Italy Grand Tour: the Teatro della Tosse di Genovsa

This article is published in number 23 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until June 8, 2021

Writing about the theater after a year of silence is a very risky thing. The most ancient expression of man, saying something in front of the beholder, a more archaic activity than music, painting and all the parallel arts, has lost the future and illusions. What is theater if not the body of those who speak in front of that of the listener? Doing in real time what another observes is the original dimension of being.

The epidemic has decreed that those who spoke on stage no longer spoke, appeased by the emoluments of the minister. His problem, I certainly don’t pining. But to be considered less than a film actor, this is not, at my level I do not accept it, in the collective interest of all the most virtuous.
The preamble is necessary, the memory is what remains of what was done. And among what we did (me and Flavia Mastrella) there was the Teatro della Tosse a Genoa. The first meeting took place in 1994, there were the two original rooms, the large and the small. We presented our avant-garde, performances with stage paintings, which mark the beginning of things. I remember the annoyance of being in the small room with a more powerful work than the one planned in the large living room. I came to perform melancholy, but the result was explosive and the emotion nullified the anger for the next twenty-four hours, when the indignation boiled until further repetition. There followed a period in which we were unable to cross the fates of the Cough, the artistic directors think in their own way when instead you should all think it my way.
We waited twenty years before returning. And it was a revelry of emotions, the steep room makes the audience appear looming over the actor, the seats seem more, thanks to the blunder that the inclination guarantees. Like San Francisco, Genoa also knows how to become an obstacle, a wall to be climbed in the opposite direction. Whoever is seated sees the stage swooping, I have personally been in the rear to find out what another sees when I perform. We have a relationship of mutual attraction with the Teatro della Tosse: “We don’t go anywhere else if you keep making us come”. Or at least we do not go away without talking about it first, we do not go away behind us, our elsewhere will never be a stab but a choice announced with the hope that it will not come true.
We like to have a home in every city, and the Teatro della Tosse is our home in Genoa, a place as loved as those of the sea, water knows how to make itself respected. Alberto Savinio used to say that a man of the sea will never be completely evil, as long as, I add, he knows how to get lost in the void ignoring his fellow men, who must be killed as such. They made us similar in order not to give us a chance, we are compliant especially in metropolises, where the eye hits the concrete, often reinforced, but never completely to execute a part of this insubstantial humanity. In any case, the traces of those who performed in the great hall in 1994 have been lost. We are still here.

By Antonio Rezza.
Photo by Donato Aquaro.

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