New Plays from Italy, Vol. 2

Includes:

We Decided to Go Because We Don’t Want to Be a Burden to You by Daria Deflorian & Antonio Tagliarini

Edited by Frank Hentschker, Translated by Maria Galante

“We realized that we are a weight to the state, doctors, pharmacists and society. So we decided we’ll be off, to spare you further worry. You’ll save our four pensions and you’ll live better.” The play takes place in a suburban apartment where the women have just takentheir “sleeping” pills. A reflection on suicide not as an existential act, but as an extreme political act. Is there an altruistic suicide?

The Healer by Michele Santeramo

Edited by Frank Hentschker, Translated by Allison Eikerenkoetter

A drunken nearly blind old healer, with an intellectual son waiting to surpass him, attempts to heal an injured boxer, a pregnant woman, and a childless couple by bringing them together, making them relate in strange circumstances on a set where doors open and close on mysterious waiting rooms.

The Neighbors by Fausto Paravidino

Edited by Frank Hentschker, Translated by Jane House

He is alone in the apartment. He hears some footsteps coming from the landing. Trying not to make a sound, he looks through the spyhole. He tells Greta when she comes home that he saw the neighbors. How were they? He cannot tell, seeing is not understanding, but he is scared. Why? Who knows? This is a play about our fears, real and imagined, about ourselves and the other, about neighbors near and far, about war.

Dr. Frank Hentschker holds a Ph.D. in Theatre from the Theatre Institute in Giessen, Germany and joined the Faculty of the Ph.D. Program in Theatre at The Graduate Center, City University of New York, in 2009.

Dr. Hentschker currently serves as Executive Director and Director of Programs at the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center (MESTC), an institute for theatre based at the CUNY Graduate Center. In this capacity, since 2001 Dr. Hentschker has transformed the MESTC into a premier forum for public programming in international and U.S. theatre and theatre studies. He founded the acclaimed annual festival PRELUDE-at the forefront of contemporary nyc theatre, which features twenty New York-based theatre companies and playwrights at the Center each fall. He also started the PEN World Voices Playwrights Series, in partnership with the PEN America Center's PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature, and led 19 CUNY performing arts centers in the formation of the CUNY C-PAC Performing Arts Consortium, producing its first joint festival in 2009.Each year, Dr. Hentschker curates and produces approximately 40 events for the Segal Center, featuring lecture-demonstrations, symposia, works-in-progress and conversations with theatre scholars, theatrical luminaries and emerging voices in the international and local theatre scene.

Before coming to the Segal Center, Dr. Hentschker served as a producer, consultant and actor in the U.S. and Europe. He founded and was Artistic Director and Financial Administrator of DISCURS, the largest European student theater festival existing today; served as Robert Wilson's personal assistant and tour manager for his production of Dr. Faustus Lights the Lights at Berlin's Hebbel Theatre, and appeared as Hamlet in Heiner Müller's own production of his play Hamletmaschine, among many other roles. Dr. Hentschker served as President of the Board of PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art from 2005- 2009, and edited the book Jan Fabre: I Am A Mistake, Seven Works for the Theatre (MESTC Publications, 2009).