Sicilian playwright Tino Caspenello’s darkly comedic exploration into the dialectical relationship between the articulation of revolutionary ideals and the ability of human beings in extremis to uphold them is on offer in St. Louis as part of Upstream’s 20th anniversary season. It’s a rare opportunity to encounter a theatrical post mortem on a potentially revolutionary moment, one that slipped away. The play is a cautionary tale—a primer for future revolutionaries, an ingeniously creative don’t let this happen to you. 

The script was published in 2013 in the brutal aftermath of the global financial crisis and two of its mass responses: the “Arab Spring” uprisings in nearby Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Syria and Bahrain, and the Occupy Wall Street movement. 

After so much immiseration, displacement and brain drain, Pictures From a Revolution wants to know more about the internal dynamics of revolutionary struggle, and does so by poking fun at the behavior patterns that often doom movements. It continues the existential themes that were so central in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, isolation and endless waiting for direction before taking action, and adds a heaping tablespoon of betrayal.

Read the theatre review at Mound City Messenger