ITALIA: June 24, 2007

Sunday, and the last day of official business for Zuppa del Giorno’s Italia Feste 2007!. We begin by rising early to discover we haven’t the necessary supplies for a proper Italian breakfast. Which is to say, we’d run out of bread. So for the morning we played “Starving Russian Peasant Family,” making a game out of our desperate situation so the boy (read: David) wouldn’t panic. I went out in search of pane afterward, so we wouldn’t go without for lunch, which turned out to be quite the adventure. I had forgotten that most of Italy shuts down on a Sunday morning, and so ended up driving about all over in search of an open store. I ended up in Orvieto centro and buying the most expensive groceries of the whole trip, but also having one of the best communication experiences in Italian so far. So I made it back victorious, light of heart and light of wallet.

Lunch was huge, breaking our Russian Peasant fast and keeping in mind that we had a lot of business today and a late dinner planned with Lucianna. For once on this trip I partook of all the courses. It was not difficult, particularly with the bottle of Orvietan white we had saved for our last full day in town. After cleaning up our leisurely lunch we made good time into Orvieto and the piazza of LinguaSi to meet with Piero in follow-up to our initial meeting concerning next year’s program.

We might’ve planned to be more Italian, as Piero came with Sebastiano in tow around a half an hour after the agreed meeting time. Ah, Italia! Accompanying them was India, the most important woman in Sebastiano’s life, I think. His Roman Mastiff dog. Have you seen Cujo? How about Turner and Hooch? Combine those looks and make it bigger. The breed comes from ancient Roman battlefields, but this beast was sweet as a muffin.

Our meeting with Piero went just fine. His responses to our ideas about and changes to his proposal were entirely positive, to the extent that I was fairly embarrassed by my anxiety about it. There was definitely something there for me to learn about the art of negotiation, as it were. His attitude seemed to be that as long as we were still working together, as long as something was happening between us, he was getting what he wanted. Perhaps this isn’t always a good approach to take in instances when what you want is very specific, but I’m certain it creates an atmosphere of positive collaboration and continued possibility.

From there, in common Italian style, we went to coffee instead of Andrea’s as planned. Actually, that’s manipulating the circumstances a bit. We had some questions at that point about whether or not India would be welcome in Andrea and Natsuko’s apartment, especially given her advanced pregnancy, and couldn’t get a hold of Andrea to ask, so stopped to refresh ourselves. By the time we got to their place—to discover the dog would not be a problem so long as we were all on their terrace—it was close to 5:30. Andrea had invited over Hanna, one of the administrative staff of Teatro Boni we met the prior week, and in spite of how tired he was from having returned from work away, the meeting progressed.

This was an interesting movement forward, as it was the first time Andrea and Sebastiano would meet, and they seemed to me very different sorts of people. Andrea is very much a country mouse, wildly enthusiastic about working creatively in a broad range of comic areas and who enjoys being silly and fun, whereas Sebastinao is what you might imagine from an urban, more “method” actor, seemingly serious about his craft and constantly concerned by his career. We were hoping they could work together, simply because they are actors and we know them both. This was the primary point of the meeting, and if we could get well along with that we could move on to the specifics of our vision for next year.

It took me a while to figure out, owing to the two speaking so fast in Italian, but they found at least some common ground. I still suspect one is not necessarily the other’s ideal partner, but David is confident that getting to the point of actually working together is the main thing, and that both are sincerely interested in working. Should differences arise, they’ll be ironed out or shaved off in collaboration, simple as that. And we began the collaboration almost immediately (once we got past the obvious—there’s no money for this on either end, there’s no precedence for this in any of our gathered experiences, there’s no money to be made by this [that’s not quite true {LinguaSi offers a lot of opportunities for us to teach even when we’re working on our own show}]) swapping ideas about what was exciting about working together. Before too long, we had to escape to let Andrea finally sleep, and all parties left it seemed in a spirit of hopefulness about the future.

During the meeting Lucianna called to inform us that her train had literally broken down outside of Rome, and she thought she’d have to stay there overnight. This was crushing, as she’s one of our best friends here in Italy, but there was little we could do about it so we agreed to keep our 9:00 reservations for the terrace of Antica Rupe without her. It was a great place to have our last dinner in Orvieto, sentimental and fine. While there we excitedly babbled about the meeting, and got on the subject of one of the ideas for our collaboration: a clown version of Rome & Juliet. This may sound simple, but we had a great time talking out the possibilities and I would not be surprising to find it’s what we agree to by October, our decision due date.

Midway through our dinner we got a welcome call at the restaurant informing us that Lucianna would indeed be joining. She caught something like three different trains to make it after all, and not too long after she phoned in her order, she was there. It was marvelous to see here again, as flustered and tired as she must have been. We established that we still wanted to do business with her, and had no idea what that now meant (we’ll be between Orvieto and other cities like Bolsena and Pitigliano most of the time), and she was fine with that. So the remainder of the evening was spent just enjoying each other’s company. The waiter ended up hitting on Heather pretty hardcore, too. We were glowing. Lucianna has that effect on us.

Late late late we headed to bed, to rise the next day for Rome. We’re spending the night there before heading to the airport for our flight back to the States. Feels like we’ve been gone a month. Could stand a month more.

ITALIA: June 23, 2007

As our Italy trip begins to wind down here, we refocus on planning for next year. This morning, between breakfast and lunch, we met for two hours to discuss tomorrow’s meeting(s) of the minds. We’re scheduled to meet with Piero at 3:00 to further discuss his proposal for next year’s course structure (a plan which, though the three actors were enthusiastic about at the time, has since come to seem limiting in some ways), then at 4:00 to get Sebastiano together with Andrea at Andrea and Natsuko’s place for a couple of hours to meet and discuss potential creative collaboration. Finally, much later that night, we get to see Lucianna again as she returns from visiting Giorgio, to discuss with her what aspects of next year’s logistics she’s interested in being involved with.

So today we began the discussion from my desire to achieve a better understanding of what we were coming to the table with on all these meetings. The good prospects of our collaboration with Andrea—and through him hopefully Angelo, the talented commedia actor we’ve seen on video—and Sebastiano have shifted our focus from the entire trip being about training American and other students, to spending half of it seeing what we can create (hopefully the beginnings of a show) with Italian artists.

The proposal as it stands now—our proposal to ourselves—is to arrive at the start of June and spend three weeks in rehearsal and meetings with whatever Italian actors we can, with the aim of training and creating a show together. During this time we Americani would also be teaching classes in theatre et al to the interested students at LinguaSi, as a way of incorporating the school more and potentially making more money while we’re here. The fourth week is when the American students would arrive for a week of intensive Italian classes through LinguaSi, during which time we would have our last week of rehearsal with the Italiani, hopefully to present some kind of show to those students at the end of the week (“This is what you’ll be doing by the end of your time here.”) Thereafter we would enter the last two weeks, in which time our training of the students in theatre and commedia dell’arte would commence, enhanced by association with genuine Italian commediani and culminating in a performance in Italian at the end of that period. It occurs to me now that we could also, in that time, research possibilities for taking our professional Italian/American show to the next phase and new venues.

It’s an exciting proposal, and after our meeting I feel more confident about everybody getting something of what they want out of it. It includes the prospect of bringing Andrea over to America to perform at The Northeast Theatre, and of taking Silent Lives, eventually, to Italy. I still have some concerns, but they’re of a scope impossible to deal with at this stage. This plan relies on grant funding for the first half of the trip, something we have historically had no luck with as regards getting to Italy. Hopefully our new collaborations will change our luck with that. It’s also a great deal of time to be out of the country. This is tempered by the fact that we’d be working on our own theatre at this time and the long-term pay-off of that, but it’s likely it will make it close to impossible for Todd and his rapidly burgeoning New York career, and we’ll have to be sure of a certain degree of income for ourselves to even allow the possibility. None of these concerns, however, tamp my enthusiasm for the scope and aspect of this proposal. It seems possible. It seems exciting and necessary, and where the program needs to head.

Our meeting evolved in to a discussion of the differences between Italian and American mentalities, the purpose of our show here and discussions of the profound effects this place has had on us so far. It was a lovely talk that extended past lunch, and gave me the idea to do a ‘blog entry upon my return on The Complete Idiot’s Guide to What Not to do When Visiting Italy. I’m certainly qualified to write such a guide.

I spent the siesta happily exercising (my pelvic floor dysfunction has become mercifully manageable through stretching and, probably, wine with every meal) and bounding about the yard working on my handstand and toward an aerial (just one, God, that’s all I ask [and a non-broken neck in the process]) before we loped up to Orvieto. And finally, finally, I posted to the Aviary. I mean: DAMN. It seemed as though it just wasn’t meant to be until we were about to leave. I swung by StatCounter to see how my absence had affected readership, to discover it had dwindled to about four hits per day, except ever-fruitful Wednesday, which kept some buoyancy around twenty hits. What is it about hump day that makes everyone read ‘blogs? Is it the height of working-day boredom, perhaps?

After Orvieto we sped off to Sant Angelo to see if either David’s friend Mauro or a feste (the event, not the Shakespearean character) were about. Neither were, so we continued on to Bolsena to have dinner on the lake and walk the site of last year’s busking victory. As we strolled up to the fountain where we had performed the Valentino excerpt last year (through a bustling gardening market with live blues music [Todd, you would have had to guest perform.]) we found it looked as though it had been brushed up a bit, possibly painted and repaired. People strolled about admiring orchids and petunias, but I stood imagining dancing with Italian children to Todd’s incomparable rendition of “At Last.”

ITALIA: June 22, 2007

Here’s where we went wrong, yesterday: When in Italy, you need to have desires, or goals. It is a land of great passion, desire and appetite. HOWEVER, no desire should ever, EVER take greater priority over your next cup of coffee.

Which is to say, listen to yourself and go with it. Don’t make yourself dopey by foregoing a good meal in order to get in the car to Florence quicker. You’ll only end up settling for roadside food and a caffeine insufficiency too late to really turn things around for you. Today we took this lesson to heart. First of all, our adventures of the previous day and the lateness of the hour of our return permitted us to sleep in quite a bit. I myself slept until 12:30, a normally unheard-of feat. When we were all up, the priority was a good meal. We knew we had the show in Pitigliano to attend later this night, so felt justified in moving at a simple pace and structuring things around when we accomplished them. This is why Italians are always late, and rarely frustrated.

So we had a nice lunch, and planned to visit our favorite little store in Orvieto for groceries and a visit with its proprietor, Vera. Doing this with no particular rush, we found we had plenty of time to eat, David swam and I exercised and acro’d on the lawn a bit (at one point looking up to find one of our neighbors on her porch watching with an expression that suggested a combination of fear and confusion), and we drove off to Orvieto feeling pretty fine. Once within its walls, Dvaid did some errands whilst Heather and I had cappuncini, used up our internet café cards and bought a plant for Vera. (The woman continually, unrelentingly takes lots of time to happily speak with us, not to mention gives us free bottles of wine and soda, when we visit her; we’ll never catch up on the gift front; she’s too good.) After a while we wound our way to Vera’s and had a lovely visit, incapable of escaping without having the wine we were trying to BUY from her hoisted upon us for no charge.

This entry—most of these later ones—grow more and more about a vacation than acting, theatre or The Third Life™. That’s one of the reasons we came here, I admit. As artists, we really don’t get “vacation time.” As Todd noted while he was here, so long as we get to do our work we generally don’t feel a need for vacation. What a lot of people outside of the effort of a Third Life® have trouble understanding is that we do work when we go out of town for a show, or take time for a tech week. The fact that we’re generally happier and better adjusted when we return just makes some people assume it was more like what sets them right, namely a couple of weeks out of the year to lie on a beach and sip margaritas, or some similar activity. As actors (and a director) our “vacations” coincide with our work, in part because that work is of necessity a third thing in our lives. It thrives most in these times we aren’t working to support our livelihood or focusing on a personal life. In other words, when we make time for it.

Not that I’m not grateful to be typing this on a sunny, vine-laced terrace in Europe, and not that it’s not luxurious and relaxing. I just wanted to express that observation to clear a little air.

So after dinner we headed to Pitigliano to see their production of Othello, or (as we shall henceforth refer to it):

La Strage del Teatro.

We had our warnings. Looking back, we had numerous cautions. And, I suppose, the worst of all possible outcomes would have been a show that sort of awkwardly straddled the fence between decent and sucky. Finally, to paraphrase Bernard in Black Books: “Enjoy. It’s dreadful, but it’s quite short.”

First of all, stupido Americani that we are, we arrived a half an hour before the time listed on the poster to have a gelato and take in that glorious Pitigliano sunset again. In so doing we witnessed the lead actor arrive, and one of the other, more punctual actors greet him at the door already in costume, said costume comprised of a lot of black gauze and satin. The doors didn’t open until the hour posted on the poster, and the show (if such a thing it may be called) didn’t begin until 10:00. Ah, we thought, let us remember this timing for when we plan a performance in Italy.

Imagine every parody, every farce, every pretentious off-off Broadway show, movie or skit you’ve seen, the subject of which is theatre or theatre life, roll them into one and make everyone speak Italian. You’ll approach what we witnessed. I have often thought it interesting, though etymologically difficult, how similar the words “tragedy” and “travesty” are. The idea has been made flesh. And black satin.

I’ve just conferred with my comrades, and there’s just no way to encapsulate all that was wrong with this show. Think of an aspect of theatre, and make it horribly, horribly wrong. David seemed to think that the director was someone who had seen a style of theatre in Rome or elsewhere Italian and decided that’s what he wanted to do, regardless of the show involved. I credit the director with less direction and more pretense and personal indulgence. Every character was dressed in black, gauze and satin, against a black backdrop. There was music during every interlude, of which there were dozens, and there was interpretive dance by non-dancers. Plus the acting was bad to the point of a approximating a slide show on what not to do on stage.

Redeeming qualities? Well, it was interesting to note—by way of this production and conversations with Andrea—that apparently not much Shakespeare is done in Italy. The language doesn’t translate well, and given the physical background of Italy’s theatre tradition, a language- or poetry-based theatre must seem fairly inaccessible to the general public. So what’s popular where Shakespeare is concerned (and he must be very concerned indeed), and was what we saw yester night, is to take the story and not the text itself. This is very interesting to me for two reasons. The first is that we would pretty much never think of doing this in the English-speaking countries unless the play was mere inspiration for an entirely different setting or conflict (West Side Story, for instance). The language is a major purpose of the plays for us, in other words. Secondly, transliterating Shakespeare strikes me as very similar—or perhaps a reverse-engineering—of what Shakespeare did to the commedia dell’arte plays he may have witnessed as a youth; plays such as may influenced A Comedy of Errors or All’s Well That Ends Well. Finally, for all the pretension of the director, the actors themselves were very earnest and modest in their efforts. This reminded us of Michael Green’s Coarse Acting plays, but it also reinforced for us that what we experienced was overall a positive experience, more full of good intention than an actual; disregard of or disrespect of us as an audience.

We drove home happily counting the Shakespearean clichés and regaling one another with our reinterpretations of favorite foibles. If the mark of a successful play is the continued effect it has on its audience, then this production of Othello was indeed successful.

Too successful, in its way.

ITALIA: June 21, 2007

Imagine, if you will, a strange land full of trickery and delight. Delight, that is, if you were reading about it or watching some fetching cartoon about it. Today we went down the rabbit hole, we went through the looking glass, people. And I’m here to tell you, messiah-like, that living it is not nearly as enjoyable as witnessing it happen to other people.

Given all the good fortune we’ve experienced in Italy thus far, it seems only apt that there’d be one day of payback, and we have only ourselves to blame. Babel-like, we set our sights too high. Looking back, we have named it il Giorno del Circolo, because we simply could not escape circles--directional, mental and traffic. The day started with trying to drive a memorized local route to Firenze. After about an hour of confusing signage and increasingly rural roads, we found ourselves on what had to have been one of the highest mountain cities in Umbria, Allarona. We stopped to take in an amazing expanse and ask for directions. Turns out we had driven a good hour around a gigantic, rural circle, to find ourselves only 20 klicks from Orvieto once again. So we returned to Orvieto (with some further difficulty, I might add) to get our bearings and decided to head out to Firenze on the autostrada (uninitiated Americani, read: “interstate”). Of course, we had planned to stop in an intermediate town for lunch, but the hour was late and after a little under an hour on the autostrada David suggested we stop at one of the pull-off stations for eats. It’s tough to get lost when you go nowhere, after all.

And boy, are the service stations off the autostrada nowhere. It was bizarrely uplifting cum depressing to see this side of Italy, or perhaps greater Europe. It told me that the pervasive (invasive) culture of convenience is not limited to America’s purple-mountained majesty. The whole establishment was hoisted above the autostrada, so you could be rocked to dreamy consumption by the coastal sounds of cars topping out at 100 mph. It was the most expensive and least satisfying meal I’ve ever had in Italy, though it still beat anything I could have gotten in such an establishment in my native land. So there’s hope yet for Italia. After this strange meal, it was back on the road.

But now for a town called Arrezzo, which none of us had been to before. We decided we were so behind, and perhaps we didn’t have the courage and stamina at that point to take on Firenze. Arrezzo is one of the towns we looked into as having theatre festivals when we were applying for grants to travel here, so it seemed logical that we might find an interesting environment there. Off we went, little aware of what we were in for.

Arrezzo is a town I think I might enjoy under other circumstances. It’s fairly small, but big enough to hold a lot of history and contemporary entertainments. It felt a bit like a university town, with some 3,000 years of history behind it. We dove in and visited the largest park and a giant cathedral, but quickly had to get back to the car as we could only pay for a couple of hours of parking at a time (circles). On our second trip we wound our way around until we finally found an exhibit of Piero della Francesca in a local museum. A famous renaissance artist, he lived in the town for some time. Oddly enough, most of his extant work is in frescoes…the which you can’t exactly export to museums. So, though it was very well done, the exhibit was something of a tease. Thereafter David suggested we find dinner in Fiesole, a neighboring town of Firenze. (I think he was generally disappointed with Arrezzo.) Feeling at least somewhat successful with having found the exhibit, we agreed, hoping it would fulfill some of our Firenze jones. The bells of the church whose lot we parked in heralded us out of town as we headed out in the car…once again.

Fiesole was quite easy to find, in spite of some anxiety owing to signage on the way. I bought a road map of all of Italy at the service station (How’s that for an investment in the future?), so we at least had some perspective on where we were headed this time. It is a town on a high hill (mountain?) to the northeast of Firenze, with a beautiful view of the city. We had a very lavish dinner—with complementary champagne, of all things—at an outdoor restaurant with a view of the city below, a place David had had dinner at ten years prior. The dinner rejuvenated us so that we felt empowered to seek out a great gelato place David remembered from the same era, in Firenze.

Mistake.

We had ourselves quite a little drive around the city, ensnared continually by traffic circles with little-to-no indication of where we wished to end up. I suppose we spent the better part of an hour trying to locate the general area we hoped to inhabit, with no success. We just couldn’t catch a break, so we eventually just tried to find the autostrada again, which led us to some very interesting parts of town. Heather: “Is she for sale?” Jeff: “I think so.” Two blocks later eliminated all doubt, as a bevy of scantily (or non) clad roadside stress-relievers dotted our periphery. In case your needs should ever lay in such a direction whilst in Florence, head to where the buses park between routes. It’s like a supermarket over there.

I took over the driving once we got going on some local roads out of town. It was nearing 1:00 AM at this point, and eventually I found the autostrada near Siena, and eventually we coursed our way into our driveway, at just about 3:00 AM. Where did we go wrong (apart from, directionally, ever which way)? That’s a tale for another time. For now, we’ll just put this day to rest.

ITALIA: June 20, 2007

Okay: I was a bit hasty when I encouraged you to avoid thinking of Bevagna’s “Medieval Festival” as though it were an American “Renaissance Festival.” The similarities are, in fact, quite arresting. The only distinctions appear to be that 1) The Medieval Festival is taking place in a town of the appropriate age, and 2) A Renaissance Festival includes dragon puppets and magic satchels and things of this nature. In all other things the two resemble one another quite closely. This town has even erected some pseudo-historical structures constructed from cast fiberglass and molded polystyrene, the ethos behind which we have been scratching our heads about all the live-long day.

It has been a long day. So long, in fact, that by 5:00 we had had enough and David rented us a room in a nunnery ("get thee to"), and we had a nap. It was well worth it. Prior to that, the day started at 6:30 in the morning in order to try to arrive in Bevagna on time to meet Andrea and Natsuko when they got there. The drive was intense—almost two hours, and full of the most winding roads I’ve ever driven on. I’m pretty certain there were a couple of times there when we traveled back in time a little, the road curled back on itself so impossibly. We split the drive with a quick stop for breakfast and a walk in Todi. We didn’t stay long. My impression is that the city is built on a spire. You walk steeply uphill to its center, and jog in a sort of controlled fall to get back to where you parked. When we got through all that, we didn’t land in Bevagna until 11:00ish.

When we met up with Andrea and Natsuko in the central piazza, we all five promptly headed off to a bar for l’acqua and caffe. It was an incredibly hot day, just getting warmed up. When we could justify sitting under umbrellas no more, we headed off to visit with one of Andrea’s friends who was also working in his quarter. The “Medieval Festival,” it seems, actually dates back to the time it honors. Bevagna is divided into four quarters known as gaiti, or gates, which refers to the town having essentially four walls, each with its own entrance. Back in the day, the gaiti were fiercely competitive. Each had there own church, their own laws, etcetera. It got so territorial at times that the gaiti would put up chains across their borders, and anyone caught on the wrong side would be killed. (Suddenly Romeo & Juliet becomes credible in a whole new way.) The festival continues in this tradition with—we hope—less bloodshed, by forming itself as a competition in authenticity and entertainment between the four quarters. Andrea’s role in all this was to a play a sort of wandering clown for Gaite Sant Giorgio.

His friend whom first we met is a painter of icons and frescoes. This was an amazing visit. We went into the workshop he had set up for the event, and it’s hard to imagine anything more genuine. I couldn’t stop taking pictures. Essentially, he gave us the full tour and lecture on his technique, hours before he would be expected to do it for the public. From color making to charcoal graphing to gold leafing, it was fascinating. I couldn’t even understand a fifth of what the guy was actually saying, and it was still fascinating.

Afterwards we all went to lunch together in the main courtyard of Sant Giorgio, where later that night the quarter’s feats would be held. Sheets were hung at intervals, over tables still stacked atop with their benches, and we met other performers and artisans of the gaite who were there for their midday meal. And, essentially, we were served a full Italian meal with wine amidst really charming and interesting people…for free. Guests of Andrea. This is the least of what we owe this man. It was a marvelous meal. After that we followed the man in charge of running the coin-stamping site into his cool basement workshop, were he minted each of us a medieval Perugian coin. Then Andrea walked us around the town to visit the other quarters, the outlet for the town’s water supply and one of the churches. Finally it was time for him to prepare for the evening at his digs in the quarter’s nunnery. (Get thee to one, go!) This was when our fatigue drove us to rent rooms there, and we napped until past 7:00.

When we woke, famished, the evening’s festivities were just getting under way. David couldn’t wait for one of the feasts to squelch his hunger, and we weren’t in a hurry to disagree (though I admit I might have waited for the experience) so we dove into the only open restaurant we could find in town. While there, Andrea found us, and whilst in character. He had donned a medieval tunic and accentuated it with his customary (and costume-ry) props, like a helmet and the collapsible sword I used for a scythe in our clown piece, and an ashtray breastplate, and was wearing a Pantalone mask. He was wildly funny, carousing with every person in reach like a drunken soldier on holiday. We agreed to meet up later for a drink, and we were off to the central piazza again to people-watch during passagiata. Everyone was out to impress that night, from packs of pre-teen boys to elderly couples walking hand-in-hand. We agreed that the festival was really just an excuse for a super-passagiata.

After wine with Andrea and Natsuko David decided he was feeling spry and we left our monastical digs to drive the two hours back to the agriturismo. I was asleep before we got out of Toscana. The love of this country wears me right out.