Peak Performances will introduce American audiences to The Sisters Macaluso (La sorelle Macaluso), from Sicilian theatrical innovator Emma Dante. The institution has dedicated this season to works by women creators, and The Sisters Macaluso is not only a wild work of physical theatre by a vital and prolific female visionary, but also one that focuses almost entirely on the emotional, physical, and metaphysical lives of female characters - seven sisters confronting the threshold between life and death following a family tragedy.

The Sisters Macaluso is set in a fantastical world, where a simple line of adhesive tape on the stage marks the border between earth and heavens, presence and absence, is and was. Seven sisters participate in funeral rituals - mourning members of their family, potentially mourning themselves - remembering, dreaming, laughing, fighting, weeping, and working through the burdens of poverty, illness, and volcanic levels of familial dysfunction. With sword and shield in hand, the sisters fight over the line between life and death in the manner of Sicilian puppets; meanwhile, viewers themselves are never quite sure who is alive and who is dead, or if, in this dreamlike depiction of life on the brink, there's any difference.