It was only a couple of days after the opening, while sitting in the audience of a lecture by Italian playwright Romeo Castellucci at Teatro dell’Arte in Milan, that Will Benedict’s “The Social Democrat” at Giò Marconi really clicked in my head. Call it synchronicity. Castellucci delivered his speech, titled “Seeing Ourselves Seeing” and focused on the role of audiences in generating meaning within the realm of spectacle, with a quiet voice, while standing in an otherwise dim theatre, stripped of all backdrops, so that brick walls were uncharacteristically visible—the σκηνή (stage, scene, fiction) laid bare. Built under Mussolini in 1933 as part of the new rationalist Palazzo dell’Arte, the building testifies to the Fascist exploitation of visual arts as means of mass communication and, obviously, propaganda. Castellucci’s company, Societas Raffaello Sanzio, is currently on tour with a new play, titled Democracy in America after the 1835 book by Alexis de Tocqueville, where “performance is not so much a reflection on politics, as—if anything—on its end,” Castellucci writes. “De Tocqueville observed the potential of a young democracy, even while pointing out its dangers and limits, such as the tyranny of the majority, a weakening of intellectual freedom when faced with …