What is a malanova? It’s bad news. Something you wish you hadn’t known. Who is Malanova? A little girl.
Her story is told to us by a young man, Salvatore, who remembers having loved her, having desired her and having found her again in a story of squalid and shocking violence. Salvatore crosses squares and narrow alleys on foot, listens to women talk about weddings, baptisms and funerals, takes part in the usual parties and rites, and questions himself about the things he has seen and heard, about respect, about honor. You will not hear him describe the act of violence itself “because the ferocity of violence and what it feels like to suffer it is not made for words.” Salvatore will tell you what happened before and after, he will take you into his world to show you how the suffering of another is constructed in words, in shared behaviors, in silences, of which we are not the material executors but are the hidden authors, the unaware instigators. Salvatore will make you participate in that more subtle, sneaky, underground abuse that passes through everyone’s gestures, that moves through a word that poorly nourishes an embodied mentality, almost impossible to separate. Almost impossible. Malanova is the attempt made by two playwrights, a man and a woman, who have decided to never hide their own fragility, perfectly in agreement in wanting to transform the rhetoric of denunciation into a male investigation, an Oedipal exploration of responsibility, coexistence and being involved, as human beings, in a basic plot that makes us all equally responsible for the lives of others.
Malanova, a raw and unspeakable story, but edifying like all accomplished stories and not purely celebratory or provocative, was made public in its news details in the novel of the same name written by journalist Cristina Zagaria and Anna Maria Scarfò, published by Sperling & Kupfer. We brought it to the stage of a theater not as a story belonging to Southern Italy but as a story of Italy, taken as a whole, not something distant from that country over there, but of our country in every part of it. A story that moves around each of us and that asks us for eyes to be seen.
