Abstract

This article brings to light several examples of the hagiographic plays staged in Italy during the 1950s and early 1960s in parishes, schools, and oratories. The article begins with a brief introduction to the continued tradition of staging the lives of the saints for educational purposes, which focuses on the origins, aims, and main characteristics of theatre for young people of the Salesians, the order founded by Don Bosco in 1859. Next, it offers a brief panorama of the pervasive presence of the lives of the saints in post-WWII Italy. The main discussion of the article concerns the hagiographic plays created for the Salesian educational stages in the years between 1950 and 1965, especially those regarding the lives of young saints Agnes and Domenico Savio. The article concludes that the Salesian plays on the lives of the saints, far from constituting a mere exercise in hagiography, had a definite educational goal which applied to both performers and audiences in the specific times of Italy’s reconstruction and the cold war.

Highlights

  • This article brings to light several examples of the hagiographic plays staged in Italy during the 1950s and early 1960s in parishes, schools, and oratories

  • I will begin with a brief introduction to the continued tradition of staging the lives of the saints for educational purposes, focusing on the origins, aims, and main characteristics of theatre for young people created by the Salesians, the order founded by Don Bosco in 1859

  • Another voice—the voice of Satan—intervenes to plant doubts: Yes, Domenico Savio was a model of charity, generosity, and purity—but what sort of youth would Don Bosco see in the Salesian oratories and schools in 1965? The answer comes in nocturne three, “The echo in the world”, which is set in the present time

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Summary

Introduction

“The Church has always believed that the apostles and Christ’s martyrs who had given the supreme witness of faith and charity by the shedding of their blood, are closely joined with us in Christ, and she has always venerated them with special devotion, together with the Blessed Virgin Mary and the holy angels. [ . . . ], To these were soon added those who had more closely imitated Christ’s virginity and poverty, and others whom the outstanding practice of the Christian virtues and the divine charisms recommended to the pious devotion and imitation of the faithful”. In the years just before the promulgation of Lumen gentium, between the end of WWII and Fascism and the beginning of the economic miracle, most Italian parishes or Catholic schools would have had a theatre on which students and alumni would perform for members of their community—often staging the lives of the saints. I will begin with a brief introduction to the continued tradition of staging the lives of the saints for educational purposes, focusing on the origins, aims, and main characteristics of theatre for young people created by the Salesians, the order founded by Don Bosco in 1859. I will discuss the hagiographic plays authored for the Salesian educational stages in the years between 1950 and 1965, especially those regarding the lives of young saints Agnes and Domenico Savio. I will conclude by arguing that the Salesian plays on the lives of the saints, far from constituting a mere exercise in hagiography, had a definite educational goal which applied to both performers and audiences in the specific times of the country’s reconstruction and the cold war

Hagiography and Educational Theatre
The Salesian teatrino: A School of Sanctity
Saints and Mass Media in Post-WWII Italy
The St Agnes Plays Published in Teatro delle giovani
The Domenico Savio Plays Published in Teatro dei giovani
Findings
Conclusions
Full Text
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