From Elsinore to American techno-solitude

Abstract

This paper presents the first Italian translation of the postmodern play Opheliamachine by Magda Romanska, the emerging voice of contemporary American drama. She is a Polish scholar emigrated to the United States and now a professor at Emerson College in Boston. Written over a period of ten years and conceived as a response/dispute to Die Hamletmaschine by Heiner Müller, it offers a reflection on the open traps and contradictions of the new globalized world, including pathological love, questionable values, infighting, selfishness, absence of certainty, dissolution of identity, technological dependence. Ophelia is cruelly trapped into a machine created by her own conscience, and she uses it to focus her problematic relationship with Hamlet. With neither embarrassment nor half-measures.