The writing for the stage of the Ubu Award winning director Fabio Condemi unfolds a collection of nocturnal tales featuring horror and the unusual, restoring the style and prose of Thomas Ligotti – one of the most significant and imaginative American writers of his generation and winner of three Bram Stoker Awards – as well as his ability to insinuate himself into the chinks of human frailty with the intent of disturbing reality.
On this outline, the background becomes the protagonist and the characters appear as indistinct figures, alone and fragile, on the threshold of sleep, at the mercy of hallucinations which distort their perception of reality and demolish the scaffolding of their consciousness, until they are brought face to face with a nightmare: a writer and scholar, obsessed with the figure of Medusa, lives hallucinatory experiences that lead him to discover the very heart of horror; a little girl haunted by nightmares tries to destroy the dreams and illusions of life; a strange doctor conducts disturbing experiments on our consciousness.In a desolate art gallery we discover disturbing installations, videos, recorded tapes that remind us of how fragile reality is, as well as anti-natalist cults, labyrinthine nightmares, hypnagogic visions and, in the background, the desolate and bleak city.
“If a diary serves to record the day's activities”, comments Condemi, “a noctuary serves to note all the rest, not so much what actually happens at night, but rather what is hidden in the folds and creases of the day. The night as a space-time of fever, confusion between myself and what is no longer myself, as a hypnagogic space, as a threshold. I believe that Ligotti's poetic, factual, narrative and even musical work is characterized precisely by this obstinate desire to probe the slippages, the chinks of reality. To face the heart of horror is the only way to really escape horror and writing itself becomes a form of ventriloquism, taking uncharted paths in which it does not matter who the Ego that is speaking is. If weird fiction has a function, it is precisely to 'restore some of the astonishment’ that we sometimes feel and probably should feel more often, in the face of existence”.
