First Review of "Beast On The Moon" in Italy

Andrea Chiodi's production of Beast on the Moon in Italy has received its first glowing review! The review referred to the show as a "great success" and has been described as a focus on "deracination and the conservation of memory." Read more of the review written by Franceso De Leonardis below, translated from Italian to English:

A stuffed chair and a standing lamp on the left-hand side of the stage are the space of the narrator, of the voce that accompanies the spectator into the story. A vaguely abstract calendar on the wall of a room tells us that we are in 1995, in Milwaukee, USA. 1995 is the year in which Richard Kalinoski wrote BEAST ON THE MOON, the drama that is playing with great success at Teatro Santa Chiara Mina Mezzadri. The show is a new production of the CTB, directed by Andrea Chiodi.

The story takes place in the 1920s; the protagonists are two young Armenians, Aram and Seta, emigres to the U.S. after having survived the genocide of their people in 1915. Never having met, they married by proxy and have to confront the difficulty of building a life together as a couple. Each of them carries within the deepest wounds suffered in the course of the extermination: her mother was crucified, like her God, the heads of his parents and siblings were hung to clotheslines between laundry linens.

In BEAST ON THE MOON, Kalinoski not only denounces the brutality of the war; what interests him more is the theme of deracination and the conservation of memory. If memory is not shared – he tells us – the person remains trapped in personal pain and can no longer live, plan a future.

Aram would like at all costs to have children, to have descendants and rebuild the family he lost, and he experiences the sterility of his wife as a blow. He cannot free himself from the past, which is housed in several fetishized objects, nor integrate himself in his new world. Inevitably, a violent crisis erupts between the two of them, interrupted by the arrival of a third character, Vincent, an Italian orphan, who Seta takes into the house without her husband’s knowledge. But it’s precisely Vincent who becomes for Aram and Seta the vehicle for the possibility of a new beginning, of salvation.

BEAST ON THE MOON is a work that Chiodi has highlighted with a non-invasive direction that carefully renders the different temporal and narrative planes; the actors’ great skill is to be commended, beginning with Elisabetta Pozzi, who has developed with her extraordinary craft the character of Seta, creating a woman of great internal strength, a person who suffers but is never pathetic; Fulvio Pepe engenders in Aram a fragility masked under the veil of authority and tradition. Luigi Bignone in the role of the boy Vincent and Alberto Mancioppi, the narrator, are also strong. Warmest applause for all of them.