Mio figlio cammina solo un po' lentamente

Marcela Serli

An intense family portrait where we laugh, argue and love stubbornly. In an ordinary house a birthday party is being prepared: Branko turns 25. Around him move a mother who doesn't give up, a silent father, a sister full of life, a grandmother who forgets everything - except the need for love. Between sharp dialogues and moments of poignant tenderness, everyday life becomes poetry and grotesque at the same time. Illness, disability, the fear of growing old are intertwined with simple and universal desires: to be seen, to be chosen, to be loved. With irony and delicacy, the show takes us inside a family that resembles all families, reminding us that, even when life slows down, the heart continues to race. A story that moves and surprises, capable of speaking to everyone.

Notes

Encountering Ivo Martinić's text means accepting a collective fragility without protection. It's a writing that offers no easy holds, no consolation, no softening: instead, it opens cracks, forcing us to look inside a family that falters, stumbles, avoids, laughs, and hides. For me, who has worked for years on a theater that seeks to shift the gaze and reject emotional simplifications, this text is both a gift and a challenge.

My directorial drive stems from the desire to make visible what usually remains off-screen: the micro-expressions, the tremors, the omissions, the small short circuits that reveal this family's inability to truly see each other.

My work with actors always begins with the body and the truth of their gestures. I don't seek the "right" interpretation, but a presence that is full, vibrant, capable of navigating both the comic and the terrible. In this show, I ask the performers to play a balancing act: between the temptation to hide and the need to expose themselves, between the grotesque that saves them for a moment and the pain that nails them immediately after. Tragicomedy here is not a genre: it is a human condition.

The theme of disability—physical, emotional, relational—is approached not as a label but as a mirror. Everyone in this family "walks a little slowly": each stumbles in their own way of loving, each avoids a truth. In this sense, the work takes on a militant value for me: it rejects rhetoric, rejects heroism, and chooses instead to narrate vulnerability as a shared territory.

I come from a biography made of crossed boundaries and shifting identities. In this text, I found something of my own: families who speak multiple languages without truly understanding each other, roots that hold firm and those that give way, generations trying to pass on something they never knew how to live. This is why I chose to highlight the text's emotional multilingualism: Italian as the language of the present, Friulian and Chakavian as languages of memory, intimacy, and fractures.

Directing Mio figlio cammina solo un po’ più lentamente means constructing an unstable place, inhabited by ten actors who bring to the stage the fragility of today's families: broken, noisy, affectionate, cruel, comical, desperate. It means accompanying the audience through a ritual, an impossible birthday that becomes a mirror of all the times we tried to be a family without knowing how.  

Marcela Serli