Tre quarti di luna

Debut: Rome, Teatro Valle, 3 March 1953

Direction Vittorio Gassman e Luigi Squarzina
Set and costume  Mario Chiari
Production  Teatro d’Arte Italiano directed by Vittorio Gassman and Luigi Squarzina

Characters and performers

Enrico Rambelli Franco Pastorino
Elisa, her sister Anna Proclemer
Mauro Bartoli Luca Ronconi
Linda, his sister Margherita Autuori
Gianni Luigi Vannucchi
Enrico's mother Luisa Gassman
Enrico's father Pietro Cesari
Germanico Piana, headmaster Vittorio Gassman
Professor Casalis Gianni Cavalieri
Professor Clemente Lucio Ardenzi
A professor of gymnasium Mico Cundari
Inspector General Butti Mario Feliciani
Beniamino, janitor Ferruccio Stagni
A peasant Maria Zanoli
A schoolboy Aristide Peraccini
Another schoolboy Renato Mori

Written by Squarzina and directed by Gassman, Tre Quarti di Luna was honoured with the 1953 Saint Vincent Prize for dramatic innovation, garnering resounding success with both audiences and critics who were impressed by its dramatic charge and tension from the first scene to last, as well as with the mastery of the action montages, the configuration of characters, the powerful language, the skilled dosing of progressions, and the refined technique of movements and plot twists. An acerbic yet authentic comedy, it makes a clear denouncement while maintaining an artistic vision all the while. The play – which holds the Gentile educational reform as the Italian twentieth century’s ideological and moral core – stresses the need for the teaching relationship to be free of ideological preconceptions and of factionalisms, while conversely emphasizing the pupils’ need for cultural autonomy. Tre Quarti di Luna [“Three-Quarter Moon”] marked Luca Ronconi’s acting debut and the end of the Squarzina-Gassman partnership. Tre quarti di luna marks Luca Ronconi’s debut as an actor and the end of the Squarzina-Gassman partnership.

(A proposito dell’incontro con Ronconi al Burcardo o alla Biblioteca Nazionale)
“Comunque sia mi incuriosì e mi piacque, aveva le fisique du role e sapeva recitare bene, per lui fu l’inizio di una grande carriera. Luca ha lavorato come me per circa sette anni, in spettacoli importanti, come Lorenzaccio, Romagnola, J.B., La congiura, ecc.”.
Luigi Squarzina

From E. Testoni, Dialoghi con Squarzina, Firenze, Le Lettere 2015, p. 109