after a few years of marriage they succumb, either by becoming fools or by drying up in the form of extravagant old maids.

Moreover, where there is talent, the female psyche manifests an obvious psychic hermaphroditism.
Sylvain Maréchal, writer, lawyer and self-styled revolutionary, with his ‘Bill to prohibit women from reading’ argues that ‘learning to read is for women something superfluous and detrimental to their natural learning’, on the other hand, ‘reason wants women to count the eggs in the yard and not the stars in the firmament’.

Accompanying Veronica on stage is a musician who, together with the actress, will perform old and new songs inspired by the female figure.
With this performance, embellished by delirious measurements of the cephalic index to which Veronica subjects herself with her irony, we will reach the acme of macho culture. A patient herself - due to a past depression - Pivetti does not fail to tell the audience some singular personal episodes and to remind us, in the words of Lombroso, that... ‘the male is a more perfect female’.

 

Information:

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