The Theater of Narration: From the Peripheries of History to the Main Stages of Italy by Juliet Guzzetta, and: Il teatro di narrazione: dalle periferie della storia ai grandi teatri italiani by Juliet Guzzetta (review)

Reviewed by: The Theater of Narration: From the Peripheries of History to the Main Stages of Italy by Juliet Guzzetta, and: Il teatro di narrazione: dalle periferie della storia ai grandi teatri italiani by Juliet Guzzetta Joseph Farrell The Theater of Narration: From the Peripheries of History to the Main Stages of Italy. By Juliet Guzzetta. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. 2021. xvi+239 pp. 99. 95 (pbk 34. 95). ISBN 978–0–8101–4387–6 (pbk 978–0–8101–4386–9). Il teatro di narrazione: dalle periferie della storia ai grandi teatri italiani. By Juliet Guzzetta. Trans. by Francesco Bianchi and Monica Capuani. Turin: Accademia University Press. 2023. xxi+354 pp. €24. ISBN 979–1–2550– 0022–8. In his introduction to Sei personaggi in cerca d'autore, Pirandello distinguished between those playwrights who write for the pleasure of narrating a tale and those who, like him, were propelled by a deeper need to search for some meaning in the events narrated. In some ways, the writers and performers, often the same person, of the genre subjected to incisively intelligent and excellently documented analysis in Juliet Guzzetta's study are motivated by both aims, by the wish to recount a historical, social, or political event and by the need to seek beneath the surface to locate its dynamics, its motivations, and its logic, however distorted. While storytellers, be they jesters, minstrels, giullari, or stand-up comedians, have featured at every stage of performance history, Guzzetta places the emergence of a new style of 'theatre of narration' in the 1970s, partly as a response to the turbulent politics of that time, which, it was felt, required a new style of theatrical expression. In her wide-ranging first chapter she identifies three elements which distinguished this new trend—political engagement, an autobiographical component, and a focus on a specific community (p. 4). The recognized parents, or perhaps grandparents, were undoubtedly Dario Fo and Franca Rame, especially after their own much-discussed break with commercial theatre in 1968. A further development for them was the decision made by Fo, and later by Rame, to stage one-person pieces, most notably Mistero buffo, which were both narrative and politically committed. Franca Rame is often sidelined in this context, but Guzzetta is meticulous in insisting on her role and achievements with her one-woman pieces on the dilemmas facing, and injustices endured by, women in modern society. One of the most intriguing works, and most explicit statements of indebtedness, is Laura Curino's play Passione (1995), in which she portrays herself as a young woman watching Mistero buffo before going on to perform one of Rame's monologues. Fo's notion of their own work as 'living newspapers' encouraged a rethinking of ideas of impegno. The new generation of theatrical narrators can also be regarded as a fresh expression of the actor-author, a figure which has been central to the Italian tradition of theatre. The Fo–Rame couple themselves did not focus on a specific community, but their example galvanized the new generation who were rooted in their own communities. However, their work also found a resonance with audiences elsewhere. Plainly, these writer-performers were not uncritical followers of Fo and Rame, nor were they the only sources of inspiration, as Guzzetta makes clear. Such figures End Page 278 in experimental theatre as Jerzy Grotowski with his theories of Poor Theatre, and Eugenio Barba with his notions of theatre anthropology, each contributed to the new aesthetic and mindset, as did less precisely defined ideas current in the 1970s. Such notions would include issues of subjectivity, of acceptable styles of acting and staging, of language versus dialect, of authorship, of ownership of history in the official or popular mind, and of the reliability of memory itself as it becomes ossified into dogma. Guzzetta discusses this problem in relation to Ascanio Celestini's Radio clandestina (2000), an unpicking of the facts and fictions relating to the partisan attack on German soldiers in Rome in 1944 and the barbaric reprisals wreaked on arbitrarily chosen Roman civilians in the massacre in the Ardeatine Caves. Guzzetta even suggests there were. . .