Fifteen years have passed since CSS first staged L’aumento / The Pay Rise by Georges Perec on the occasion of the company’s debut at the 1990 Asti Festival.  It  is therefore not so surprising that Rita Maffei should decide to approach her friend, the director Alessandro Marinuzzi with a new proposal to work once more on the text from which the French writer was to develop his stage play L’augmentation or more precisely, how to think up all the possible scenarios and probabilities - be these related to health, psychological, economic, climatic or other factors - that might or might not arise when asking one’s boss to completely review one’s salary. The play explores the casuistry of asking for a pay rise, mapping out all the mathematical probabilities in a cruelly ironic game which, having presented all the possible variables, then offers some highly improbable yet amusing ‘user manual’ strategy guidelines.
Rita Maffei presents  these absurd, ridiculous and obsessively repetitive pieces of advice looking directly at the audience, who have been invited to sit around a huge boardroom table. This obsessive referral to the audience, the  exhaustive analysis of every possible scenario and variable, the efforts made to keep Perec’s test hovering between maniacal mathematic fun and the desperate search for a solution - between the comical, quixotic experiences of the protagonist, the poor clerk, and the heartbreaking futility of his efforts - all combine to make the play as a whole a metaphor for a never ending existential quest.