Eleonora: Last Night in Pittsburgh – Ghigo de Chiara

“Theatron” Theatre Company

First performance: March 4, 1998

Last performance: March 11, 1998

The performance was reprised on May 8, 1998, as part of the “Soloists and Protagonists” Festival of Lamia, under the auspices of the Municipal and Regional Theatre of Roumeli.
Eleonora Duse is experiencing the last day of her life. She is seriously ill, in a second-class hotel.

Death is approaching.

She tries with all her might to hold on, she wants to perform again, to intervene in her own fate.

Sick, with a fever, sometimes delirious, sometimes lost in recollection, sometimes living in the present, sometimes playing various excerpts from roles she has portrayed. The memory of her great love, the Italian writer Gabriele d’Annunzio, is seldom far from her thoughts. In the end, unable to return to the stage and to her art, she takes her last breath on April 21, 1924, at the age of 66.

Eleonora Duse longs to see the blossoming April of her homeland again. However, she dies on a rainy, dark night in Pittsburgh, in a city full of smoke and with air tainted by rusty iron, as she says.

From the performance programme, curated by Vouvoula Skoura.