The Theater of Narration: From the Peripheries of History to the Main Stages of Italy by Juliet Guzzetta (review)

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Reviewed by:

• The Theater of Narration: From the Peripheries of History to the Main Stages of Italy by Juliet Guzzetta
• Stefano Boselli

THE THEATER OF NARRATION: FROM THE PERIPHERIES OF HISTORY TO THE MAIN STAGES OF ITALY. By Juliet Guzzetta. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2021; pp. 239, 21 illustrations.

Despite its minimalist setup—consisting mostly of a single performer on stage, sitting on a chair or standing—the Italian theatre of narration exhibits a surprising vitality. Beginning with its earliest solo shows in 1987 and following its rise to national prominence, especially with the first televised performances a decade later and their wide distribution on DVD, the genre importantly speaks to Italians’ experiences and concerns. Juliet Guzzetta argues in The Theater of Narration: From the Peripheries of History to the Main Stages of Italy that because narrators bridge personal life events with those of their local communities in relation to national-level issues, connecting their stories with history at large, these performers’ activities—archival research, interviews, and creative storytelling—are a form of “historical praxis” (6). Akin to the methods of microhistorians such as Carlo Ginzburg and Giovanni Levi, these performances contribute to the reevaluation of history from a plurality of perspectives, emphasizing those of the common folk. Each of the volume’s five chapters brings together the historical, cultural, and theatrical context while referencing critical and performance theory to analyze the genre’s genealogies, unique traits, and particularly remarkable productions.

Guzzetta points out that the Teatro Settimo theatre company was central to the beginnings of the Italian theatre of narration (chapters 1, 2, and 4). It was founded in 1974 by director Gabriele Vacis, performer Laura Curino, designer Lucio Diana, and others in Settimo Torinese, an “industrial wasteland” near Turin (27), at a time of violent social and political upheaval in Italy. Guzzetta underscores three major influences on the company: the politically engaged monologues of Nobel Prize-winning playwright-cum-performer Dario Fo and especially his wife Franca Rame, with their performance setting in close proximity to the audience; Jerzy Grotowski’s Poor Theatre, in its quest for what is truly essential for live performance; and the practice of animazione teatrale (theatrical animation), which, stemming from the 1968 student and workers’ protests, viewed the narrator as a cultural laborer didactically engaged in improving the lives of the underprivileged. Indeed, the company’s first improvised performance, Questa storia non ci piace: Buchiamola! (We Don’t Like This Story: Let’s Punch Holes in It!)—based on interviews and historical research on the “conflicts between the farmers and clothing launderers in the mid-nineteenth century outside Turin” (42)—entailed [End Page 118] storytelling from minor characters’ points of view, with the goal of activating the local community. Inspired by Michel Foucault’s notion of heterotopia, some of Teatro Settimo’s projects also engaged with local cultural organizations to reinvent the use of city locations. These traits, Guzzetta historicizes, would later influence the theatre of narration.

Curino’s masterful Camillo Olivetti: Alle radici di un sogno (At the Roots of a Dream, 1996), on the visionary engineer who founded Italy’s first typewriter factory, and other monologues later became crucial references for two generations of narrators who worked or studied with company members—including Marco Paolini and Giuliana Musso—and others who more indirectly tapped into the genre’s potential—such as Marco Baliani, who gave an emotional account of his reaction to dramatic political events of the 1970s in Corpo di Stato (Body of State, 1998).

Apart from thematic lines intersecting history and politics, and with a focus on theory rare in Italian studies, Guzzetta compares the genre with other performance approaches (introduction) and illuminates the formal traits of its language for the stage (chapter 3). In terms of postures and gestures employed to evoke multiple characters, she views the “laconic physicality of the solitary actor” (90) as a contemporary version of classical oratory. As for language, at times influenced by the 1970s antiestablishment discourse, the use of regional dialects allows narrators not only to ground their stories in recognizable locations and communities but also to elevate the level of agency of humble local actors to that of those speaking...