Dario D'Ambrosi Helms MEDEA with Chorus from Teatro Patologico at La MaMa, Now thru 10/18

To share an electrifying and distinguished work from Italy with a larger audience, La MaMa E.T.C. will present Teatro Patologico (Pathological Theater) from Rome in "MEDEA," adapted and directed by Dario D'Ambrosi, tonight, October 8, to the 18th, 2015 in its Ellen Stewart Theater, 66 East 4th Street.

The piece combines professional actors from New York and Italy, who perform in English, with a chorus of 14 actors with differing abilities drawn from the University program of D'Ambrosi's La magia del teatro (The magic of Theatre) drama academy, who perform in Attic Greek. Dario D'Ambrosi, one of Italy's most distinguished theater artists, has made a career of plays and films that are with and about people with psychiatric disabilities, devising productions that portray their unique perspective on life.

The cast features Celeste Moratti (Italy-NYC) as the title character, Duane Allen (NYC) as Creon, Mauro F. Cardinali (Italy-NYC) as Jason, and Michela D'Ambrosi (Italy) as Glauke. Original music is by Papaceccio and Francesco Santalucia. The chorus will be Beatrice Agostini, Emanuele Antei, Emanuela Daniele, Fabio De Persio, Andrea Ferrari, Gilberto Giliberti, Paolo Giliberti, Elisa Maruca, Claudio Salvatore, Valerio Serafino, Claudia Terracini, Daniela Tortosa, Paolo Vaselli and Giuliano Verdecchia. All are students of D'Ambrosi's First University of the Integrated Theatre of Emotion, a college program D'Ambrosi's "La magia del teatro" (The magic of Theatre) drama academy, which offers a three-year colllege diploma in the performing arts to those with diagnoses of disorders including schizophrenia, manic-depression and autism as well as Down Syndrome.

The adaptation focuses on the relationship between language and the human body: the body itself becomes language and a means of communication thanks to, among other things, a live musical score by Papaceccio and Francesco Santalucia. The original Attic Greek becomes a key textural element. The principals speak in English and the chorus performs in Attic Greek (the product of an intense collaboration with language historians and philologists in Rome).

D'Ambrosi's impressive and visceral adaptation of Euripides' tragedy was originally presented as a work in progress by La MaMa in December, 2011 for four performances as part of "Teatro Patologico in New York," a festival of Pathological Theater and Film honoring La MaMa's 50th Anniversary. In 2012, a full production was presented at Wilton's Music Hall in London and won the Wilton Prize 2012/13 as the best show of the season. It has also been awarded the "Lupa Capitolina" Award in Rome, a Mayoral honor. This is the American premiere.

Prior to the La MaMa run, the production will be staged September 14 and 15, 2015 at Teatro Argentina in Rome, one of Europe's most prestigious theaters. On September 30 at 6:00 PM, the Italian Cultural Institute in New York, 686 Park Avenue, will present a free program on the production featuring D'Ambrosi and actors from his Pathological Theatre.

D'Ambrosi writes in his director's notes, "You are about to witness something that looks like a 'regular' show, with actors moving, acting, speaking and trying to achieve a structured movement pattern while wrapped in costumes designed to fit their bodies. But the truth, what you are about to see is anything but a 'normal' show. Some of these actors, before this experience, weren't able to talk; some of them were deathly afraid to walk up a flight of stairs; some have been harming themselves for years. Seeing their progress is what gave us the strength and the enthusiasm to push forward. When their parents thanked us because they could finally sleep at night, after many years, thanks to this theater training and to the newfound serenity it brought their kids, we knew that our apparently impossible work had finally paid off.

"Going to theater conventions all over the world, we'd heard that artists such as Peter Brook, Robert Wilson and Pina Bausch brought new languages to the stage in the seventies and eighties and that nothing new can be really achieved after them in terms of theatrical expression. I don't agree. Working with actors with mental disabilities brings us to a new form of theatrical language. Only they have the key to it, only they can unlock and dictate new guidelines for the future of the theater. That is because their presence on the stage is intentionally 'anti-theatrical.' We could expect anything to happen: they could leave the set at any moment or end the show before its conclusion.

"This new way of being on a stage, which for me is the healthiest possible, mirrors the sheer terror every human being feels at any time anywhere in the world. I don't know if any of my actors will actually leave the scene without warning, but then nobody will ever know. What you're about to see is absolutely truthful and unique. Each night will be an absolute surprise both for my 'patient-actors' and for the audience. It is a unique experience that will bring you close to true theatre, the Theatre of Emotion."

Music is by Francesco Santalucia. Transliteration, revision and consultation on the Ancient Greek text is by Silvia Buffo. English translation is by Celeste Moratti. Choreography is by Marta Deioanna. Assistant Director is Alessandro Corazzi. Costume Design is by Raffaella Toni. Assistant Costume Designer is Chiara Laureti. Set design is by Maria Grazia D'Ambrosi. Assistant set designer is Silvia Panconesi. Original lighting design is by Danilo Facco.

IF YOU GO:

MEDEA

October 8 to 18, 2015

La MaMa E.T.C. (Ellen Stewart Theater), 66 East 4th Street

Thursdays through Saturdays at 7:00 PM; Sundays at 4:00 PM

$25 general admission, $20 seniors and students

Ten $10 tickets will be available to every performance on a first-come, first-served basis (advance sale recommended).

Box office (646) 430-5374, www.lamama.org

Runs 1:25. Critics are invited to all performances

ABOUT DARIO D'AMBROSI - Dario D'Ambrosi is a former professional soccer player, one of Italy's leading performance artists and originator of the theatrical movement called Teatro Patologico. His plays investigate mental illness by grasping its vital artistic and creative aspects with the intention of restoring the "dignity of the fool."

The NY Times' D.J.R. Bruckner wrote, "Any piece by Mr. D'Ambrosi is about each member of the audience. A viewer who surrenders disbelief for a moment will be carried away in an unimaginable world of chaos, wit, bewilderment, mirth, anger, disgust and a kind of sweet sadness, and will leave it with a sense of relief and loss." In the '80s and '90s, D'Ambrosi marched irresistibly into the forefront of Italy's theatrical ambassadors, a cohort led by Pirandello, DiFilippo and Dario Fo. In 1994, he received the equivalent of a Tony Award in his country: a prize for lifetime achievement in the theater from the Instituto del Drama Italiano (the equivalent of the TONY Award in this country). D'Ambrosi first performed at La MaMa in 1980 and has been in residence there nearly every year thereafter. He has written and directed over 16 plays, acted in 18 major films and TV movies, and written and directed three full-length films. Fifteen of his plays have had their American premieres at La MaMa. In the US, he has also performed at Lincoln Center, Chicago's Organic Theatre, Cleveland's Public Theater and Los Angeles' Stages Theatre, among others.

Rosette Lamont wrote in Theater Week, "The yearly appearance of the Italian writer/performer Dario D'Ambrosi at La MaMa is cause for celebration." In a definitive essay, she traced D'Ambrosi's aesthetic to his close study of Antonin Artaud and Georges Bataille. Critic Randy Gener, writing in The New York Theatre Wire, stated "his theater is a form of social realism that is also an idee fixe. With unusual openness and frankness, his theatrical aesthetic openly embraces the extremity of their forms, emotions and ideas, and it is, thus, called teatro patologico."

D'Ambrosi has had a theater named Teatro al Parco in Rome, located in a children's psychiatric hospital. He formed the Gruppo Teatrale Dario D'Ambrosi in Italy in 1979. Twenty years later, D'Ambrosi opened a new theater in a converted warehouse in a northern section of Rome. Called Teatro Patologico di Roma, it is home to his resident company of professional actors and a drama school for psychiatric patients. It was described in The New York Times (by Gaia Pianigiani, June 2, 2010) as Europe's first drama school for people with disabilities, who create original works of theater there as actors, designers and playwrights. Fifteen teaching artists instruct sixty students, including people of all ages who are schizophrenic, catatonic, manic depressive, autistic, and born with Down Syndrome. Many of these, the article relates, have broken through their isolation, found self-knowledge and made themselves understood through theater.

D'Ambrosi speaks excitedly about the theatrical possibilities of these newly-minted theater artists, whose purity of vision and unencumbered passion make their work fantastically original, inspiring and well beyond the artistic reach of conventional theater.

D'Ambrosi's first international "Pathological Theater Festival" was held in 1988 in a mental hospital in Rome. The audience, he says, was made up of people who were normal and people who were sick, and you couldn't tell which were which. He also organized an acting unit in an adolescent ward and helped them put on a play, but unlike the Marquis de Sade in Peter Weiss' "Marat/Sade," D'Ambrosi did not invite anybody "normal" to watch. Subsequent festivals of this type have been open to the public and have helped raise money to help Italy's growing population of mental patients who have been "released" from institutions.

D'Ambrosi's La MaMa productions include a wide variety of notable works. "Cose Da Pazzi (Mad Things Out of This World)" (1995) was a play on useless technical theories of the psychiatrists and the deep state of alienation in which the psychiatric patient lives. "La Trota (The Trout)" had its American premiere at La MaMa in 1986 and was revived in 1997. In this play an old man, trapped by his fetishist acts, turns the trout he has purchased for dinner into a love symbol and the object of an inevitably doomed passion for life. "My Kingdom for a Horse (Il mio regno per un cavallo)" (1996) was inspired by "Richard III." D'Ambrosi portrayed Shakespeare's villain as a schizophrenic fetus trapped in internal dialogue with his unloving mother. Ben Brantley (New York Times) hailed the production as a remarkable interpretation that "taps right into primal terrain most of us avoid exploring."

In 1998, D'Ambrosi adapted the Peter Pan story into "The Dis-Adventures of Peter Pan vs. Capitan Maledetto" which critic Randy Gener, writing in The New York Theatre Wire, called "the most utterly charming of D'Ambrosi's allegorical explorations of the irrational," warning "You'd be a fool to miss it." In 2000, D'Ambrosi celebrated 20 years of productions at La MaMa with a serial retrospective with three of his most singular plays: "All Are Not Here (Tutti non ci sono)" (1980, 1989), a solo performance in which an inmate from a psychiatric ward is victimized by neglect in the outside world, "Frustration (Frustra-Azioni)" (1994), a play on a butcher's psychotic obsessions, and "The Prince of Madness" (1993), a story of a crippled man selling human beings who in the end are revealed to be his family. "Nemico Mio" (1988, revived 2003) was a maverick Vladimir-and-Estragon-type play in which two inmates of a psychiatric hospital, one speaking and one mute, engage in elaborate, poetic fantasies of being at the beach.

In December, 2007, he revived his "Days of Antonio" (originally performed at La MaMa in 1981), a play based on the real incident of an insane boy who had been raised in a henhouse. Celeste Moratti starred in that play and in its subsequent film rendition, which was completed in Italy in 2010. The New York Times (Jason Zinoman) credited her with "a boldly feral performance of a boy stuck between the worlds of the sane and the mentally ill and the human and the animal."

Mr. D'Ambrosi also sustains a prolific acting career. He played the Clown in Julie Taymor's film version of "Titus Andronicus" (1999) with Anthony Hopkins and Jessica Lange. He is director and co-author of "The Buzzing of Flies" (2003), a Hera International film produced by Gianfranco Piccioli, with Lorenzo Alessandri and Greta Schacchi (the latter co-starred with Harrison Ford in "Presumed Innocent"). In 2000 he appeared in the Italian thriller "Almost Blue" and in 2005, he was seen in "Ballet of War," a film about the clandestine immigration of Albanian people into Italy. But his most well known film appearance may be as the Roman Soldier who mercilessly whipped Jesus in Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ." The villainous part caused strangers to glare at him scornfully on the streets of Rome while the film was playing. Zachary Pincus-Roth, writing in the New York Times, reported that Mr. D'Ambrosio says he still has dreams in which Jesus - with the face of Mel Gibson - assures him that it was all worth it. The entire experience ultimately inspired him to create "The Pathological Passion of the Christ" (La MaMa, 2004 and film version, 2005), which was based on the idea that many of Jesus' contemporaries considered him insane.

In July 2009, D'Ambrosi created an original genre of live performance called "The Drive-In Stage™" and inaugurated it an hour-long thriller, "Night Lights," which was a site-specific performance on the block between Washington Street between Spring Street and Canal Street in SoHo. The play portrayed a precarious liaison between a female university professor and a male ex-convict in a city street. The audience of 40 viewed the live action from within parked cars, listening with headsets.

In December 2009 at La Ma, he staged a novel version of "Romeo and Juliet" which portrayed the marvel of love with the fragility of life, the shock of the moment of total loss and what he calls a "schizophrenia of the world" with innovative and shocking stage effects. In 2010, he staged his first puppet play, "Bong Bong Bong against the Walls, Ting Ting Ting in our Heads," as the opening production of "La MaMa Puppet Series IV--Built to Perform." The piece was a playful work about genius and love in children living in mental institutions, featuring set and life-sized puppets by Italian stage designer Aurora Buzzetti and an American cast of five.

In 2000, D'Ambrosi staged his first Pathologic Theater Festival at La MaMa, offering four plays and three screenings. In 2011, he staged his second such festival, which included performances of three past plays and a work in progress of this "Medea" which featured Celeste Moratti as the title character and a chorus of ten actors with diverseabilities (including epilepsy, neurological disabilities and down syndrome) from his Teatro Patologico di Roma. The festival also included screenings of three full length films by D'Ambrosi.

In 2013, D'Ambrosi brought the American premiere if his "Hamlet Hallucinations" to La MaMa. Shakespeare's tragedy was adapted to a graveyard scene in which the tale was staged from the point of view of a mortician/gravedigger. It used Shakespeare's best-known dialogue and soliloquies, focusing on the essentially helpless child inside of Hamlet, who was ever caught up in his sexual problems.

Pictured: MEDEA by Euripides, adapted and directed by Dario D'Ambrosi, presented by La MaMa E.T.C. December 15-18, 2011 as part of TEATRO PATOLOGICO IN NEW YORK, a festival of Pathological Theater and Film. Celeste Moratti as Medea, Dune Allen as Jason. Photo by Lee Wexler/Images for Innovation.

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