Marco Martinelli returns to the Piccolo with Lisistrata, a new chapter in the Sogno di volare project, founded in 2022 in Pompei. Created with the participation of adolescents from the Vesuvius area, the play comes to Milan in a brand-new and choral form, involving the youngsters from the workshops organised by Olinda, which operates within the Paolo Pini ex-psychiatric hospital in Milan.
The project draws inspiration from Aristophanes, the father of Western comedy or rather, as Martinelli writes in the director’s notes, “a furious adolescent” who, at the age of eighteen, began writing in protest of the war that savaged Athens.
Taking to the stage with a choir of 120 adolescents, Lisistrata draws on the inventiveness of the comedian as well as the creativity of the young actors, who embrace the celebrated story, interweaving the pacifist fight with the dream of an alternative world: if men continue to perpetuate war, then women will “undo the armies” with a paradoxical denial of sex. 
«Over the more than thirty years in which, since the early Nineties, I invented the non-school, in Ravenna – commented the director – adolescents have not changed: they are still magnificent, fragile creatures, filled with dreams and fears, desire and darkness, which adult society continues to ignore».