New Naples Theater, kicking off the 2026/2027 Season

There is still a need for theater, not as a nostalgic refuge, but as a living space for crossing the present. From this conviction takes shape the 2026/2027 Season of the Teatro Nuovo in Naples, with an articulated and deeply contemporary playbill that brings into dialogue great texts, new writings, civil theater, comedy, visual experimentation and dramaturgies capable of questioning our time.

The theater, today more than ever, continues to be one of the few places where a community physically gathers to share an unrepeatable experience, every night different, every night alive, capable of relating different eras, languages and sensibilities, preserving the memory of the classics and, at the same time, opening up to the urgencies of contemporaneity.

From next October to April 2027, the curtain will rise on a season that puts memory and contemporaneity, word and body, irony and restlessness in dialogue. From Filippo Nigro to Emma Dante, from Paolo Nani to Marta Cuscunà, from Matthias Martelli to Enzo Gragnaniello, Luca Bizzari, and Francesco Montanari, passing through Yasmina Reza, Dario Fo and international physical theater, the 2026/2027 playbill draws a path that restores the theater to its most authentic role: to be a place of community, confrontation and collective imagination.

A "path" traversed by great texts, new writings, authorial visions, contaminations between artistic forms and different generations of performers and directors, with dramaturgies that observe the present and works that explore the boundaries between word, music, image and performance.

What emerges is a season that claims plurality as a value, a multiplicity of gazes through which to read the world, its transformations, fragilities and contradictions.

Also in the coming season, the programming opens up and enriches itself, becoming a true meeting space between arts, generations and visions.

Among the proposals, starting next fall, there will be the choreographic projects Open Fest and Open Dance, the music review and the four meetings dedicated to Neapolitan musical culture of the Ausuliàre - Sounding Naples cycle curated by Pasquale Scialò.

There will be no shortage of laughs, thanks to the Stand-up comedy events, nor space for research with Nuove Sensibilità, the showcase of contemporary dramaturgy and emerging young companies.

And again the Napoli Queer Festival project in collaboration with Casa del Contemporaneo, La rete dell'immaginario, a theatrical review designed for secondary school students, and the Nov. 21 evening event Drag Ring, a lip sync battle led by Priscilla with some of the scene's most iconic performers.

Guiding the programmatic lines is a strong and clear vision, which director Alfredo Balsamo summarizes as follows, "The 2026/2027 Season opens the doors to a theater that is a place of encounter, questioning and discovery. Classics return to question us, new writings find a voice and languages are contaminated in performances that cross eras and gazes. Each evening is a different crossing, an invitation to look at the present with new eyes. As long as there is something to say, there is theater."

Opening the theater programming, Nov. 5-8, will be Filippo Nigro with Davide Carnevali's The President, directed with Fabrizio Arcuri. A powerful and corrosive text that reflects on power, its moral implications and the fragility of the man called upon to wield it. The show, rewritten and readapted by Carnevali himself for this new production, continues the artistic journey started by Arcuri and Nigro around works built on direct relationship with the audience and civil reflection.

From Nov. 26 to 29 comes Figli by Mattia Torre, with Edoardo Pesce, Silvia D'amico, Carlo De Ruggieri, Cristina Pellegrino, adapted and directed by Fausto Paravidino. The tale of a happy couple who, after their second child, enters a crisis amid fatigue, economic difficulties and lack of help. The text shows with irony and realism how difficult it is to raise a family in Italy today.

In December, the playbill opens to the international scene with Apocalipsync by Luciano Rosso and María Saccone, staged Dec. 1 and 2. After the worldwide success of Un Poyo Rojo, Rosso builds a visionary and sweeping one-man show born during the pandemic. A surreal journey into contemporary loneliness, between dance, clowning, transformism and lip-sync, which ironically reflects on the human need for escape and freedom.

December 11-13 sees the return of a show that has now become a classic of contemporary theater, Paolo Nani's La Lettera, an extraordinary example of physical theater that has been applauded worldwide for more than 30 years. With a table, a suitcase and a narrative structure repeated fifteen times in as many different styles, Nani creates a perfect comic mechanism that continues to amaze with its precision, rhythm and scenic invention.

Space for Enzo per Enzo - Gragnaniello vs. Moscato, Dec. 17-20, for an encounter between music and word that promises to interweave two central figures of Neapolitan culture and artistic sensibility into an intense and identitary poetic and musical dialogue.

The new year will open, Jan. 14-17, with Lucia Franchi and Luca Ricci's Le Volpi, starring Giorgio Colangeli, Manuela Mandracchia and Federica Ombrato. A black comedy set in the Italian province that investigates the dynamics of local power, petty moral compromises and the mechanisms of everyday corruption, told with lucidity and fierce irony.

From Jan. 22 to 24, comes Mistero Buffo by Dario Fo and Franca Rame in the interpretation of Matthias Martelli, directed by Eugenio Allegri. A show that collects and renews the legacy of great narrative theater and the jester tradition, bringing back to the stage the satirical, political and popular force of the Nobel Prize-winning masterpiece.

From Feb. 4 to 7 it will be the turn of Yasmina Reza's Le Dieu du carnage, directed by Antonio Zavatteri and starring Francesca Agostini, Andrea Di Casa, Alessia Giuliani and Antonio Zavatteri. The celebrated play, which became an international case study and later a film by Roman Polanski, stages the meeting-clash between two pairs of parents after an argument between their respective children.

From an apparent civil mediation, a fierce portrait of human relationships, suspended between comedy and cruelty, gradually emerges.

Debuting in February, from Feb. 18-21, Davide Sacco's Il medico dei pigali (The Pig Doctor) with Luca Bizzarri, Francesco Montanari, David Sebasti and Mauro Marino. An edgy and grotesque political satire set in the English monarchy, in which a veterinarian specializing in pigs suddenly finds himself involved in the management of the royal succession. A text that uses absurdity and paradox to interrogate the mechanisms of power and ambition.

From March 11 to 14, the stage will welcome the poetic intensity of Emma Dante with Tango delle capinere, starring Sabino Civilleri and Manuela Lo Sicco. A delicate and poignant show that traverses the memory of a lifelong love story, told backwards through dance, music, gestures and fragments of memories. A hymn to the persistence of love and the fragility of time.

Closing the theater season, from April 8 to 11, Sorry Boys by and with Marta Cuscunà, inspired by a fact that really happened in the United States: eighteen teenage girls got pregnant at the same time within the same school.

Through her original stage language made of figures, objects and spoken word theater, Cuscunà builds a powerful reflection on motherhood, female identity and the need to imagine new social and relational models.

The 2026/2027 Season of the Teatro Nuovo in Naples presents itself as an open and plural mosaic, traversed by different registers and languages, which does not seek an unambiguous definition, but claims complexity as a value and theater as a necessary space of encounter between artists and audience.

Because as long as the desire exists to tell the world, to question it, to understand it together, theater will continue to make sense. It will continue to be necessary.

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