Born and often confused with the season of experimentalism and “cellars” or even more so with political theatre, given the implications and values it promoted, civil theater in Italy spanned at least twenty years, from the 1960s to ’80s, also giving us, theater critics in training, the opportunity to try our hand at events that more often than not went beyond theatrical history and were drawn from daily news, where the critic, with his wealth of culture of classical texts it moved with difficulty, the healthy difficulty of those who find themselves recording, understanding and helping to understand new messages and alternative formulas.
This trilogy by Sergio Velitti, renamed the REVENGE AND DEATH TRILOGY by the production and director, is made up of three monologues (Marialaò; About a lady; blue grisaille) It has its genesis precisely in those years of maximum expression of civil theatre. And it claims all the theoretical presuppositions and scenic applications starting from the most important one, the emotional involvement of the spectator.
Involvement is essential so that the circuit between spectator and author is closed and the formula of empathy is respected. But involvement would not be possible if the stories staged on a stage without scenography (if not minimal: an empty frame, a chair and a homeless cartoon) and in this case accompanied by Marcello Cirillo’s music were not held together by a narrative glue that the professionalism of Nello Pepe, a long-time Rai director, was able to legitimize by making it seem more like a unicum collected in a dialectic of episodes, in a dialogic reciprocity, rather than a story fragmented into moments separated from each other other, like individual monologues, appear in the idea of its author. A tight dialectic therefore where the connections are to be found in what were once defined as profound motivations.
Here the glue is violence, an all-round violence, expressed without pathetic devices or sociological lightening, exercised by a chauvinist society towards women, and what marks the distinction in this trilogy between political theater and civil theater is precisely the refusal of the author to arrive at what is the definitive solution, absolution, revenge and/or redemption of the offended party on that part of society that offends. In fact, on the front page we can only read the pain, the frustration, the resigned resignation to the inevitability of the daily life of the three female protagonists.
The first, Maria Lao, in whose bowels tormented by a life on the margins (that of the sidewalk), the very talented Maria Cristina Fioretti was able to infuse Roman interpretative connotations that brought to mind the undisputed skill of Gabriella Ferri with her attitude proud and his determination and the conscious acceptance of destiny that we have often found in Magnani. Touching on all the interpretative registers in question, from painful comedy to dramatic irony, passing through the heartbreaking normality of a daily life that is accepted but never wanted.
The high level of interpretation does not soften even in the second episode, played in tandem between Fioretti and Maria Pia Iannuzzi, who were able to combine without showing any gaps or discontinuities the figure of the noble lady poisoned by her husband who then takes revenge on him in an affair which alternates drama and farce, irony and patheticism with perfect interpretative balance.
Finally, the story sadly counted among the classics of theatrical literature dating back to mythology, therefore to the one who as a mother becomes the executioner of her children, the Medea who from Euripides to Anna Hurkmans (who revived it, obviously in a modern key, just last year the story) where the protagonist is this Antonietta Gavone, Cairano widow, a beautiful and prosperous 35-year-old woman who fosters ideas of possession in men, taking pleasure in it.
Mother of numerous children for whom she is unable to guarantee a life, even if not dignified, at least sufficient for material survival, basing her motivations in that poverty which for years has been the plague of our nation emerging from a war and an even more hungry post-war period of the war itself due to the unleashing of the survival difficulties of those who were already poor before and who would have seen their poverty increase and reproduce paradoxically precisely with well-being, which, as we have seen, had managed to reward the clever, the arrogant , the violent, the oppressors. Despair, anger, suffering, frustration, disappointment, maternal pain linked to the decision to kill one’s offspring dominated the scene in the varied, intense and complete interpretation of Matia Pia Iannuzzi, not new to this already tested part, but introjected as if to make it become an expressive heritage of his already mature and complete acting skills. And certainly convincing, judging also by the response of the spectators who greeted the show with long and enthusiastic applause.
RAFFAELE AUFIERO
FROM 23 TO 28 APRIL 2024
AT THE TOR BELLA MONACA THEATER
Via Bruno Cirino, on the corner of viale Duilio Cambellotti with via di Tor Bella Monaca
tel. 06. 2010579
