PROFESSOR JOSEPH MILLER: Fabrizio Pinzauti; THOMAS BACHER: Daniele Torrini; OFFICER O’CHELLY: Massimo Blaco; EMILY O’CHELLY: Raffaella Afeltra; MISS MADISON MOORE: Micaela Frulli; vocal performances: Anna Serena; costume design Fiamma Mariscotti; lighting Luca Romagnoli; backdrop Fabrizio Faber Piredda.

Over the course of the play's three scenes, the light gradually fades towards twilight and, eventually, near-darkness. The changing light accompanies the play's inner movement: from reasoning to confession, from jokes to reckoning, from irony to the ultimate threshold.

The cemetery is more than a setting. It is a landscape of the mind: a place where the living continue to talk, argue, love, fear, misunderstand one another—and search for one another.

The tone moves between lightness and depth. The play knows how to make us laugh, often through sharp, everyday humour, but never uses comedy as an escape from its central theme.

Quite the opposite. Comedy makes it human.

Death is named, discussed, challenged, feared, desired and rejected—but always through characters who are vividly alive, imperfect and contradictory.

No one possesses the final answer. Yet each of them forces the Professor—and the audience—to shift their point of view, if only slightly.

Confronti (Encounters)

Confronti is a play that chooses an apparently final place—an old Anglo-Saxon cemetery—to stage everything that is never truly final: thought, doubt, desire, fear, love, and the need to remain just a little longer.

At the heart of the story is Professor Joseph Miller, an elderly literature professor: gentle, cultured and ironic, arriving at the cemetery at dusk in search of peace—and perhaps an answer.

Around him moves a very different collection of characters: Thomas, a young gravedigger's assistant, shrewd, superstitious and endearingly down-to-earth; Michael and Emily, two young lovers who turn this place of death into a refuge for life; Officer O'Chelly, an overbearing father whose uniform conceals a more fragile man; and Madison Moore, a brilliant, intrusive and fiercely perceptive friend, stubborn in her affection.

First staged in 2017 by the Vicini D'Istanti theatre company, under the extraordinarily sensitive direction of Marco Lombardi, Confronti, Encounters, is a philosophical and deeply human comedy about limits.

It is a play about the possibility of choosing, but also about the impossibility of ever being truly alone in our choices.

Because even when you think you have already said goodbye to everyone, there may still be someone asking for one last drink, one last stretch of road together, one last word.