The theme of “The Mother” is a sort of female manifesto that should be read in a charter of women’s rights, when they become mothers. Motherhood is a widespread theme in theatrical texts, just as the theme of a failure to renounce motherhood, of the separation from children, which is painful and unsolvable, is widespread if the woman in question has not done work on herself and on the “construction ” of “other paths” besides that of motherhood. Nothing new, except that Zeller’s text investigates all its pathological consequences. Anna, the protagonist, played by Lunetta Savino, is so chained in her role as mother and betrayed wife, but who also betrayed her through her unhealthy love for her son, she knows how to double herself on stage, in various narrative levels , which reproduce the story in a series of constantly alternating realities.
A success last Friday at Duemila in Ragusa, the last event of the successful Theater in the foreground season. Consistent public participation was also recorded for this performance. The director Marcello Cotugno wanted to propose an often alienating acting, as if all the protagonists fell into the woman’s psychological drama one at a time. The husband, played by Andrea Renzi, the traitor, at times profoundly alone, at times disillusioned, always chained to the moral blackmail of a wife who clearly no longer loves him, even if she has never loved him. His son, a young and virtuous Niccolò Ferrero, who has no solution against a mother who loves him too much, except escape, or murder (and not just metaphorical). The son’s girlfriend, played by Chiarastella Sorrentino, the monster who distances Anna’s loved one and who, through a role play, also takes on the role of her husband’s lover. Anna holds “the skein” of this psychological game, and holds it seriously, a ball of red cotton rolls up and unrolls on the stage. Anna is the one who weaves the web of a desperate woman, of a pain she herself constructed by depriving herself of the possibility of seeing beyond her, her being her mother. Lunetta Savino offers a dry acting, repeats, repeats herself, becomes obsessive and seems to have everything done, even though she has led the game of her madness. In this the actress was profoundly capable, she outlined a role without acting forced, alienating and for this reason probably more immersed in a psychotic discomfort. A mention goes to Luigi Ferrigno’s scenography, profoundly successful and an integral part of the show. Five doors, a refrigerator, three chairs and a table would seem like little, if it weren’t for the fact that each of the objects mentioned, together with other scenic devices, contribute to building the power of the obsession. The game of mirrors, the chairs, always occupied by two, leaving the “empty chair” (who knows if it is a Gestalt quote?), the refrigerator that rotates around the scenography, glacial and deafening at the same time, the clothes worn by the two/ three women, all the same, albeit with different necklines and sizes; as if to say that Anna was, before being a mother, a lover, a girlfriend and everything that she no longer allows herself to be.
