Tekken Drama, the text with which Francesca Becchetti received in 2025 the special mention In Scena! of the Hystrio Prize – Scene Scripture, will be presented at the Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò Monday 18 May 2026 at 18 in the framework of In Scena! Reading, in English and free admission, will last 75 minutes. The text was translated by Caterina Nonis and developed with Dave Johnson’s mentoring, playwright and American poet already involved in OnStage! American readings, the project dedicated to Italian translation of the American theatre.
The collaboration between In Scena! and the Hystrio Prize serves not only to bring an Italian text to New York, but to accompany it in the passage to another language and another audience. Each year the festival works with a dramatist or a dramatist selected by the prize, alongside a translator and a local author. It is a decisive work, because in theater translating not only means changing the words: it means understanding what rhythms have the jokes, what references still work and what should be adapted why they do not remain closed in the context from which they come.
At the center of Tekken Drama there is Eveline, a woman of thirty years who crosses her memories starting from the end of a sentimental relationship. The starting point may seem common, almost small, but the text uses it as an entry into a more complex area: that of the thoughts that are repeated, of the impulses that cannot be governed, of the parts of themselves that discuss each other without getting to a synthesis. In Eveline’s path there are also two imaginary figures, feminist and anarchist, who do not act as a simple inner chorus, but intervene with net, often hard advice, as if in his head the conflict needed to take shape and voice.
The title holds two records together that the text seems to want to live together without making them more tidy than they are. Tekken refers to combat, shots and data, to a competitive and unhealthy space where the body and psyche are tested. Drama, on the other hand, indicates both the theatrical dimension and a word often used to liquidate certain identities and certain ways of staying in the world as exaggerated, lamenty, “too” visible. Becchetti works within this ambivalence, in the nineties and present, using a pop frame to tell something that has to do with tragedy, satire and the way a person tries to give a name to his contradictions.
L’articolo The festival <i>In Scena!</i> brings to New York a new Italian dramatist comes from IlNewyorkese.
