Italian
Clumsy, overweight, a completely improbable Harlequin. This is how Marco Baliani describes, in his director’s notes, the famous commedia dell’arte mask brought to the stage by Andrea Pennacchi in the show Arlecchino?. A grand cauldron mixing fragments of cabaret, burlesque, variety theater, comedy, and drama arrives at Venice’s Teatro Goldoni from January 17 to 19.
Venice. Supported by Marco Artusi, Maria Celeste Carobene, Miguel Gobbo Diaz, Valerio Mazzucato, Elisa Pastore, and Anna Tringali—actors portraying equally inadequate characters hired by Pantalone for meager wages—Andrea Pennacchi dons the mask of the international icon of the commedia dell’arte tradition. He “tears” it from the past to bring the character’s authenticity into contemporary times. The resulting conflict is easy to imagine. From the clash between Harlequin and our modern world arise hilarious situations but also irreverent visions and unmissable confrontations. It’s an obstacle course during which Harlequin, in all his clumsiness and cunning, crosses many and varied territories of the human spirit, discovering and exploring that humanity which in every era reveals its eternal contradictions.
The characters on stage are accompanied by music composed by Giorgio Gobbo, arranged and performed live by the duo I Sordi. The show’s sets and costumes are designed by Carlo Sala, while the masks were crafted by Officine Zorba of Andrea Cavarra. Lighting design is by Luca Barbati.
The production is co-produced by the company Gli Ipocriti of Melina Balsamo and TSV – Teatro Nazionale.
Director’s Notes by Marco Baliani
The Harlequin that Andrea Pennacchi brings to the stage might well shock the many Harlequins who, over time, have made this mask of the commedia dell’arte famous.
He tries in every way to live up to the role, but he never gets it right. He’s clumsy, overweight, utterly improbable—but he’s in good company: the other actors, who, like him, have been hired by the entrepreneur Pantalone for miserable wages, are just as excessive, untimely, catastrophically inadequate.
And yet, all these missteps, these exits from the stage and departures from the script—which are also forays into today’s contemporary world—these absurd performances, these stylistic tumbles, and literal falls of scrappy bodies; all these piled-up words; this whirlwind of actions and gestures—they are precisely what recreate the miracle of great Goldonian comedy in an unexpected form: a disruptive, disorienting comedy that reconstructs tradition by intelligently betraying it.
Thus, despite everything—or rather, because of all this overwhelming everything—the story unfolds in its narrative, revealing a Harlequin like never before, one that blends different styles, fragments of cabaret, burlesque, variety theater, comedy, and drama: a grand, ultra-postmodern cauldron that strings together pieces of theater history’s memory.
To create such a jumble of intentions and make it exceptionally vibrant, I needed actors capable of following me into such delirium.
And here they are: a troupe of companions and accomplices—Marco Artusi, Maria Celeste Carobene, Miguel Gobbo Diaz, Valerio Mazzucato, Elisa Pastore, and Anna Tringali—capable of simultaneously playing multiple roles, transitioning from the grumbling protests of underpaid actors to the whirlwind actions of the commedia characters they must portray.
In this relentless tightrope walk of identities, it’s their talent that holds together what constantly seems to slip out of grasp.
They rightfully belong to the great tradition of Venetian theater—great because it has always dared to take risks to renew itself, as happens on these stage boards set with Harlequinesque madness.
During rehearsals, I imagined Carlo Goldoni sitting in the third row, and I had to tell him to be quiet because he was laughing so hard, his eyes wide with the wonder of a child who never grew up, watching his work become so improbable that it became even more his own.
And when Giorgio Gobbo’s music, performed live by the duo I Sordi with Matteo Nicolin on guitar and Riccardo Nicolin on drums, burst in as surprising interludes, forcing the actors to also become dancers and singers, Goldoni back there couldn’t contain himself.
Finally, what can be said about Carlo Sala’s ever-shifting sets, a movable, mobile scenography as simple as creativity itself when it forgets about looking good and surrenders to childlike play? The actors themselves serve as stagehands, continually altering the set as if sudden gusts of wind swept through—sometimes a storm, sometimes a spring breeze.
The text, feverishly rewritten each day based on insights that arose from witnessing the actors’ creativity at work, and diligently transcribed by Maria Celeste Carobene, is exactly what I had imagined from the start.
The words sent flying are also light and yet, as in true comedy, deliver piercing stabs and sharp breezes that speak to our daily disasters as a nation and a people, so that the on-stage tremors remind us of the daily shakiness of our own lives.
