Furore

After captivating audiences from its very debut in 2019, Massimo Popolizio returns to inhabit, with vibrant intensity, the immortal pages of The Grapes of Wrath, the masterpiece by John Steinbeck, published in 1939 and immediately hailed as an international bestseller. It is a novel that has never ceased to speak to the present, and which today resonates more than ever as a powerful echo of the fragilities of our own time.

On stage, The Grapes of Wrath is far more than a theatrical adaptation: it becomes a fully immersive emotional experience, capable of shaking and profoundly engaging its audience. Warmly received in previous seasons, the production continues to fascinate thanks to its narrative force and its unflinching portrayal of human dignity in the face of injustice, the struggle for survival, and the urgent need for social fairness.

At the beating heart of this co-production by Teatro di Roma and Compagnia Umberto Orsini lies Popolizio’s magnetic performance, lending voice and physical presence to the suffering and hopes of its characters.

Hosted at the Teatro Argentina, Furore is an epic and lyrical one-man show, traversing the painful agricultural, economic and social crisis that struck the United States between 1929 and the attack on Pearl Harbor. On stage emerges a nameless narrator, an almost omniscient figure who understands the human heart, the despair of the dispossessed, and the relentless mechanisms of injustice. A modern-day storyteller who does not merely recount events, but excavates, denounces and illuminates.

With extraordinary intensity, Popolizio restores the poetic power of Steinbeck’s writing, transforming language into living matter. The staged reading becomes pure theatre, where the voice shapes landscapes, faces, dust storms and shattered dreams.

Through the tragedy of the Joad family — emblematic of one of the most devastating waves of rural migration in modern history — profound connections emerge between individual destiny and collective forces: parched land, technological upheaval, climate uncertainty, and greed that breeds exclusion.

Nothing is foreign to this narrator: he knows the suffering of the outcast and understands the deeper causes that have led them there. It is this awareness that makes the production both realist and visionary, capable of weaving together harshness and poetry, protest and compassion, leaving audiences with a story that feels not distant, but urgently, painfully alive.

The programme may be subject to change.

Cover: Massimo Popolizio