Since 2014, In Scena! introduced the Mario Fratti Award for emerging Italian authors. Every year, a play is be chosen by an international panel of experts. The winning playwright is presented with an especially created painting made by Victora Febrer, a visual artist who uses wine to create her paintings. The winning play is awarded with the English translation, published in the Mario Fratti Award Collection, and with its reading. Since 2022, the Mario Fratti Award readings and plays in NY have been directed or co-directed by a female-identified director as part of KIT’s commitment of hiring more female directors in their productions and according to Mario Fratti’s interest and respect tributed to female characters.
The award ceremony usually takes place during the Festival Closing Night, at the Italian Cultural Institute of New York, 686 Park Ave. Since 2022, some of the winner play are also produced as showcase in the following season by KIT.
Mario Fratti is an internationally acclaimed playwright and drama critic. Born in L’Aquila, Italy, he moved to Venice, where he received his degree at Ca’ Foscari before moving to the United States in the 1960s. As a professor of Italian literature and language, specializing in Dante, he taught at Columbia University and Hunter College and has served as a theatre critic for various Italian newspapers. He is a proud member of the Outer Critics Circle Association. His 90 plays have been translated into 16 languages and performed all over the world. Perhaps most notable of his theatrical works is his adaptation of Fellini’s film 8 1⁄2 for the Tony award-winning musical Nine. In 2017, he celebrated his 90th birthday.
MFA WINNERS
2014 – Carlotta Corradi, Via dei Capocci
A real street in a working-class neighborhood in the heart of Rome, Via dei Capocci is historically known for its prostitutes and legendary landladies who rent them small rooms known as Neopolitan “bassi.” The play tells the story of the meeting between a middle-aged landlady and a former prostitute… [read more]
2015 – Lorenzo Pisano, Mater Familias
The play tells the story of three generations through increasingly difficult times, as they sometimes help each other, and sometimes clash in order to survive. A powerful drama with exact dialogue and sharply drawn relationships, it begins with a mother and son’s desperate need to commit a crime… [read more]
2016 – Emanuele Aldrovandi, Farfalle (Butterflies)
The story of two sisters whose favorite pastime is a dangerous game: the one who is holding the butterfly hairpin can ask the other one to do anything. “Butterflies” is a tale of personal growth and sisterly love in which self-discovery is not always accompanied by greater understanding of the other person… [read more]
2017 – Paolo Bignami Il paese delle facce gonfie (The Land of Swollen Faces)
A monologue that tells the story of a workplace accident in Italy, “The Land of Swollen Faces” denounces a world in which human rights are ignored. The play’s tragic events are narrated by a single voice of heart-breaking lyricism and lightness… [read more]
2018 – Chiara Boscaro & Marco Di Stefano
La città che sale (The City Rises)
The play is a mosaic of interconnected stories about a changing city, Milan, and its inhabitants. Victims and perpetrators are the characters of urban stories that intersect and disperse, inspired by Futurist artist Umberto Boccioni’s painting by the same name… [read more]
2019 – Tobia Rossi Nascondino (Hide and Seek)
A monologue that tells the story of a workplace accident in Italy, “The Land of Swollen Faces” denounces a world in which human rights are ignored. The play’s tragic events are narrated by a single voice of heart-breaking lyricism and lightness… [read more]
2020 – Giorgia Brusco Briciole di allegria (Crumbs of Joy)
Two elderly people live alone. Due to a banal accident, they involve an unaware passerby in their affairs. She takes their life to heart and decides to devote time to them, in search of a phantom son who never seems to arrive… [read more]
2021 – Luca Garello Quando gli uomini erano uomini (When Men Were Men)
Telling the Holocaust without narrating the Holocaust: it the invisible thread that binds the characters beyond their relationships. Those tragic events are never narrated but only evoked: the holocaust is inside people, and it is in the loss of identity… [read more]
2022 – Andrea Cioffi L’appartamento 2B (Apartment 2B)
In Apartment 2B lives a thirty-year-old with precarious work, unpaid bills and a disturbing vision that keep appearing around him, pills in hand, suggesting the way to go: suicide. His only contact with the outside is a shower of voice messages haunting him with deadlines and responsibilities… [read more]