Reviews 2011
Reviews 2011
✭✭✭✩✩
by Spiro Scimone, directed Gianfelice Imparato
Compagnia Scimone Sframeli,
Berkeley Street Theatre Upstairs, Toronto
March 22-26, 2011
“Not Quite Spumante”
Canadian Stage is currently hosting Sicily’s Compagnia Scimone Sframeli as part of its “spotlight.italy” celebration of Italian culture. Last week the CSS presented actor/playwright Spiro Scimone’s first play Nunzio (1994). This week we have his third play La festa (1999). Whereas Nunzio was written in Messinese dialect, La festa is written in standard Italian with the vocabulary and the sentences kept extremely simple.
This simplicity is part of the general minimalism of Scimone’s esthetic. Avid theatre-goers in Toronto will know that Beckett has had a strong on European playwright’s like Austria’s Thomas Bernhard (Ritter, Dene, Voss) and Germany’s Franz Xaver Kroetz (Through the Leaves) beginning in the 1970s and on Norway’s Jon Fosse beginning in the 1990s (Someone Is Going to Come). Scimone would seem to be part of this second wave, but has used minimalism in a very distinct way. He has taken the banalities of everyday conversation and boiled them down to their basics. He then sets up situations where characters don’t develop ideas so much as fling these banalities at each other as if already tired of the same “conversations” they have had far too many times. As in Bernhard, Kroetz and Fosse, it seems that no real communication takes place. Instead, reflexive repetition of words and sentences is meant fend off communication.
In La festa, Scimone presents us with a nuclear family of Father (Francesco Sframeli), Mother (Spiro Scimone) and son Gianni (Gianluca Cesale), on the day of the couple’s 30th wedding anniversary. The family members appear two at a time in a number of very short scenes in the course of one hour. The duo have arguments they have clearly had innumerable times before, except that the anniversary brings in mention of new items like a chocolate cake, spumante and a red hat that seem to trip the characters up because they are topics so out of the ordinary.
While Fosse uses constant repetition to create the sense of tragedy by showing characters caught in a mental framework they cannot escape, Scimone uses it for to create depressing sort of comedy that harks back to definition of comedy in Henri Bergson’s essay on “Laughter” (1900) as perceiving “something mechanical in something living”. What Scimone exposes is not just the verbal and mental habits of the three characters but also the mechanism of he family.
Basically, the Father and Gianni speak to the Mother only because they want her to make food for them. The men make contradictory statements about what the want and how they want it and then complain when it’s not how they think they asked for it. The Mother, who mistaken thinks of the Father and Son as opposites, seems to have infinite reserves of patience and complies with every demand to make or re-make something for the seemingly helpless males. At the same time, she dispenses unending statements about what the Father and Son should or should not do--smoke, drink, use salt, etc.--based on what she has read in the newspaper.
The Father is such a fool and the beloved son such a lout that our sympathies, if we even have any, tend to lie with the Mother. Yet, by the end we see she as passive-aggressive, using her apparent compliance as a way of controlling the Father and Son to her own ends. It can’t be a good sign that the Mother’s fondest memory of her married life was that she was still a virgin at her wedding. The two men act like infants; the Mother’s attitude ensures they remain infants; their infantilism demands a Mother. As in Fosse, the family is caught in a cycle, but Scimone uses it as a critique of the family as a fundamental unit of society. It all becomes clear in the play’s final moments. The Mother has got what she wants--a chocolate cake and a new red hat. The Father has what we wants--a bottle of spumante--however, he holds the bottle in two hands and pours it down his throat with it spilling out of his mouth and over his clothes just like a baby.
Sergio Tramonti’s design for this touring production is basic. A stained white square represents the kitchen floor, with two white boxes as chairs and a kitchen cabinet facing upwards to hold all the props. The cups are all flower-shaped bowls and food, no matter what, is served in identical, beaten-up green plastic boxes. The men throw both on the floor when unhappy or finished. Patrizio Trampetti has composed jarring music to separate the minuscule scenes. It sounds like except of some wild jazz set for piano and drums and is played at an unpleasantly high volume.
Gianfelice Imparato was the original director of the piece in 1999, so we can assume that what we see is how Scimone wants us to see it. Imparato gives the show little visual interest by having the actors remain in place for every scene. They may switch sides during the blackout between scenes but virtually never move once the lights flare up. The Mother typically stands, the Father typically sits and the Son typically squats on his haunches. Scimone gives the more enjoyable performance because he gradually allows us to see how the apparent placid, passive Mother also lies, schemes and imposes her views on the men in her life. Cesale plays Gianni with only one note, but at least plays him as if he were a real person. Sframeli plays the Father as a bizarre caricature bending himself backwards whenever he stands and maintaining the same grimace throughout. His is the only non-naturalistic acting and why Imparato or Scimone should want this is totally unclear. This may be the original production, but it’s very easy to see how a less peculiar and constrained acting style could make La festa a funnier and much more engaging play.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Francesco Sframeli and Spiro Scimone. ©Aviva Armour Ostroff.
2011-03-24
La festa