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FRANCA RAME
Sunday, May 15 | 6pm | Casa Italiana Garden
FRANCA RAME, A Woman Alone (Una donna sola)
Franca Rame's "A Woman Alone" is the opening monologue for her one-woman play Tutta casa letto e chiesa (literally, "all home, bed, and church"), which she wrote and performed for the first time in the late 1970's.
These short feminist pieces are a kind of Italian antecedent of the Vagina Monologues. In addition to women's sexuality, these pieces also explore the difficulties of balancing work and home, the challenges of motherhood, and domestic violence (though often in a key you might not expect!).
Though Franca Rame's words come to us from a different era, I think today's readers will find that they still have a deep resonance for woman today.
FOR ITALOPHONES: You can find Franca Rame's own performance of Una donna sola (in Italian) in four parts on YouTube (see videos above).
(Unfortunately, the fifth part seems to have been taken down since I watched it a few months ago, I haven't been able to find it anywhere...! :( Read the end in the PDF to see how it ends [or watch the English] because the ending is key!!)
If you would like to use the text as a guide for your viewing, go ahead and take a look at the PDF version of the monologue, which you can download by clicking on the Drive PDF to the right. ------->
Rame_Una donna sola.pdfA WOMAN ALONE (in other languages)
Not confident in your Italian? No problem! This set of monologues has been performed by feminist theater companies across the world, and YouTube has performances of this text in every language from Hindi to Portuguese.
I would recommend as our official English language version the recent theater movie created by the women of Little Muse Theater, which was created during quarantine in 2020. (see below)
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