From 18 to 23 March, 2025, Teatro Gobetti hosts Rachel Carson. The Lady of the Oceans, a monologue starring Laura Curino. Written by Massimiano Bucchi and directed by Marco Rampoldi, the play explores the life of the pioneering environmentalist. A Teatro Stabile di Torino – National Theater production.
Rachel Carson (1907-1964) was a marine biologist and writer whose groundbreaking work shaped the modern environmental movement. From her poetic bestseller The Sea Around Us to the revolutionary Silent Spring, she challenged humanity to rethink its relationship with nature.
Through the voices of Carson, her confidante Dorothy, and her fiercest critics, Laura Curino brings to life the struggles and impact of one of the 20th century’s most influential figures, sixty years after her passing.
Teatro Gobetti – 18 -23 March, 2025
Rachel Carson. The Lady of the Oceans
By Massimiano Bucchi
With Laura Curino
Directed by Marco Rampoldi
Set and lighting: Lucio Diana
A Teatro Stabile di Torino – National Theater, Tangram Teatro, Associazione Culturale Muse production, in collaboration with Coltivato 2025
"I could have said, like Emily Dickinson: I have never seen a moor, I have never seen the sea. And yet I know what heather looks like, and what a wave is."
Rachel Carson, born in 1907 on a farm in Pennsylvania, had never seen the ocean until she was twenty, when she decided to specialize in marine biology. It was the beginning of a profound understanding and a great passion—a passion for the sea and for a clear, poetic style of writing.
"Who can truly say they know the ocean? Neither you nor I, with our earthly senses, can know the foam and the wave crashing over a crab hidden beneath the seaweed, in the tide pool formed by shifting currents, among the rocks where it makes its home. Nor can we grasp the slow, rhythmic swell of the ocean, where schools of wandering fish hunt their prey only to become prey themselves, and where dolphins break the surface to breathe. We cannot know the hidden life at the ocean’s depths, where sunlight, filtering through a hundred meters of water, is no more than a faint bluish glow, where sponges and mollusks rest, where starfish and corals cling, where swarms of tiny fish sparkle in the darkness like a silver rain of meteors, and eels lie in wait among the rocks."
The Sea Around Us, written as a biography of the ocean, became a worldwide bestseller. But Rachel Carson is best known for her final book, Silent Spring. No longer a celebration of wonder, it was a warning—a call to awareness about environmental destruction, the degradation of landscapes, and the loss of plant and animal species. It shook the conscience of America and, soon after, the world.
Rachel died on April 14, 1964, at the age of fifty-six, after a long battle with breast cancer, a struggle she never made public. Silent Spring became one of the sparks that ignited modern ecological awareness, a testament to the power of words when they reach the right place at the right time—just like the ocean waves that so fascinated Rachel.
Through the voices of Carson, her close friend and possible lover Dorothy, and her fiercest critics, Laura Curino brings to life one of the most dramatic and influential figures of the last century, sixty years after her passing.
