US Premiere – February 9, 2017 – 6:30PM
Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimo’ at NYU
part of Carnegie Hall’s La Serenissima
With:
Tali Custer, Aileen Lanni, Paul Herbig*, Michael Ryan*, Gina Marie Russell
Directed by Laura Caparrotti in collaboration with Jay Stern
*Denotes Equity Actors
The “Memoirs” by Venetian revolutionary playwright Carlo Goldoni (1707-1793) see the light in French in Paris, published by Duchesne, in three volumes corresponding to the three parts of the work: the author, at that date, is 80 years old.
Goldoni starts in 1783 to write his memories, which intends to serve “the story of his life and that of his own theater”. He finishes in 1786. Then in mid-August 1787 the publisher Duchesne, in Paris, prints the first edition of one of the tastiest autobiographies of our literature, in perfect balance between the romance of life education, the summary of poetic and of a nation’s customs statement (in this case, the French one where Goldoni lived for the last thirty years of his existence).
Carlo Osvaldo Goldoni (Venice 25 February 1707 – Paris 6 February 1793) is one of the most revolutionary Italian playwright. His works include some of Italy’s most famous and best-loved plays. Audiences have admired the plays of Goldoni for their ingenious mix of wit and honesty. His plays offered his contemporaries images of themselves, often dramatizing the lives, values, and conflicts of the emerging middle classes. Though he wrote in French and Italian, his plays make rich use of the Venetian language, regional vernacular, and colloquialisms. Goldoni also wrote under the pen name and title “Polisseno Fegeio, Pastor Arcade,” which he claimed in his memoirs the “Arcadians of Rome” bestowed on him. One of his best known works is the comic play Servant of Two Masters, which has been translated and adapted internationally numerous times.
