Teatro Tram, starts on Thursday with “A story for Euridice”: a monologue in Italian and Neapolitan about the nymph loved by Orpheus
The audience of the Teatro Tram in via Port'Alba in Naples is ready to return to the theater, which for the start of the season relies on Una storia per Euridice, written and directed by Luisa Guarro, which will debut in world premiere from October 20 to 30, 2022. The monologue, performed by Chiara Orefice, is a suggestive rewriting of the myth in a contemporary, poetic and raw key, with a language that ranges from Neapolitan to literary prose. The show, financed by Teatro dell'Osso ETS, is the winning project of the "Regista con la A" award reserved for shows directed by women.
Eurydice, the beautiful tree nymph protagonist of the myth of Orpheus, has no story of her own. We only know that, beloved by the divine musician, with her premature death she causes him a heartbreaking and poetic pain and the descent into hell. In the version of Virgil and Ovid, it is mentioned that the nymph runs in the woods without paying attention and is bitten by a viper, to escape the beekeeper Aristaeus, who wants to possess her. This detail of the chase makes her an ancient example of a victim of male violence and from here the imaginative reconstruction begins.
“There is a time of passage before death, a flash, during which all of life passes before you. – explains Luisa Guarro -. And in this dilated time, Euridice, on the verge of crossing the threshold of the afterlife, relives her story, through fragments of memory. Hers is a story never told before. Little has been said about her over the centuries: she was a nymph, she was the wife of the musician Orpheus and she died prematurely, bitten by a viper, while fleeing from a beekeeper, Aristeo, who wanted to possess her. Her premature death causes Orpheus to descend into the underworld, to whom the myth is dedicated. A nymph, victim of male violence, therefore. From here begins the original reconstruction, which tells her entire life, from birth to death and beyond, and tells of a young, attractive and lively woman-nymph from the Neapolitan province, daughter of an Oak, whose ardour is extinguished by an all-consuming love affair with Aristeo”.
In the proposed story, socio-cultural and psychological dynamics are intertwined. It often happens that parents sacrifice their children's instances of freedom and authenticity, of which they should be spokespersons in the community to which they belong, to bend them to the rules that it imposes. This produces deep narcissistic wounds, which predispose them to become slaves and architects of pathological loves, loves in which one obsessively tries to heal the original wound. Only after having overcome her hell, Euridice meets Orpheus and is capable of true love.
Euridice's is a visionary monologue, in Neapolitan and Italian, according to the bilingualism of Campania, a virtuoso game of changes of voices and characters, of dances and songs of desperate love. A reflection on the condition of women-nymphs, whose essence of free spirits is repressed, so that either they transform into plants, rooted and immobile, with a silent vital energy mortified and constrained by wooden limbs, or they rebel, unleashing the violent reaction of those who demand their succumb.
Article published on 17 October 2022 - 18:28
