Franco Scaldati: The Actor Who Writes

In our theatre there are no good guys and bad guys, no minor and lead characters: there is the size and strength of the chorus, and when there is guilt, the guilt itself is gigantic and has an absolute value, like justice. Each character is good and terrible at the same time; everyone has an assassin deep inside.—Franco Scaldati, Sonno e SogniFrom the 1970s until his death in 2013, writer and actor Franco Scaldati exemplified an admirable course of artistic development for many young practitioners of theatre, and yet his work was largely ignored by local and national cultural institutions as well as by critics, who revealed themselves incapable of making sense of it in terms of the Italian theatrical tradition as they understood it. Perhaps the most immediate reason for this is that most of his work is written in Sicilian dialect, specifically that of Palermo. With the exception Il teatro del sarto The Tailor's Theatre, the fine selection of his work published by Ubulibri and released in 1990, most of his plays have failed to find a publisher. In addition, in contrast to the plays of Giovanni Testori, for example, Scaldati's theatre really cannot be inserted comfortably into the dominant models of neo-avant-garde experi­mental theatre.The tradition to which he most belongs is probably that of the actor-author rooted in the dialect of old Palermo, with his solitary excavation into the memory of the sounds of his mother tongue, which he first renders in script form and then brings to life on stage. Scaldati's dialect is directly and solely expressive and poetic, with no attempt to polemicize against standard Italian, however much his total independence from contemporary cultural and aesthetic modes may be taken to suggest an oppositional attitude.Scaldati's oeuvre belongs in the deeply Italian vein of the actor/director/producer who manifests a total vision, similar in this way to the great Neapolitan artists, from Raffaele Viviani to Eduardo De Filippo, who as lead actors, directors, and playwrights transformed the accumulated patrimony of their city's local theatre into masterpieces of universal breadth.His productions derive from the interweaving of solitary composition—carried out in the morning in his minuscule studio—with collective collaboration both with professional actors and private citizens during rehearsals conducted after work hours in improvised spaces. This method has in turn conditioned the resulting works themselves, which have a quality of seeming to be in ongoing development, and in fact much of his work exists in variant editions, with scenes elided and shifting characters from one to another. Plays such as La locanda invisibile (The Invisible Inn) present a Palermo whose alleyways are animated by ancient trades: the coalman, the scavenger, the balloon man. The life of these creatures who live on the margins of legality is densely threaded with misfortune and misadventure, diseases such as malaria and smallpox, tragic accidents (one character falls from scaffolding, another is crushed by a train, and still another is hung from the electrical wires running above the tram), violence, and cruelty (another is cut in two by a handsaw).The animals too are violent. From the end of World War II to the new millennium, Scaldati's world—chronicling Italy from the immediate post-war period to the new millennium—is nourished by eros and permeated with sex. When identity is unstable, the body and its flesh constitute major characters; Stella, for example, is a hymn to the fleshly body. His work before the 1990s typically breath in a natural landscape including sea, stars, moon, jasmine flowers, roses, and fireflies. In his work after that, city shadows take the place of nature's light; the mafia bears down, menacing and ever-present; killing is obligatory, with the dramatis personae murdered one by one.The anthropological context that Scaldati's theatre incarnates emerges from history, although more implicitly than literally. Focused on the problem of Italy's South, Femmine dell'ombra (Women of the Shadows) evokes the last World War: gum- chewing American soldiers with bulging wallets who distribute cigarettes and nylons to starving women. A segment of the play presents the legendary bandit Salvatore Giuliano and the May 1, 1947 massacre of agricultural laborers in Portella delle Ginestre, Sicily. Among the characters are Girolamo Li Causi, the Sicilian communist leader who accused Interior Minister Mario Scelba of involvement. Another segment deals with mafia capo Gaetano Badalamenti.His theatre is simultaneously inhabited by human beings, shadows, and angels. Time moves discontinuously, with latencies, anachromisms, survivals and returns. Narration is never linear; past does not necessarily lead to present, while cause and effect are fully independent one from another. His angels live in an enchanted garden, an Earthly Paradise, recurrent in Scaldati's theatre world, always searched for by Giufà, a simpleton character taken from Sicilian folk tales, and his shadow. Different from the biblical myth, Scaldati's domesticated Eden is a hortus conclusus that expresses an intense feeling for a Nature that welcomes travelers who have made the long voyage across dimensions in search of a place to create theatre.It is also a sort of world beyond, populated by figures who have made the passage from life into death. Such a topos appears in the garden of the invisible inn, where errant shadows gather to tell tales which may be either true or invented. The figure of the poet turns up repeatedly in Scaldati's work, accompanied by impalpable shadows who appear but never speak. Certainty and rationality vanish in this Edenic garden, also a cemetery, where writing and the creative process arise from a prelogical state of infancy marked by evanescent appearances and a sensation of constant shifting, endless transit and transition.Scaldati's cosmos is nocturnal; his apparitions materialize in the dark and disappear in daylight. Appearance and absence coincide in a dimension that embodies the essence of theatre itself. His characters are wanderers: Giufà and his shadow's journey to the abode of the angels requires him to stage a performance. But being in transit also entails transformation, and death is a transformation: a tiny ant becomes a ray of moonlight and a pot of mint.Heaven and Earth, moon and sea, the living and the dead transmute in an irresistable process of becoming. The world is an immense extermination camp: characters survive in collapsed houses, junkyards, garbage dumps, and among cadavers. Hell neighbors Paradise, and wandering inevitably leads to the enchanted garden where his seekers finally achieve their goal: to make theatre. In La notte di Agostino il topo (The Night of Agostino the Mouse) the garden itself—along with the fly, the spider, and the snail—is one of the dramatis personae:. . . come one, come all; a mysterious garden am I; / an enchanted garden of shadows and delicate lights . . . / perfumed flowers sigh in me and tender herbs grow . . . / come mirror yourselves in the waters of my pool . . . / come lose yourselves among my fragrant branches . . . / I am illuminated by the stars, this evening . . . / come and listen to my music, my words . . .1Heaven—home of the angels—can be visited with ease; in fact, Heaven and Earth are reversible and can be exchanged one for the other. In the company of his shadow, Giufà travels to heaven, where they put on a performance for the angels. Scaldati's stages are populated with the demented, dimwits, the voiceless, the legless, whores, tale-telling shadows, and the decrepit. We often find the blind, the lame, hunchbacks, and other deformations, along with practitioners of now- vanished or non-existent trades, such as the man who sells soap bubbles. Animals live on an equal level with humans.Scaldati's writing is more poetic than dramatic, his texts long poems with the text laid out on the page to form designs. The few lines per page are spaced according to how long they take to be performed or spoken. Totò e Vicé is rich with onamatopeia and lyrical flights, featuring repetition and lists rather than syntactic construction. His texts are composed not in scenes but in quadri—framed images—whose sequencing is not Aristotelian (peripeteia, anagnorisis, catharsis, etc.) but determined by thematic factors and spatial relations. The actions carried out by the characters, although commonplace in appearance, have a ritualized and sacred quality freed from naturalistic or hyper-realistic motivation: his characters wash, dress themselves, pee, drink wine, and prepare for bed. The moon is a main character, carrying out diverse functions, but especially that of enchantment. Death, too, is a living creature.The dramatis personae in his works live within a lyrical nature made of primeval elements such as the moon, sun, sea, plants, and animals, but also urban ruins and rubble where the border between good and evil is not clearly demarcated. Brutality and love take place naturally and side by side: in the case of the character Fiorina, making love equals bestowing death. Human beings share a boundary on one hand with angels, on the other with demons. Collective entities, fearful above all of solitude, they need one another. His theatre world is full of doubles: Totò and Vicé, Santo and Saporito (roughly translated: The Holy One and the Tasty One), the dwarf and the mute; reversible and exchangeable, now victim, now executioner.The dwarf beats up the mute, who always reacts with the same vocal sound, "Uhuhuhuhuhuhuh," varying only in length and intensity. These dramatic figures blend with those of the animal world: the crow, the fly and spider, snails, a dog-man, a moth, a ladybug, a firefly; but also with the moon, a rose, dew, a fairy, a dead star . . . They appear out of an eternal distance and disappear back into it without apparent motive. Totò and Vicé navigate through the air in darkness and silence, singing nonsense verse ("peri piru, peri paru . . ."). They greet one another as two comrades meeting again after long separation. They are two living beings, but their verbal exchanges do not take place in a dialogue of words. They speak in animal sounds, preverbal sonic gestures that emerge from diseased lungs and crushed, arthritic ribcages. Always on the verge of tears, they groan in lamentations, asking querulous, argumentative questions, scansioning syllables, drawing out dipthongs. Gutteral voices seem to reiterate the surrounding silence. Their questions, like those of the children in Jean Piaget's The Child's Conception of the World, make no distinction between sleeping and waking, lightning and lamplight, sun and moon. They question one another about how the universe works, about their own selves and those of others, but only among themselves do they ask and answer.who am I? who / am I? / And if we weren't called either Totò or / Vicé/ who would we be . . . / Totò: . . . who would be be . . . "I am a girl . . . Then, I'm not who I am. / . . . A moment ago I looked at myself in the mirror and I / saw myself / dressed/ like / a girl . . . but I was dressed/ like a man . . . then, I dressed like a girl . . . and in the mirror / I seemed dressed as / a man.These worlds, woven of light and shadow, also have a comic lightness, close to nonsense verse: love and sexual pleasure brighten pain and yearning. But instead of representing opposed regimes, these contrasting figures and their shadows emerge from the same dark backdrop, "a new regime of light" that elbows its way into visible presence. The vocal and sonic register of his plays compose a score of heightened chromatic timbres that echo with the sobs of children and lamentations of the aged, sighs of lovers and the pulsing song of cicadas, rain and ringing telephones, tinkling bells and the cries of street-sellers with melodies on the violin. Scaldati's theatre-world stimulates the senses, transmits odors, irradiates light and color, and blankets us in shadow. Changes in light pace out the day, passing from dusk to utter darkness.Scaldati's sensorial vision brings into being a space-time in which all reality blends in a unique, nameless, indistinct otherness. His beings dedicate themselves not to functional action but to play, eros, and errancy. The intimate closeness of the animal and vegetable worlds draw his landscapes less toward the primitive or archaic than toward the contemporary posthuman, disempowering anthropomorphism to mold new species, different from the pre-existent ones. "Diverse in their nourishment, their relation to the environment and infinite other characteristics, certain humans have already abandoned their own species in search of a new home for a new kind of being"2 The angel does not live anywhere, he presents himself in the form of transit, an activity to which the dramatis personae of Scaldati's theatre dedicate themselves. He has no place in the city of progress, like the numerous figures of the blind, deaf and mute who have a compassionate relationship to the world. With the angel we are surrounded by the divine presence: angelic figures coexist happily with animals, plants, and humans.