IN SCENA: Via dei Capocci

July 4,2014

What is a street in New York if not theater? And when you are on the way to a play named after a street that has earned a certain reputation the play begins before the play, surrounded as you are by characters playing themselves, high-heeled, rouged up, tattooed, the junky embracing the fire hydrant, the swank chick pushing the double stroller, the businessman with his briefcase, the man walking the dog, several men walking several dogs.  Theater for the New City is just off St. Mark’s Place. Need I say more?

It was the perfect setting for the final evening of In Scena! -- the two-week festival dedicated to bringing Italian theater to the streets of New York. When artistic director Laura Caparrotti, who had been enticing us throughout the festival with descriptions of things about to happen and things yet to come, turned up as the weary but lively former madam in the play, there was poetry in this.

It did not take long to see why Carlotta Corradi’s play had won the festival’s first Mario Fratti Award for emerging Italian authors.  In fact, I heard someone in the audience behind me say those exact words during the first exchange between the madam and Ira, the foreign girl who has answered the call for someone to clean up the house. Of course Ira has a past not unlike the madam’s; they are both finished with that life; but they are also entirely different personalities, evidenced by the fact that the older woman is now making her living by lending money at high interest and the young girl is looking for houses to clean.

Everyone has a past.  Through interludes, this play shows us the past and the present, and how the past meets the present.  This is Europe post WWII.  Everyone has suffered.  The war’s biggest victim is innocence itself, yet innocence persists, even in the older madam, an atheist who constantly talks to God, a disappointing and disappointed mother who may just have found a true daughter not of her own blood who she christens with a simple white flower.  On the streets of New York, we would call this tough love.

Carlotta Corradi has found a real street in Rome with a real past and out of it she has created an imaginative, compelling conversation that you should hear. Laura Caparotti is Lina, the convincing older madam whose vulnerability, deeply buried, has been awakened by Giulia Bisinella as Ira, the embodiment of innocence itself.  Ms. Bisinella’s portrayal of her character is so instinctual and thorough that it has a cleansing effect on the audience.  The conversation between these two actresses is like a dance.

Carlotta Brentan and Jojo Karlin, also characters with very different personalities, show us the past and then link to the present in a way that deepens the meaning of the play.  Kudos to the versatile Ms. Brentan who in addition to acting and serving as executive producer of the festival, also translated Ms. Corradi’s script into English.

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Kairos Italy Theater, the preeminent Italian theater company in NYC, presented its second In Scena! Italian Theater Festival (www.inscenany.com <http://www.inscenany.com/>) in all five boroughs from June 9 to 24, 2014.  The event featured six full productions and four readings.   “Via dei Capocci” is winner of the first Mario Fratti Award for Emerging Italian Playwrights, an honor created and bestowed by the In Scena! Italian Theater Festival.