Don Giovanni e il suo pitbull

Don Giovanni is more than just a provocative title. It is the ironic, irreverent lens through which Dan Fante - son of the Italian-American writer John Fante - reexamines the American family at the end of the millennium.
In this work, personal memory and social critique intertwine, giving shape to a dark comedy that entertains while, above all, provoking reflection. Dan Fante follows in the path laid down by his father, yet speaks with a voice entirely his own: sharp-edged, disenchanted. If John Fante gifted literature with believable, tormented, eternally adolescent characters, Dan inherits that legacy and recasts it in the raw tones of a disillusioned America.
The result is a lucid and unforgiving portrait of a performance-driven society - one that measures human worth through success, appearance, and profit. In the background, the American Dream slowly and inexorably crumbles, while the protagonists, members of deeply dysfunctional families, search for a way out through sarcasm and self-destruction.
The work belongs to the tradition of America’s anti-epic literature, the tradition that has given voice to losers, outsiders, and the forgotten. With a style that moves effortlessly between comedy and tragedy, Dan Fante crafts a family saga as grotesque as it is real, one in which everyone may recognize a fragment of their own story. The result is a production that digs beneath the polished surface of the American myth to reveal a wounded, yet still living, humanity.
Franco Branciaroli finds in this text - in which he will appear both as leading actor and director, alongside a long-standing ensemble of fellow actors and artistic companions - a register perfectly suited to his sensibility: rich in nuance, irony, and tragicomic undertones, tones he has mastered over the course of a sixty-year career.