Some Italian Theater

It's cold here, but everyone seems to be in a little better mood than usual because the holidays are (finally!) over and we've had over a week of uninterrupted sunshine.

In America, our "holiday season," which is really a politely ecuminical way of referring to the breaks from work and school that we get because of Christmas, usually lasts around a week and creates barely a ripple in our regular lives. Here, where theater is a way of life, getting ready for, experiencing, and coming down from the holidays is a production that would make Verdi and Puccini proud. In addition, the holiday season gets stretched out for an extra week by "La Befana" Day on January 6, when an old ugly witch appears to give candy to good children and lumps of coal to bad ones. What this means in practical terms is that no one goes to work (which is actually the normal state of affairs in Italy) and that Piazza Navona turns into a street carnival with games, a carousel, cotton candy, candied apples, and helium balloon versions of SpongeBob Squarepants and the Power Puff Girls.

If Italian life is theatrical, Italian theater is even more theatrical. Last week I went to see the Edward Albee classic "Chi ha paura di Virginia Woolf?" starring Mariangela Melato, probably best known to American audiences for starring in the Lina Wertmuller film Swept Away. This is the second play I've seen in Rome, and both productions featured handheld video cameras, which the actors use to videotape each other while they're performing, so that their every facial expression is magnified on TV screens for the audience. This does not happen all the time, of course. Only during very emotional or dramatic moments, just in case the audience isn't aware that it's an emotional or dramatic moment. If that isn't enough, there's also dramatic music swelling in the background and chartreuse or magenta colored spotlights to key us in. This emotional underlining may seem unnecessary to American theatergoers, but you have to keep in mind that the Italian style of acting is to scream every line at a fever pitch, which therefore makes the detection of dramatic peaks and valleys that much more difficult.

The finest form of Italian theater, however, is not as you might expect opera, but rather politics, which are heating up in Italy because there's going to be an election in April. It's media magnate and rightist Silvio Berlusconi (who happens to control or influence just about every major TV and radio station in the country, not to mention several newspapers) against the candidate of the united left, Romano Prodi. Imagine John Kerry without the charisma, and that's Prodi.

To remind Prodi what his priorities ought to be, the Communist party sponsored a rally last weekend to advocate for civil unions. Almost as fascinating as the rally itself were the lovely posters fixed up on walls all over town of two gorgeous impeccably dressed Italian men holding hands while sitting on a white sofa. It could have been an Ikea ad, except that a large Communist flag with hammer and sickle was suspended between them. (For some reason there was no version of the ad with two women.) Actually, it seemed a little strange to me that the Communists should be in favor of gay rights given the dismal treatment of gays in Communist countries like the Soviet Union or today's China.

At the rally itself, a motley gang of groups (including athiests selling T-shirts that said "No God" and stickers that said "Danger! Catechism!") gathered to declare what ought to be an obvious statement: "Italy is a secular state." If you're not Italian, however, it may be difficult to imagine the emotional resonance of this sentence. Sadly, given the Pope's enormous influence on politics and culture here, Italy is not a secular state in reality, which may explain why it is the only country among the EU's original sixteen members that doesn't have some kind of domestic partnership arrangement on the books.

However, in this respect at least, as an American I have no cause to look down my nose at Italy. Certainly our own country does not answer to the Pope, but rather to a caricature of Jesus Christ whipped up by evangelicals who believe, for example, that God gives strokes to Prime Ministers who evacuate the Gaza Strip, or sends hurricanes to punish cities where people have too much fun. "America is a secular state." I think I'm still safe in saying that. We'll see if I feel the same after a few more years of a Republican White House. One thing, I do know for sure, however, is that I would feel very nervous walking down an American street dressed in a "No God" T-shirt, even in that bastion of liberalism, the People's Republic of New York City.