Zitti tutti!
by Raffaello Baldini
on stage: Ivano Marescotti . set design and costumes: Sergio Tramonti . stagecraft: Stefano Iannetta . voice: Ermanna Montanari direction: Marco Martinelli . production: Ravenna Teatro, Comune di Ravenna
The text
Zitti tutti! is included in the book
Zitti tutti!, by Raffaello Baldini, Ubulibri, Milano, 1993
Debut Ravenna, Teatro Alighieri, november 22 1993
1994 -
Raffaello Baldini’s play Zitti tutti!, directed by Marco Martinelli, wins the Ubu Prize for the “singularity of the linguistic debut”.
Press reviews:
"The mutating interior landscape of the post-war generations studded with voice and a few spare gestures, water poured into a glass, spilt on the ground to suggest a liquid boundary which in reality unites, without rhetoric. Right down to the gesture of the comrade, always silent at meetings, who on hearing of the break-up of the Italian Communist Party turns up at his branch to claim the flag. And he stays there, seated and motionless, like the actor, holding out until he gets it. One of the many nameless soldiers of too many wars fought, which have had their effect on ourselves and others. Right into our houses today, in the daily conflict of mistrust and fear of the different which this show of rare quality and sensitivity makes tangible, closing with the silence without history of a body bent over to conceal face and voice".
(Massimo Marino, "Hystrio", january 1 2002)
"In the narration a hypothetical dialogue between generations, between fathers and sons, is broken up and put back together an infinite number of times. Fathers who were themselves children and sons during the second world war, men and women of the age of well-being. Of those times there emerges the figure of the partisan Gino Gatta, communist barber, mayor in the immediate post-war period, “who went to die in the pinewood, in his river in his marshland, in his water”, and the story of Vitaliano Ravaglia, a native of Romagna who fought in Vietnam. Dadina follows and indicates the many possible directions of the narration, and he does it just a few steps from the public who are gathered on the stage in the apse of the ancient church of Santa Chiara. The story is taut and rich in images, amid the freezing winters of war and the horizontal lines of the marshland where “each creature learns to be somewhat like another thing too".
(Chiara Bissi, "Il Corriere della Romagna", november 24 2001)
"He wears an incongruous black suit with the jacket at least a couple of sizes too big. He munches little meringues that are heaped up on a ceramic tray. Now and then he drinks thirstily from a bottle of water on the table. A couple of times he spills some on the floor in a clear symbolic reference to the many rivers great and small that are the thread running through the story, emblem of a fluctuating memory, like the narrative rhythm of this intense monologue that unravels its liquid landscapes, continually shifting through ages, subject matter and expressive tonalities. The homonymous narrator of Al Placido Don – text by Renata Molinari and Luigi Dadina and acted by the latter, an outstanding member of Ravenna’s Teatro delle Albe – sets out […] from a part of Sholokov’s And Quiet Flows the Don, but immediately shifts to the banks of the river Senio and other Romagna waterways […] unconscious elements linking a present of crumbling ideologies and a past of battles and partisan undertakings. […] the triple dot pauses, the transversal approaches and the unfinished stories are the best resources of this dense show, staged with a contribution from director Marco Martinelli […]".
(Renato Palazzi, "Il Sole 24 ore", july 7 2002)
"[…] What fascinates […] in Al Placido Don is the proceeding by questions that underlies the dramaturgical structure and makes the actor’s words unfold in a progression that is in no way linear or consequential. Almost following the flow of the river, its expanding and rising up, taking on the many stories that its banks and bed have always accommodated, Molinari and Dadina’s narration is developed with fragments of stories, glimpses of tales and with an equal number of responses to questions about the sense and possibility or otherwise of recounting, for example recounting the war. What emerges is a sort of uninterrupted dialogue between fathers and children, children who want to know about the war and fathers who have experienced it but cannot or don’t know how to tell. This is also a heartfelt questioning about the difficulties of communication between generations and of handing down the truth about history before it becomes normal and consigned to the museum as History with a capital S […]".
(Mario Brandolin, "Messaggero Veneto", january 26 2003)
"A table bearing white cakes, a bottle of water and a glass: the actor, wearing a dark suit and a white shirt, gathers the spectators around him with his eye, a kind of pact of reciprocal union before the story begins. And a characteristic of this fine Teatro delle Albe show Al Placido Don, “ghosts of the river”, produced by Ravenna Teatro, […] is precisely the extraordinary communicative tension that the actor – a really marvellous Luigi Dadina who also wrote the text with Renata Molinari – articulates with his eyes. Movements of the head, sometimes the shoulders, observing now this now that spectator are never just easy ways of involving the public: it is actually the interior punctuation of high theatre, speech punctuated by pauses of thought that are at the same time eye contact. […] An excellent performance by Luigi Dadina. The applause was long, warm and very well deserved".
(Valeria Ottolenghi, "Gazzetta di Parma", july 23 2002)
