TERAMO. Edoardo Oliva and the tragic hero Caprò open the 32nd MaggioFest, the spring festival organized in Teramo by the cultural association Spazio Tre with the artistic direction of director Silvio Araclio. An exciting show, repeated for years with great success in theaters in Abruzzo and throughout Italy, “Caprò” will be staged today at the Spazio Tre Teatro (starting at 9pm). Vincenzo Mambella is the author of the play of which Oliva is the vibrant performer and director. Scenography Francesco Vitelli, with Oliva, Teatro Immediato and Teatro Stabile d’Abruzzo production. «An important work, which offers the great acting performance of Edoardo Oliva», said Araclio when presenting the piece, which features a farmer who grew up in the cold love of his parents and in the visceral attachment to the land. His tragic story, always on the edge of awareness, crosses the immense tragedy of the shipwreck of the ship Utopia in 1891 off the coast of Gilbilterra, on which 600 Italians emigrated to America, including 12 farmers from Abruzzo from Fraine. «A story, that of “Caprò” which does not completely break the wall of oblivion, does not end up in books» we read in the director’s notes by Oliva, an all-round theater man, actor, author, director, festival organizer and reviews, founder in Pescara of the Teatro Immediato and of the Nell’Immediato space – Enzo Spirito. «A story that swallows up the small stories of the many negligible lives that he feeds on to guarantee his perpetuity, whose humanity, full of the beauties and ugliness of every existence, are lost forever. We did not want to talk about the shipwreck of “Utopia”, which is so reminiscent of the tragic events that we learn about every day from the news, keeping ourselves away from the rhetoric that often accompanies the story of those tragedies. The historical fact and emigration remain in the background. Starting from those facts and from an archaic substratum, without any historical or symbolic pretense, we looked for a landing place that would make this little story, so distant in time, universal in its archetypal essence. The loss of a single man, therefore, a solitude, an anonymous late nineteenth-century farmer who tosses on a plot of land with the few objects that mark his life. It is on that piece of land that his true shipwreck takes place while waiting for the one who will hand him over to history.” (afu)
