The events of the third edition of the “Cilento festival – Pollica” continue, held in the spaces of the Teatro Sala Keys. The event is dedicated to Angelo Vassallo, thirteen years after his murder. Many quality meetings will enliven the program conceived by the founder and artistic director Girolamo Marzano.
On October 12th, space for “Nuovo concerto per voci single” with the reciting voice of Girolamo Marzano and the tenor Francesco Formicola. On stage, two men and a woman with a small orchestra behind them. A tenor, a singer and a singing actress. Together they build a dramaturgical/musical path that includes poems, opera arias, monologues. A sort of song theater linked by a common thread that is the theater and its most varied components: prose, music and songs. From Brecht to Eduardo, from Viviani to Karl Valentin, with songs taken from shows by these and other authors. “It is a format that we created last year in the second edition of the festival and that, changing the contents, we repeat on this occasion, counting on doing one every year – anticipates Marzano – This year the new edition will see the light in the recently restored Chapel of S. Marco that overlooks the port and was the first church that from the 600th century onwards welcomed fishermen returning from work”.
On Saturday 21 October the public will be able to attend “About Eva”, a text written by Girolamo Marzano. “The world of entertainment has always been a point of reference for contemporary English-language authors to make it a metaphor for the world as a whole. Sometimes with tragic tones, other times as in this case with tragicomic tones, existential themes are addressed, generational conflicts bordering on class struggle. In this text Eva and Margo are the two opposing but at the same time united faces of the same figure – explains the author – The woman, the actress, the inexorable passing of the years, the inexorable hunger for visibility. The setting in the 50s does not allow the intrusion of social media or influencers, but the dynamics are implacably the same. An attack from below with determination and a methodically trained ability by Eva in place of Margo. The men acting as a crown, often used by both Eva and Margo, the director, the playwright, the assistant director, the journalist... tools in their hands and also in those of Karen, Margo's friend, the playwright's wife who takes sides now for one, now for the other, witnessing victories and defeats like a referee of a race who will be blatantly removed in the end. Fortunately, all the conflicts are tempered by a tone of brilliant comedy, very much anticipating the best television series but with an exquisitely theatrical language".
On October 27th, Caroline Pagani will take the stage with “Mobbing Dick”. The show won the 2009 Italian National Women's Union Award, the La corte della Formica Award for best actress, the 2010 audience award, Naples. Teatri Riflessi Award 2022, best actress “Idee nello Spazio “2021, best show and Ginestre Award 2022. Mobbing Dick describes in an ironic and funny way, with gags and surreal situations, the condition of women artists in the world of work. This is the case of a theater actress who finds an ad in a newspaper for an audition for a theater show on Eros. She goes to audition and proposes a repertoire of erotic Shakespearean female characters. But she comes across a different Master than she imagined… A porn director. The two do not understand each other, they have different languages and imaginations. We will thus slip from the reality of one of the proposed Shakespearean texts, Measure for Measure, which overlaps, as in a game of mirrors, with the surreal context of the audition. The actress will suffer a series of humiliations by the director, like the Shakespearean heroine of Measure for Measure with her executioner, which will make her a being destroyed by the system, a monster. Will she give in?
On Saturday 4 November the theatre will host Rosalba Di Girolamo in “2984” inspired by The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. An old tape recorder in the foreground, a woman’s voice: a rediscovered testimony. In an unspecified future, Humanity has been decimated by atomic radiation, and the world has ended up transforming into a single totalitarian state, a theocracy based on the control of man over man. Or rather, of woman over woman. Because at the centre of this system of power is the control of the female body: women have the sole task of ensuring lineage for the ruling elite. Women capable of reproducing are called Handmaids. Those in charge of their surveillance are the Aunts, the housemaids are the Martes, those too old, fragile or infertile are the Nonwomen. Alongside these, the hierarchy of males, guardians of order, at the top of which are the Commanders, each of whom is assigned a handmaid. Offred, or the woman who belongs to Fred, is a handmaid. Red dress, red suitcase, Offred enters the scene and tells, in a game of memories and voices that intersect. A single figure that gives voice to all the actors on the stage, because these, despite apparently fighting each other, seem to be the various faces that the Human Being can assume when he gives up his freedom as a human being. More than on physical fertility, the show questions internal fertility.
On November 10th, the Roman actor Francesco Montanari arrives in “Play House”. A man and a woman. Love, boredom, family, sex, bickering, resentment. In 13 paintings Katrina and Simon explore small moments of everyday life, they plunge the blade into their relationship, they build and destroy the relationship. The world outside is just an echo and, when it penetrates their apartment, it excites and destabilizes. But who are Katrina and Simon really? What role do they play? Have they ever really met? The viewer constantly has the impression of spying through the keyhole in the aseptic room in which the life of a man is consumed, dramatically exhilarating, desperately alone.
