STAGE

In theatre, words cease to be merely written, imagined or remembered. They become body, breath, movement, presence. They are tested against light, silence, the other actor, and the gaze of those who listen.

For Onatzirò, the stage is the place where every text asks to be inhabited completely. Not simply interpreted, but lived through. In the great playwrights he has encountered fragile, arrogant, ridiculous, wounded, loving, defeated human beings—or people still stubbornly standing: characters who bring the most vivid contradictions of human nature onto the stage.

From Ibsen to Tennessee Williams, from Steinbeck to Jane Austen, from Gogol to Molière, from Sophocles to contemporary drama, his theatrical journey moves through classics, adaptations, socially engaged works, bittersweet comedies and ensemble narratives.

Every role becomes another way of giving shape to words: through the body, the voice, the timing of silence and expectation, through irony and through wounds.

More than any other art form, theatre has taught him that a story does not truly exist until someone speaks it in front of someone else. And that every character, however distant, begins to live when it ceases to be a mask and becomes a question.

This section brings together some of Onatzirò's theatrical experiences: encounters with companies, directors, writers and characters that have transformed words into performance—and performance into living memory.

THE ELEPHANT MAN

The Elephant Man is based on a painful and deeply moving true story, told with great delicacy and poetry, far removed from sentimentality or aesthetic complacency.

We are in London in 1884. John Merrick is exhibited as a circus attraction under the name The Elephant Man, controlled by the unscrupulous Mr Byte. His face and body are deformed by a condition that makes his appearance disturbing to those who see him.

The compassionate Dr Treves succeeds in bringing him to a hospital, hoping to understand the origins of his illness and perhaps find a way to treat him.

When Treves discovers that John can not only read but is also intelligent, cultured, gentle and refined, Merrick gradually becomes a celebrated figure in Victorian London.

At the heart of the story lies a proud defence of difference, set against a profoundly pessimistic vision of human nature. The play also reflects on the inscrutability of fate and on the tyranny of appearances, in a society that seems to measure human worth against a rigid and canonised ideal of beauty.

The dreamlike sequences of the prologue and epilogue evoke an attempt to find meaning in the natural mystery embodied by the protagonist.

Onatzirò plays the Strong Man, Dr Thomas, a drunkard and a passer-by.

EVA CONTRO EVA - 2026 Production

In 2025, the Giardini dell'Arte company brought Eva contro Eva back to the stage, based on Mary Orr's novel in the Italian adaptation by Maurizio Panici and Marzia G. Lea Pacella, once again directed by Marco Lombardi.

The cast for this production includes:

Laura Bozzi as Margo Channings; Rosanna Reccia as Eva Harrington; Chiara Foianesi as Karen Richards; Francesco Falsettini as Bill Sampson; Aldo Innocenti as Addison DeWitt; Brenda Potenza/Sandra Bonciani as Birdie; Massimo Blaco as Max Fabian; Matelda Giachi as Claudia Caswell/Phoebe.

Costumes: Fiamma Mariscotti. Music: Marco Simoni. Set Design: Marco Salvatori.

This time, Onatzirò plays Lloyd Richards.

CALCIO INVENZIONE INFINITA (Football, Infinite Invention)

On 4 October 2025, Calcio invenzione infinita was staged at the Teatro Verdi in Florence, directed by Marco Lombardi and performed by the Giardini dell’Arte company.

Based on the book of the same name by Sandro Picchi and Marco Viani, the production transforms the history of football into an ensemble narrative combining theatre, live music and dance.

Rather than presenting a simple succession of sporting triumphs, the show journeys through characters, ideas, myths and human stories that have made football a phenomenon capable of crossing eras, cultures and generations.

Onatzirò is part of the ensemble chorus, within a cast of around thirty actors, singers and dancers. The narrative chorus is one of the central elements of the production: a collective presence that accompanies the story and gives voice to the many lives and memories that shape this journey through the history and imagination of the world's most popular game.

He also performs a short monologue dedicated to Gigi Riva and Cagliari's historic Serie A title.

It is the story of Gigi Riva, “Rombo di Tuono” — “Thunderclap” —, the solitary and reserved champion who chose Sardinia, and Manlio Scopigno, the fatalistic philosopher who guided Cagliari to the championship from the bench.

In Onatzirò's voice, the story takes on a more intimate meaning. It is not merely the story of a football team and an unforgettable title, but the story of “my Sardinia” and “my Cagliari”.

The production also had a charitable purpose. Promoted by Firenze con Te ODV, , it supported a project dedicated to training personal assistants in order to promote freedom and independence for people with severe disabilities.

UOMINI E TOPI (Of mice and men)

Based on John Steinbeck's masterpiece, in Luigi Squarzina's Italian adaptation, Uomini e topi tells the story of George and Lennie, two migrant farm workers travelling through Depression-era America.

They are two lonely men bound by a profound friendship and by a simple, stubborn dream: to save enough money to buy a small piece of land and finally build a life of their own.

George is the mind, the guide, the protector. Lennie has the strength of a giant and the vulnerability of a child.

In a harsh world populated by defeated, excluded men hungry for a future, their friendship represents an exception: the possibility—perhaps the illusion—of not being completely alone.

Yet in Steinbeck, the dream already carries within it the shadow of its own ending.

Directed by Marco Lombardi, the Giardini dell’Arte company brings to the stage the full humanity and power of a work in which friendship, loneliness, exclusion and the longing for freedom converge towards an inevitable and painful conclusion.

Since its première, the production has toured theatres and festivals throughout Italy, with more than twenty-five performances and numerous awards from both professional juries and audiences.

These include first prize at the 77th GAD Festival in Pesaro, the Premio Città di San Miniato, and several awards recognising the production, direction, set design and performances.

Onatzirò plays Carlson.

LA GATTA SUL TETTO CHE SCOTTA (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof)

Tennessee Williams' masterpiece brings together a family around an ailing patriarch and an inheritance everyone already seems eager to claim.

But beneath the surface of financial interests lie deeper wounds: repressed desire, lies, resentment and truths no one truly wants to confront.

At the centre are Brick and Maggie. He retreats into silence and alcohol; she clings stubbornly to a love that seems to be slipping away.

Around them, the Pollitt family transforms a birthday celebration into a reckoning, where hypocrisy becomes a common language and every relationship begins to reveal its fractures.

The production has appeared on several Italian stages and received both the Special Jury Prize and the Audience Award at the 26th edition of Vetrina Teatro.

The recognition celebrated a production capable of preserving all the tension, vulnerability and emotional ferocity of Williams' text.

Onatzirò plays Dr Baugh, the man called upon to bring into the house a truth no one seems ready to accept.

UN TRAM CHE SI CHIAMA DESIDERIO (A Streetcar Named Desire)

Un tram che si chiama desiderio porta in scena uno dei testi più potenti e inquieti di Tennessee Williams: un dramma di passioni, fragilità e identità in conflitto.

Al centro della storia, l’incontro esplosivo tra mondi opposti: il bisogno di essere amati, la paura della verità, la violenza del desiderio e l’impossibilità di sottrarsi fino in fondo al proprio passato. In un’atmosfera tesa, sensuale e claustrofobica, i personaggi si muovono lungo il confine sottile tra illusione e realtà, cercando disperatamente un equilibrio che continua a sfuggire.

Con la regia di Marco Lombardi, la compagnia Giardini dell’Arte restituisce tutta la forza emotiva del testo di Williams, trasformando la scena in un luogo di scontro, attrazione e progressiva disgregazione, dove ogni personaggio è costretto a confrontarsi con ciò che desidera e con ciò che teme di più.

Onatzirò è Steve

CASA DI BAMBOLA (A Doll's House)

In presenting his 2019 production, director Marco Lombardi, wrote:

"The publication of A Doll's House in 1879 caused an enormous scandal—and understandably so.

Drawing inspiration from a true story, Ibsen challenged the narrow-minded and hypocritical values on which society of the time was founded, beginning with the dismantling of the idealised image of marriage and family and extending his criticism to work and social respectability as a whole.

Nora, the protagonist of A Doll's House, through an act that is both revolutionary and profoundly moral, determines the destinies of the other four characters.

Within each of them lies an instinct for survival that magnifies, in different ways, their individual needs and fears.

Through her choice, Nora directs their lives either towards shipwreck or towards the possibility of escaping it.

All this led me to reflect on the extraordinary modernity of the play. Nora lives, acts and thinks in our own time, as though the one hundred and forty years since Ibsen's masterpiece first appeared had never passed.

The idea, therefore, is to present a timeless story, one that could belong to any moment in those one hundred and forty years, bringing it closer to our own age through contemporary stage design and through the physical interaction between the characters."

Stage photographs by Marco Donati.

Onatzirò plays Dr Rank.

OLTRE IL FILO (Beyond the barbed wire)

Oltre il filo is a theatrical journey through places where democracy breaks down and rights cease to be guaranteed.

Guided by a professor of The Science of Democracy, audiences travel alongside his students across geographical and historical borders: from the concentration camps of the past to contemporary places of segregation, repression and deprivation of freedom.

South Sudan, Guantánamo, Bosnia, China, Russia, Auschwitz: different stages of the same urgent and uncomfortable question.

How fragile is a right once we stop defending it?

Written by Roberto Zatini and performed by the Il Teatro dell’Inutile company, directed by Daniele Torrini, with Onatzirò as assistant director, Oltre il filo is a production about memory, but above all about our responsibility in the present.

Because the line separating freedom from its denial is often thinner than we imagine.

Onatzirò plays the Professor of the Science of Democracy.

RAGIONE E SENTIMENTO (Sense and Sensibility)

Director Marco Lombardi, presenting Giardini dell'Arte's ambitious production of Ragione e sentimento, wrote:

“Our challenge is to bring to the stage what we believe to be an extraordinary novel.

Jane Austen has captivated millions of readers with Sense and Sensibility, and the idea came to us after revisiting the remarkable film adaptation of the 1990s, which gave renewed visibility to the even more famous novel.

Without wishing to distort a beautiful story that contains an extraordinary variety of ideas, reflections and even moments of comedy—often arising from the exaggerated cynicism of the aristocracy of the period—our aim is to create an almost faithful theatrical adaptation, with a cast of fifteen actors, period costumes and a simple but effective set, allowing audiences to breathe in the atmosphere of that extraordinary historical period.

The production is completed by original music from an exceptional composer and the technical support of several professionals.

With this new challenge, we hope to repeat the successes of our recent past.

We take great pleasure in the creative recklessness with which we continue to propose works outside the usual repertoire.”

The story tells us that the challenge was won.

Onatzirò plays Sir John Middleton.

FERDINANDO

Ferdinando is one of the best-known works by Annibale Ruccello, one of the leading playwrights of the new Neapolitan theatre movement of the 1980s.

First staged in 1986, the play is set in August 1870, shortly after the unification of Italy.

In a villa in the countryside near Mount Vesuvius lives the reclusive Donna Clotilde, a Bourbon baroness who rejects the new political and social order.

She shares the house with her cousin Gesualda and Don Catellino, the family priest.

The arrival of the young, attractive and ambiguous Ferdinando disrupts the fragile balance of the household. By seducing everyone around him, he brings repressed desires, hypocrisy, rivalries and secrets to the surface.

Combining comedy, sensuality and tragedy, Ruccello depicts the decline of the Bourbon aristocracy and the difficult transition towards the new Italian society.

The language, shifting between Italian and Neapolitan dialect, becomes an expression of the conflict between identity, power and historical transformation.

Onatzirò plays Don Catellino.

LA CUCINA SOTT'ACQUA (The underwater fitted kitchen)

The Florence flood of 4 November 1966, perhaps more than any other dramatic event, divided the collective memory of Florence and its surrounding areas into a before and an after.

We all remember—or have seen—the images of Florence's historic centre overwhelmed by the force of the water, with masterpieces of art submerged in mud and fuel oil: images that travelled around the world.

What has perhaps been told less often is how the flood entered people's homes, carrying away objects both large and small, exposing people's vulnerability and helplessness, and leaving wounds that would remain forever.

How did a family in Sieci—a small community within the municipality of Pontassieve, built along the Arno upstream from Florence—experience the flood?

There were no works of art to save here. The family's treasures were a few clothes, a radio, a wood-burning kitchen stove, their modest savings, four freshly painted walls in a newly rented home—and new furniture that had not yet even been delivered but was already covered in mud... and still being paid for in instalments.

The play tells a simple story.

Piero is an extremely active member of the local Communist Party and a town councillor. On the evening of 3 November, he repeatedly goes out to check the condition of the Arno. He needs to understand whether the river will once again behave badly, as local storytellers have so often described, or whether this time everyone really is going under.

His son Moreno is away from home. He has driven to Compiobbi to visit his girlfriend. Will he manage to get back, or is he in danger?

Piero's wife Lina is at home with her elderly parents, Grandfather Luigi and Grandmother Enrichetta, and their daughter Carla, unpacking boxes after the move.

She is torn between worrying about her son, thinking about the Levane dam, and thinking about the new furniture they have already bough, particularly a brand-new fitted kitchen sitting in a ground-floor warehouse, due to be delivered the following day.

But this time, the flood really does arrive, with all its consequences.

Onatzirò plays Grandfather Luigi.

Il cast

Corifeo: Marco Bartolini; Antigone: Luisa di Valvasone; Ismène: Marina Bambi; Guard / Messenger: Giorgio Della Pergola; Haemon: Daniele Torrini; Tiresias: Filippo Catelani; Eurydice: Ilda Fusco

Antigone is one of the greatest and most necessary tragedies of Greek theatre.

Written by Sophocles in the fifth century BC, it is the tragedy of an impossible boundary: the one between what conscience knows to be right and what the city believes to be necessary.

Sophocles places at the centre of the story a young woman who defies the king's decree in order to bury her brother Polynices.

Creon, ruler of Thebes, considers him a traitor and forbids anyone from honouring his body.

Antigone, however, obeys a law older than any political authority: the unwritten law of the dead, of the gods, of blood and compassion.

The greatness of the tragedy lies in the fact that the conflict can never be reduced to a simple opposition between right and wrong.

Antigone holds fast to an absolute truth, yet hers is a harsh and solitary truth, prepared for sacrifice.

Creon defends a fragile and human law, vulnerable to error and arrogance; yet without such laws there can be no state, order or community.

Between them opens a wound that has crossed the centuries: on one side, the universal laws of conscience; on the other, the laws created by human beings, imperfect and changeable, yet necessary to communal life.

Antigone still speaks to us because it forces us to remain inside this contradiction.

We cannot live without law, yet neither can we accept a law that becomes blind, detached from justice, compassion and humanity.

This production by Il Teatro dell'Inutile was directed by Daniele Torrini

Onatzirò plays Creon

EVA CONTRO EVA (All About Eve)

In 2015, Eva contro Eva marked the beginning of a collaboration between Onatzirò and the Giardini dell'Arte company that has now lasted for more than a decade and produced numerous shows.

Based on Mary Orr's 1946 story and made internationally famous by the multi-Academy Award-winning film, All About Eve is a ruthless portrait of the cynical world of show business: an escalating chain of concealed deceptions and a bitter examination of theatre and those who inhabit it.

It reflects a society permeated by pettiness, ambition, duplicity and ruthless manoeuvring, delivered like fatal blows in the struggle for a fleeting moment of fame.

The conflict between celebrated actress Margo Channing and the seemingly naïve social climber Eve Harrington draws every level of a theatrical production into the struggle: writer, director, producer and critic.

Each reveals moral decline, compromise and occasional attempts at redemption, until Karen, at once spectator and participant, is pulled onto the chessboard and forced to influence the outcome of the game.

But theatre, like life, always presents the bill—and there is always another surprise waiting just around the corner.

Onatzirò plays producer Max Fabian

HEDDA GABLER

Written by Henrik Ibsen in 1890, Hedda Gabler is one of the masterpieces of modern theatre.

Hedda, daughter of the late and authoritarian General Gabler, has entered a loveless marriage with Jørgen Tesman, a mediocre but devoted academic.

Returning from a long honeymoon, Hedda realises that she is pregnant and feels no enthusiasm whatsoever for the new life that awaits her.

The situation deteriorates with the arrival of two figures from her past: her former lover Eilert Løvborg, a brilliant but self-destructive writer and Tesman's academic rival, and the ambiguous Judge Brack, who attempts to blackmail her.

Jealous of Løvborg's freedom and driven by the desire to exercise power over the lives of others, Hedda subtly pushes him towards self-destruction, giving him one of her father's pistols.

When Judge Brack discovers the truth about the weapon and attempts to use it to force Hedda into submission, she is unable to accept either dishonour or dependence.

She takes her own life with a gunshot to the head.

Onatzirò plays Judge Brack.

In July 2014, Onatzirò took part in Versus – L'eterna lotta, an interactive theatre production written and directed by the imaginative and prolific Alessandro Riccio, staged on 25 and 26 July at the Antica Badia a Settimo in Scandicci.

More than a traditional performance, Versus was an immersive theatrical experience: a large-scale nocturnal treasure hunt in which spectators were drawn directly into the story, following clues, deciphering signs and physically moving through the locations.

At its heart was the eternal opposition between good and evil, light and darkness, choice and destiny.

It was an ancient, almost mythological tension, perfectly suited to the Badia a Settimo, where stone, memory, silence and mystery became integral parts of the narrative.

Theatre here opened itself to play, ritual and exploration.

The audience did not merely watch: spectators interacted with the setting, the characters and the clues scattered along the way, becoming active participants in a story suspended between reality and imagination.

Onatzirò plays the Faun, an ambiguous, symbolic figure associated with nature, instinct, seduction and the fragile boundary between human and animal.

L'ISPETTORE GENERALE (The Government Inspector)

During 2013 and 2014, under the guidance of Maria Paola Sacchetti, Onatzirò further explored the techniques involved in bringing a theatrical production to the stage.

L'ispettore generale was the result of that work.

The Government Inspector, also known in Italian as Il revisore, is Nikolai Gogol's celebrated satirical masterpiece, written in 1836.

It is a comedy of mistaken identity in which the corruption, incompetence and pettiness of the Russian bureaucracy are exposed when a penniless young traveller is mistaken for a feared government inspector.

The play remains dishearteningly relevant today.

The story takes place in a small, corrupt town in Tsarist Russia, where local officials live in terror of an unexpected inspection from the central government.

When the Mayor learns that an inspector is due to arrive incognito, panic spreads throughout the town.

At the same time, Ivan Khlestakov, a young, penniless civil servant from St Petersburg, is staying at a local inn.

Through a misunderstanding, the town's dignitaries mistake him for the government inspector and do everything in their power to win his favour.

Khlestakov seizes the opportunity: he borrows money, accepts gifts and presents himself as a powerful government official before escaping shortly before the deception is revealed by the arrival of the real inspector.

Onatzirò plays the Mayor.

TARTUFO (Tartuffe)

In 2012, Onatzirò decided to return to formal study of diction and acting, attending a course in Florence led by actress and theatre teacher Maria Paola Sacchetti. That experience brought him into contact with remarkable people with whom he would later share part of his artistic journey.

Tartufo was the final production of the course.

Tartuffe ou l'Imposteur, known in Italian as Il Tartufo, is one of Molière's most celebrated and frequently performed comedies, first written in 1664.

It is a fierce satire of religious hypocrisy and fanatical moralism, centred on a false holy man who manipulates and deceives a wealthy bourgeois household.

Tartuffe is welcomed into the home of Orgon, a prosperous Parisian.

Behind a mask of profound devotion and piety, Tartuffe succeeds in completely manipulating his benefactor, eventually persuading Orgon to transfer his property to him and promise him the hand of his daughter Mariane.

While the servant Dorine and the rest of the family repeatedly try to make Orgon see the truth, his wife Elmire decides to expose Tartuffe by arranging a meeting during which he attempts to seduce her.

Orgon, hidden beneath a table, witnesses the betrayal committed by his supposedly holy friend.

Tartuffe, however, retaliates by claiming ownership of the house and attempting to evict the entire family.

The play ends with a deus ex machina: the wise and providential intervention of King Louis XIV, represented by an officer, who has the impostor arrested and restores Orgon's property.

Onatzirò plays Orgon.

We are in the second half of the nineteenth century. Between 1860 and 1863, Italy is in the midst of its process of unification, firmly in the hands of the House of Savoy—a process which, as we shall see, will prove far from painless and will help set the country on two increasingly divergent paths, one in the North and one in the South, with consequences that—sadly—are still evident today.

This is the beginning of the so-called “Southern Question”. Born out of the incompetence and political immaturity of the ruling classes of the time—though not only that—it would find one of its most notorious expressions in the phenomenon known as brigantaggio, or brigandage.

In a Southern Italy that feels disappointed and betrayed—first by the promises of Garibaldi and his Thousand, in a chapter of history long neglected by traditional historiography, and later by the so-called “Turinese”—a movement of protest begins to take shape.

Little by little, that protest turns into a desperate and armed cry against a new invader: a power that had almost imperceptibly replaced the former Bourbon ruler, itself perhaps too hastily discredited and cast aside.

BRIGANTI!...PARTIGIANI IN MINORE (Brigands!... Partisans in a minor key)

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