Napoli Teatro Festival Italia opens the 2019 edition with a tribute to the great Lithuanian director Eimuntas Nekrosius, an artist who has always been linked to Naples and the Festival, recently passed away. It starts on June 8 at 5 p.m. with the inauguration of the exhibition Il Meno Fortas di Eimuntas Nekrosius, curated by Marius Nekrosius and Nadežda Gultiajeva (open until July 14). On June 8 at 9 p.m. the show Zinc (Zn), a show by the Lithuanian director inspired by the novels of the Nobel prize for literature Svetlana Aleksievič, is staged at Teatro Politeama (repeat on June 9 at 7 p.m.). The exhibition and the show will be preceded on June 7 at 8.30 p.m. by the screening of the documentary Eimuntas Nekrosius: Pushing the Horizon Further, scheduled at Teatro Politeama.

Nekrosius’ bond with Italy, where he received four Ubu awards (the first in 1996), was very strong indeed. To celebrate his figure, Marius Nekrošius and Nadežda Gultiajeva present at the Festival an exhibition of photographs, sketches, notes, and props of his memorable shows, born in the theater he founded. The exhibition opens a unique glimpse into the theatrical universe of the great director. Located in the premises of a former printing house in the historic center of Vilnius, Meno Fortas is the place where Nekrošius created most of his shows in the past two decades.

In the 2017 and 2018 editions of the NTFI, the great Lithuanian director conducted the laboratory project Theater Bridges in Naples: at the center of the first study session there were writer and journalist Svetlana Aleksievic’s works Chernobyl Prayer, Boys in Zinc and Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets. In the wake of this work, NTFI 2019 decided to host Zinc (Zn), a show that debuted in Vilnius in November 2017, at the theater where Nekrosius began his career. This work, inspired by the Aleksievič novels, traces the history of the last decades of the 20th century through the stories of the war fought by the USSR in Afghanistan and the explosion of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant’s reactor.

The feature film, presented as a preview of the Festival, is the portrait of the legendary director’s human personality and is based on the rehearsals of the show Boris Godunov by Alexander Pushkin, a performance directed by Nekrosius in 2015 at the Lithuanian National Drama Theater, which is presented in the film as an interview with the artist in his role as artistic director at the Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza, where for three years he directed the Ciclo dei Classici at Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza.

Nekrosius, who passed away in Vilnius last November, was working on Edipo a Colono for Napoli Teatro Festival Italia; the show’s production was then entrusted to the director Rimas Tuminas, artistic director of the Vakhtangov Theater in Moscow. The relationship between Naples and the countries of the former Soviet Union passes through Greece, whose myths tell stories of power and oppression typical of every era. Ruggero Cappuccio‘s Edipo a Colono, freely inspired by the work of Sophocles and directed by Rimas Tuminas, will be staged at Teatro Grande in Pompeii from June 27 to 29, as part of Pompeii Theatrum Mundi, organized by Teatro Stabile di Napoli – Teatro Nazionale and directed by Luca De Fusco. The show is included among NTFI 2019 special projects.