The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas

Or if the hypothesis were offered us of a world in which Messrs. Fourier’s and Bellamy’s and Morris’s utopias should all be outdone, and millions kept permanently happy on the one simple condition that a certain lost soul on the far-off edge of things should lead a life of lonely torture, what except a sceptical and independent sort of emotion can it be which would make us immediately feel, even though an impulse arose within us to clutch at the happiness so offered, how hideous a thing would be its enjoyment when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a bargain?
– William James

The short story The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas (Hugo Award) by Ursula K. Le Guin confronts us with a reflection on the paradoxes of the world and human indifference. Will this indifference allow the people who encounter this performance to place the aforementioned reflections back into that corner of consciousness that is now filled with the daily news and images of injustice, war, and genocide that flow before their eyes?

The celebrated novel The Left Hand of Darkness (Hugo Award and Nebula Award), tells of a planet populated by androgynous yet hermaphroditic individuals and a human struggling in his mission as ambassador for the Intergalactic League from his own lack of understanding for this society.

In her equally famous Dispossessed: an ambiguos utopia (Hugo Award, Locus Award, Nebula Award, Jupiter Award), the author tells of a small world of people who have given themselves the name “odonians” in memory of the founder of their community, Odo, who lived several generations before the time in which the novel takes place. Odonianism is anarchy, whose main target is the authoritarian state, and its main moral-practical component is cooperation in the forms of solidarity and mutual aid. 

In the introduction to the short story The Day Before the Revolution, the author defines Odo as “one of those who walked away from Omelas.”

In a rarefied and mysterious scene, conceived by Davide Sacco, the iconic Eva Robin’s, in constant relation with the darkwave music of La Mano Sinistra, narrates, thanks to the intensity of her personal bearing and putting her own body at stake, a story that cannot leave one indifferent, while raw images of reality emerge in the air, as violent as they are ethereal, connecting the words of this powerful story by Ursula K. Le Guin with our daily lives and the macroscopic planetary injustices that have now become habit.

NB: The performance includes the complicit participation of some people who will receive instructions for the execution of a simple yet dramaturgically pregnant stage action.

by Ursula K. Le Guin 
translation by Roberta Rambelli
adaptation by Davide Sacco 

with Eva Robin’s
concept, direction, space Davide Sacco / ErosAntEros
music La Mano Sinistra (Giuseppe Lo Bue, Gianluca Lo Presti, Davide Sacco)
literary consultancy Sara Tamisari

production Teatri di Vita, ErosAntEros

“The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” by Ursula K. Le Guin
courtesy of Curtis Brown, Ltd. and Agency Danesi Tolnay
Copyright © 1973.
All rights reserved.

previews September 6th 2025, Civita Festival, Civita Castellana (VT); September 20th 2025, Armonie d’Arte Festival, Borgia (CZ); September 27th, 15 years of ErosAntEros, Ravenna
national premiere October 16th-19th 2025, Teatri di Vita, Bologna

duration 60 min