I Think It's Spring Outside

Gaia Saitta / Giorgio Barberio Corsetti / Concita De Gregorio

To forget, to remember.
Etymon, root: mind, heart.
To forget is to remove from the mind.
To remember is to bring back to the heart."

Irina Lucidi's story is tragically well known. One day, her husband abducted their six-year-old twin daughters. He later took his own life, and the girls were never found.
Five years after the tragedy, Irina decided to tell her story to journalist and writer Concita De Gregorio. From this deeply moving testimony emerged I Think It's Spring Outside, De Gregorio's powerful and profoundly sensitive book.

Confronted with the loss of her daughters, trapped in what she herself describes as a permanent state of siege, Irina recounts how she learned to survive the life that followed, resisting the temptation to disappear along with them.

"I am alive. Pain alone does not kill.
You need happiness to withstand such unimaginable pain.
You need fear in order to find courage."

"I believed I had loved completely, and that I would never love again. I was wrong."

Irina's endurance is an act of love.
This is an extraordinary portrait of a contemporary woman who, faced with an experience that bears all the hallmarks of Greek tragedy, succeeds in piecing together both her life and herself.
Gaia Saitta and Giorgio Barberio Corsetti bring De Gregorio's book to the stage in a participatory theatrical adaptation.
On stage, Irina—performed by Gaia Saitta—finds the key figures of her story among the audience. A live investigation unfolds alongside an intimate poetic journey, with spectators becoming active participants in the performance itself.

Director's Note
A true story becomes the substance of a devastating poetic work. A modern tragedy.
One actress.
The remaining performers are the audience.

Among the spectators, without even knowing it, may be the characters summoned onto the stage. For this reason, audience members will be invited to participate, perform simple actions, and become an integral part of the performance.

The production reveals how close evil can be, and how unexpectedly it may emerge from something as ordinary as a marital crisis.

When Irina meets Mathias, he appears intelligent, methodical, charming—a man with whom she imagines sharing her life. How can someone be so profoundly mistaken? Could this happen to anyone? What hidden abysses lie within another human being?

The disappearance of the two daughters. The husband's suicide.
The clues, the unanswered questions, the girls' bodies never recovered. Doubt.

A Medea in reverse. In this tragedy it is Jason who makes his daughters disappear. With calculated cruelty and vengeance, he ensures that their bodies will never be found, denying the mother the rituals and catharsis of mourning. He condemns her to an endless waiting.
This is the hell deliberately inflicted by an abandoned man upon the woman who dared to reject his obsessive need for control.

Mathias gradually becomes an ominous, lifeless figure—an asexual, mechanical presence that ultimately hurls himself beneath a speeding train.

An Italian woman in Switzerland. A hostile environment marked by prejudice, indifference and a deafness to repeated cries for help. Escaping the emotional coldness and rigid order of Switzerland, Irina eventually rebuilds her life in the warmth of Spain, alongside a man with generous hands and in the creative world of an animation studio.

For Irina, the possibility of a new life becomes the heroic conquest of an untouched territory—as vast as Patagonia, surrounded by seas from whose depths the immense bodies of whales emerge, a recurring image in her dreams.