What is a daughter? And what, truly, is a mother? Can a number—the exact count of remaining oocytes—measure a woman’s destiny, authorize or deny her emancipation? Can being a mother ever coincide with the mere act of bringing a life into the world, or does motherhood exceed every calculation, every prediction, every statistic? In how many ways can this bond exist?

IL NUMERO ESATTO written by Fabio Pisano and directed by Martina Badiluzzi is a kind of journey undertaken by Alice into the ever-deepening mystery of her own birth. It is a path marked by the painful impossibility of saying “who one is,” because—these are her words—“a chasm has opened, I am now inside a well in the dark.” A quartet of women shares the responsibility for her motherhood: a first mother, a surrogate, a nanny, and a second mother. One almost loses track following this chain of mothers who are never entirely so, each in some way “wrong,” “not right,” as the text puts it. In particular—and this too is no coincidence—the only biological mother (the “owner of the eggs,” as she is defined) also appears as the one most lacking in the so-called “maternal instinct.” Page after page, the text detonates every comforting idea of motherhood in a fierce confrontation with reality: “because it is only a myth that mothers owe something to their daughters.”

IL NUMERO ESATTO can also be read as a metaphor, in its chiaroscuro, in its seamless shifting from the personal to the universal, beginning with the geographical setting of the protagonist’s gestation and birth, divided between Ukraine—still aflame twenty years after the Russian attack—and Russia, from which the nanny comes, and where even “the last tsar” is mentioned in passing.

IL NUMERO ESATTO
di Fabio Pisano
regia Martina Badiluzzi
con Alessandra Borgia, Francesca Borriero, Anna Carpaneto, Federica Carruba Toscano, Giulia Weber
scene Roberta Guasco
costumi Alessandra Gaudioso
luci Fabrizio Cicero
musiche Francesco Leineri
direttrice di scena Teresa Cibelli
datrice luci Desideria Angeloni
fonico Guido Marziale
foto di scena Ivan Nocera

produzione Teatro di Napoli – Teatro Nazionale in collaborazione con Compagnia Liberaimago, AMAT e Comune di Pesaro per RAM – Residenze Artistiche Marchigiane, progetto promosso da MiC e Regione Marche, In__corpore, progetto di Residenze per artisti nei territori 25-27 del teatro del Grillo di Soverato (CZ), co-finanziato da Regione Calabria e Ministero della cultura

Testo finalista della 57^ edizione del Premio Riccione per il Teatro
Vincitore del Premio Ugo Betti per la drammaturgia, nel 2024
Pubblicato nella collana teatrale bettiana, per Bulzoni editore

DEBUTTO: Ridotto del Teatro Mercadante, Napoli - Aprile 2026