Two Plays
SynopsisPlot
The first, concerning the aftermath of the Holocaust, questions truth, loyalty, and the future as well as a host of other issues that surround the despair and emptiness of lost lives. The second centers on the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti the Italian-American anarchists executed for murder and robbery in 1927. These plays, large in scope and thematic range, reveal, for the first time to the English-language audience, the powerful force of Gatti’s drama.
Story
About this book
Armand Gatti, born in Monaco and active in French-language theater, wrote plays shaped by political history and its human consequences. This volume collects two of his works, each built around a different episode of twentieth-century conflict. The first play deals with the aftermath of the Holocaust, exploring questions of truth, loyalty, and what remains when lives have been destroyed. It examines how survivors and witnesses face despair while trying to locate meaning in what has happened to them.
The second play takes up the case of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, the Italian-born anarchists arrested in Massachusetts and executed in 1927 after being convicted of murder and robbery. Their trial drew worldwide attention and protest, and Gatti uses it as a framework for examining political justice, immigrant experience, and the workings of public fear. Both plays are broad in scope and deal with moments where individual fate and collective politics become impossible to separate.
The collection was intended to introduce Gatti's dramatic writing to English-language readers. Gatti spent decades creating theater tied to historical and social subjects, and these two works reflect that ongoing concern with how societies remember and judge the past.
