Donna Paola and female playwrights during the Fascist era

Abstract

The Dossier is one of the results of the research for a PRIN 2022. It focuses particularly, but not solely, on the Thirties, often through representative stories of women. The starting point is prose theatre, both professional and amateur, which allows for the exploration of different levels that in the context of the period appear less central, as the realisation of more or less experimental drives between dance and prose. The study branches out into different areas concerning the presence of political police; the influence, even on theatre, of the growing relations with Germany; the emergence, between the war and post-war periods, of a generation of ‘certified’ directors who had studied at the Academy of Silvio d’Amico; the female playwrights.

Raffaele Rezzonico’s Donna Paola and female playwrights during the Fascist era explores the problem of female dramaturgy by means of a significant example. During the fascist period, female playwrights are hardly ever mentioned in newspapers and magazines: female dramatists are rare, journalists and theatre critics are practically always men. The exception in this panorama of silence is an article on “female playwrights” published in 1937 by the writer and feminist journalist Paola Grosson in a precarious editorial female niche, the «Annual Almanac of the Italian Woman». “Donna Paola’s” article allows the author to note and discuss some issues concerning the connections between sex, power and theatre authorship before and after the consolidation of the fascist regime and the definitive shelving of historical feminism. Through these issues, it shows the similarity between the reasons that prevented women from being dramatic authors and those that disempowered them from political participation and from legal family authority, and the continuities and discontinuities in social attitudes and authorial recognition of female playwrights.