Project of Igor Pison: Drugibutalci

Fran Milčinski (1867 - 1932), a keen and witty observer of the Slovene public life, wrote his humorous chronicle Butalci (Half-wits/People of Butale) in 1899, in which he ingeniously tackled one of those most typical Slovene insignificancies that are considered to be big and important, as well as those lunacies that are thought to be smart. In turn, OtherHalf-wits (OtherPeopleofButale), a newly reworked text by a Trieste stage director Igor Pison, has but little in common with Milčinski's original, although the very idea of inhabitants in Butale stays as a common denominator. According to Pison, the main source for OtherHalf-wits (OtherPeopleofButale) were "notes, quotes and emotional tantrums" that are not intrinsically linked to an imaginary town of Butale (Halfwitville) from the Slovene past, but rather to our "here and now". In fact, the collective half-wit has increased over time, and we are nothing but witnesses of this phenomenon.

In consequence, Igor Pison has created a play that reflects the true spirit of our quotidian society. Namely, OtherHalf-wits display a society, saturated with nonsense and soliloquies that are being repeatedly uttered but remain unheard, with sought-after stories that cannot be found, or with questions about who we are, although we remain unsure of our own identities. The play therefore depicts a society obsessed with property, in which everyone is becoming an acquired object; specifically, the play portrays a society where individualism is required, although is it anticipated within the "standard of majority".

Pison's OtherHalf-wits are, as pointed by the dramaturge Vili Ravnjak, an expression of aberrations, imposed by contemporary scientists from tech-labs, beauty and fitness club members, paranoid visitors of shopping centres … it is even possible that those aberrations come from the future as incarnations of people with artificial intelligence implants. Characters and situations, as introduced by Pison, are in any case not merely a vernacular expression of the Slovene psychosocial condition, but rather a universal metaphor for a globalized world today that has lost "its purpose and course". /…/ Due to a significant decline of emotional as well as cognitive intelligence, the human life has become just another "vague", "casual", "random" and "dispensable" item, while the omnipresent feeling of indifference and powerlessness has deprived us of the last thread of humanity.