Following the success of Freud o l’interpretazione dei sogni, a Piccolo Teatro production from last year, Federico Tiezzi returns to exploring Austrian Society with the staging of La signorina Else by Arthur Schnitzler, an author who he had already staged with Il ritorno di Casanova.

Written in 1924, La signorina Else is a ruthless exposé of Austrian society of the time, a blend of frivolous superficiality and dark, worldly cynicism, where a family has no qualms about sacrificing their young daughter for financial gain.
On holiday in the Dolomites, Else (Lucrezia Guidone) is contacted by her mother who orders her to do anything she can to obtain a loan from an elderly family friend (Martino D’Amico), who is staying in the same hotel, in order to safe her father who, due to a business failure, risks imprisonment. The friend agrees to lend the money on the condition that Else strips naked for him. Humiliated and wounded by a request that she cannot refuse, Else agrees, to then kill herself by drinking poison.
Through flashbacks, Tiezzi shows the young woman, now dead, who re-evokes her story in reverse, in a wonderful, vibrant internal monologue, a dissection of the soul, in which fantasy blends with fear, and adolescent pride is transformed into real hallucination.