A microcosm through the many declinations of time in Saverio’s play La Ruina at the Asti Theater Festival. AstiTeatro, under the artistic direction of Mario Nosengo, will continue until June 29th
ASTI – “It’s always a question of time” and time, the one that flows and the internal one, lost and to be searched for, is the fabric of “Via del Popolo” by and with Saverio La Ruina, presented yesterday 14 June at AstiTeatro in the setting of the Michelerio courtyard. AstiTeatro, in its forty-sixth edition, will continue until June 29th and the entire program can be consulted on astiteatro.it. Here’s the program for this weekend.
“Via del Popolo”, a 2023 Ubu award show, is a journey that crosses a road and a life, intertwining the family history of the protagonist with that of a street from the 1960s onwards. There is the evident mutation from a context teeming with activity and neighborhood ties to a sterilized and globalized one, but above all there is the rediscovered time, immanent and capricious in its flow.
It all begins on a scene crossed by lights, which suggest the route of Via del Popolo, but also a cemetery atmosphere. La Ruina wears a white bartender’s jacket and has her back to the painting (by Riccardo De Leo) of a melted clock, hanging like a pendulum and taken from Dalì’s “The Persistence of Memory”, while she talks about a walk in the Castrovillari cemetery together with a childhood friend. The gravestones open glimpses of life, memories of flavors offresh pasta” (yes, just like the madeleines, about time lost and found), up to the memory of the loss of the protagonist’s father, which weaves the autobiographical thread of the piece.
It is a story on the thread of memory, which intertwines Italian and Calabrian, dialogues with the father, childhood moments and ironic-epic narration (compared to “Furore” by John Ford) of a family who moved from the Pollino hinterland to Castrovillari, almost a metropolis, and opened a bar in Via del Popolo. It seems like a flow of consciousness that continually shifts from slow to fast time, following a walk along Via del Popolo and its duration: in the 1960s thirty minutes, between stops, drinks and pleasantries, just over two minutes today, in middle of nowhere and anonymity. At every step, in the slow rediscovered time, shopkeepers, artisans and customers are compared to film characters, such as almost the entire Corleone family, in a breath that enlarges a town and makes it the gateway to the world, as in a Bildungsroman.
Photo by Franco Rabino
And it seems like a novel “Via del Popolo” in its opening episodes, in its colorful and vernacular descriptions of the many characters which pass through, each at its own pace, the center of Castrovillari, in dialogues that evoke extremely vivid images. La Ruina talks to her father and assumes his slow speech, a little resigned, but also resolute, then evokes the elusive and fascinating image of her uncle who gives him, with a stopwatch, the illusion and magic of mastering time . She remembers, as in a slow-motion film sequence, the clicking of the heels of the much admired Miss Giannotti, as everyone and everything froze in moments that seemed eternal and yet too fast. Therefore a novel where narrative coherence is never lost, where the thousand voices always find space in a plot that returns and finds itself. The protagonists are time, loss and the ability to recall in the light of a more logical than nostalgic thread, with the courage to lay bare an autobiographical side, mix an ironic streak and guide the viewer on a real journey that goes well beyond the path of a passer-by in that microcosm of Via del Popolo (how can we not think of via Castellana Bandiera or Via Merulana?).
The hands of the clock turn and today Via del Popolo, emptied and flattened like all historic centres, “it looks like the Spoon River hill that has slipped into the plain”, illuminated by the lights on the scene, in an ideal return to the gravestones of the initial cemetery. But the rediscovered and internalized time continues to live and the piece does not dissolve into easy sadness, but maintains the solidity of a narrative with perfect rhythm, which does not allow even a flaw. It is precisely time that is perfect in its liquidity, in its many declinations and in the invitation to live it, in the moment that is now, is about to be and has been in the past. This seems to be captured in a narrative that one simply welcomes within itself and would like to continue.
