Theatre: Tutti Non Ci Sono – All Mad Are Free | Written, Directed and Performed By Dario D’Ambrosi. A Teatro Patologico Production in Italian and English – June 2, 2022

Tutti Non Ci Sono (We Are Not Alone, 1980, 1989) was D’Ambrosi’s American debut piece when first presented in New York by La MaMa in 1980. It is a solo performance in which an inmate from a psychiatric ward is victimized and neglected by the outside world. The play was written in reaction to a 1978 Italian law, which changed the Italian approach to mental institutions. At that time, inmates released from psychiatric wards had nowhere to turn and became helpless, homeless people living in the streets. D’Ambrosi, survivor of a rough, difficult boyhood in working-class Naples, began working with young (and less young) mental patients, seeking to find out what the violence of some of his buddies – the paranoia and schizophrenia of the streets – was all about. From that experience was born what Jerry Tallmer, writing in The New York Theatre Wire, called “the marriage of theater with pathology” – a concept for theater that is highly metaphoric, ironic and comic as well as tragic.

Dario D’Ambrosi and Teatro Patologico

Dario D’Ambrosi, founder of the Pathological Theater of Rome is one of the major Italian avanguard artists. Author, director and actor, he has been working for over thirty years on his personal research on madness, developing some among the most interesting theater shows on the Italian and International scene.

The shows of the Pathological Theater investigate the statuses of mental illness by grasping its vital, artistic and creative aspects with the intention of restoring the “dignity of the fool”.

Dario D’Ambrosi, in collaboration with Tor Vergata University in Rome, is the founder of the first Integrated Theatre of Emotion University Course. It’s a research, study and training community, in which teachers, researchers, technical and administrative staff, managers and students, participate fully within the context of their respective expertise, functions and responsibilities.  Its fundamental and primary purpose is the pursuit of an educational, scientific, and social research project, organizing different forms of training in a branched structure.