A dark fairy tale spanning Milan, Palermo, and New York—a game both playful and cruel.

Farfalle, the play by Emanuele Aldrovandi, winner of the Premio Hystrio 2015 and the Mario Fratti Award 2016, after its world premiere in New York, makes its Italian debut under the direction of the author himself, who directs Bruna Rossi and Giorgia Senesi in a production by Associazione Teatrale Autori Vivi, a company founded to place contemporary dramaturgy at the heart of the creative process.

On stage are two sisters, cynical and poetic—one blonde (Bruna Rossi), one brunette (Giorgia Senesi)—united from childhood by a game: whoever holds the butterfly-shaped necklace can force the other to do anything, or else the game ends.

During the performance, the two actresses play the main characters of their lives in a series of scenes that, with tragicomic irony, trace the sisters’ growth and life choices—bizarre or banal, forced or unexpected—that lead them to greater self-awareness and to become very different from the little girls they once were. Their journeys, however, run in opposite but almost complementary directions, and the changes they undergo bring them first to drift apart and then to clash violently.