Monday, January 16, 2006

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.

Sunday, January 01, 2006

A New Year's Wish

Last night, I was talking with some friends at a New Year's party, and I suddenly said aloud, "This has been a really shitty decade." What a relief to admit it. Since the selection of 2000 (can we really call it an election?), very little seems to have gone right in the world.

My first thought, when I try to understand why things seem so terrible, is to blame the president. Even if you're a Bush supporter, can you possibly be satisfied with what he's produced? A war seemingly without end in Iraq? An exploding deficit that keeps ballooning more and more out of control each year? Newspapers filled with bombs exploding around the world (though none so far on our precious soil)? And despite Bush's grand promises to his conservative base on abortion and homosexuality, has he really managed to make any serious inroads on those issues?

Since this small-minded man has become president, we've become more divided as a nation (both from each other and our neighbors), our national culture has become coarser, our people have retreated out of fear into a blind imitation of faith that leaves us angry and bitter, and worst of all, we're constantly scared for our lives. We're afraid to fly, afraid to ride public buses or subways, afraid to travel to crowded cities like New York (tempting terrorist targets), afraid to write emails or do google searches that could be archived and some day come back to haunt us. We're even afraid to argue about politics with people who don't agree with us, afraid that the emotions underneath our political views will get the better of us and bring us to blows. Books, movies, and music are all tired and less accomplished retreads of things we've seen before. TV shows are becoming more violent, crude, and acrimonious. And the people who watch the shows and then imitate the behavior they see while speaking on their cell phones to teach other are becoming more violent, crude, and acrimonious. And no one cares. Why should they? They're behaving just like the man at the top, our violent, crude, and acrimonious president who will be remembered for two qualities: pettiness and vindictiveness. Oddly enough, he once claimed that his inspiration was Jesus Christ. Which specific characteristics do George Bush and Jesus Christ have in common?

Sadly, however, we can't heap the blame for all the troubles we're in on this one rather vile man. As powerful an office as he holds, and as powerful a nation as America is, we are not powerful enough to control the minds and destinies of the world's citizens, who are becoming increasingly selfish, shallow, and miserable. And for this state of affairs, each of us bears some responsibility. What have we done to make other people's lives easier, richer, happier? How often do we take a break from worrying about our petty concerns about our looks, our money, our inability to feel perfectly loved, entertained, and satisfied at all possible moments and instead think about the suffering of others? We don't need more iPods or cell phones or secret government agencies to spy on ourselves and others or consitutional amendments banning behavior we don't like. We don't need lavish vacations and parties with mountains of uneaten food that get thrown out at the end fo the evening and vulgar displays of jewelry and clothes and cosmetics. But what can I do, we ask ourselves. The world is big and its problems are bigger, and we are so small.

We can spread love, each one of us. And we can start now.

We need to love every person we know and every person we see and every person we think of, even George Bush, even terrorists hiding out in caves who may be planning our destruction. We need to turn off our cell phones and Tivos and iPods and all the unnecessary noise that's polluting our brains and we need to think seriously about who we are and why do we want to continue to live on this planet. And most of all, we need to stop being afraid, of terrorists, of ignorant presidents, or each other.

If we can just stop being afraid, that there won't be enough money for all of us, that some dark stranger is lurking around the corner who wants to kill us, that we're getting fat, old, ugly, boring, uninformed, that the world is going by so fast that if we don't race to keep up with our emails and voice mails and favorite websites it will pass us by--if we can just let go of the weight of all our fears, imagine how beautiful our world could become. It's so hard not to be afraid. And yet what has our fear given us? How has it protected us? Or has it only made us more vulnerable, causing us to spend more, worry more, argue more, and love so much less.

So that's my goal for this new year, and my wish for the world, that we all stop being afraid. Maybe not all the time, but maybe a few minutes each day, maybe an hour, an hour and a half, I will tell myself, I am not afraid. And I will wait for peace to come.