June 19, 2014
In a sense,
a reading is a greater test of a script than a full-fledged play, precisely
because in a reading all you have are the words. But what could be more appropriate for a
figure as invested in words as Oriana Fallaci?
She is the subject of “Fallaci, a Woman Against,” one more performance
in the eclectic two-week run (June 9 -24) of In Scena, the Italian Theater Festival taking place in all five
boroughs of NYC. Go here for the
calendar:
I hesitate
to call her a journalist because she so completely rejected that
characterization.
Hear that rejection in
her own words convincingly delivered by actress Andrus Nichols whose portfolio
of characters includes another strong woman – Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan.
Instead of
journalist, the writer’s words in the mouth of the actress carefully explain
that the moniker she prefers is historian in the moment. She imagines interviewing historical figures
like Joan, Caesar, and Napoleon with the same intensity, challenge and distrust
she applied to Henry Kissinger, Golda Meir, Willy Brandt, Nguyen Van Thieu,
Ayotollah Khomeini and other elusive, prominent figures of her day.
Imagination
and poetry are at the heart of this production.
Playwright Emilia Costantini has weaved Fallaci’s own words together to
create an interview that never took place.
Two women sit on chairs facing each other, interviewer and interviewee,
exactly the kind of free-ranging discussion of herself Fallaci never agreed to
in life.
The poetry
is in the depth of the subject matter and artfulness of the words that make up
Fallaci’s responses. She will tell us
that writing is the most strenuous job in the world and that only written words
have lasting value, that disobedience to the arrogant is mandatory – the only
justification for the miracle of being born, if we do not protest injustice we
are like leaves dragged in the wind, that war is the bane of human existence,
that politics as a career is destructive to the world, that love is unknowable,
that there is no reality like the death of a mother because it anticipates your
own. She is a professed atheist, an
eloquent spokesman for the soul, a woman at one with and against the history of
her times.
All of this
comes through.
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Written by Emilia Costantini
translated and adapted by Dave Johnson and Laura
Caparrotti with help from Carlotta Brentan
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