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“We’ve become numb to this,” Barak Obama told the nation last week, speaking of the latest mass shooting in Roseburg, Oregon. A similar anguish, I think, drove Italian playwright/director Marco Martinelli and his Teatro delle Albe in Ravenna to create Rumore di Acque (Noise in the Waters) about Europe’s inability to act to prevent the mass drownings of refugees seeking entrance to Italy by boat from Africa, already a 10-year long tragedy in 2010 when the play opened. Martinelli seeks to bring that blinding catastrophe to full view in his audiences’ imaginations. Like Obama, he hopes the heartbreak will lead to political action.
He knows it can also break brains; the despair that’s driven so many thousands to take such desperate risks is unbearable to entertain. Numbness becomes a survival tactic. The single character in Noise in the Waters is called the General. He works, apparently in isolation, on a small volcanic island at the southernmost point of Italy. Once a tourist destination, it has become a mass graveyard for the drowned. The General is in charge of the bodies, assigning numbers and inventing identities; he names the skeleton of a very young girl Obedience. Most are named “unknown.” He babbles behind dark sunglasses in verbal fragments rife with repetitions of the sort that a mind hurt beyond its limits gets caught in.
The actor Alessandro Renda of Teatro delle Albe has been playing the General for five years in performances across Europe. The time spent shows in his perfect mastery of the role. He performs in a meticulously heightened physical and vocal style that we don’t see often in Milwaukee; larger than life but never cartoonish; musical, athletic, fast-paced and polished, like a great song-and-dance man might render a ravaged character in an absurdist tragicomedy. It was an honor to have him in town. Thanks to Theatre Gigante for bringing him and his very unusual, very European, harrowingly current theatre piece.
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Translator Thomas Simpson delivered his English version of the Italian text onstage between the breaths of Renda’s performance. On opening night, much of it was lost on me; in part because it was hard to hear, in part because the split focus was just too much to navigate. Composer Guy Klucevsek performed a sensitive, live accordion accompaniment, a wondrous score that ranged from an aching one-note plaint to a somber chorale that felt vast and tragic.
