There are losses that are difficult, perhaps impossible, to metabolize if they happen without a reason, and continue to dig into those who remain a void that becomes a chasm. And it digs into the words, memories, feelings of those who have lost a loved one and, after many years, still questions the reasons while dealing with the consequences, «L’arto fantasma», a show conceived, written and directed by Michelangelo Maria Zanghì, originally from Patti, who brought it to the stage together with Alessio Bonaffini and Nunzia Lo Presti, in a production of the Compagnia di San Lorenzo, to close the XIII edition of the Cortile Teatro Festival.
The show was born from a strong need and, after its acclaimed debut at the Tindari Festival, it sealed a review, born from an idea by Roberto Zorn Bonaventura (who is the artistic director), Giuseppe Giamboi and Stefano Barbagallo, organized by Il Castello di Sancio Panza, together with the Municipality of Messina and with the support of Latitudini, a Sicilian dramaturgy network, which this year too had the merit and ability to unite, through the dramatic word, different generations of spectators, examining themes and questions and opening unexpected spaces for the theater.
Like the northernmost promontory of Sicily, among the vineyards and olive groves of the Rasocolmo estate, which on Tuesday provided an evocative stage for Zanghi’s story.
Suitcases and bags piled up to form a pyramid and to contain the lives of those who go and those who stay, and then a broken story, which digs into the memories and mud that on October 1, 2009 took away 37 lives and condemned many others to pain, perennial, without peace. The flood that year hit Giampilieri, Scaletta Zanclea, Molino, Altolia and other villages in the southern area of the city of the Strait is one of those forgotten Italian tragedies, a tragedy with only victims and no guilty parties.
To remember her and bring her out of oblivion, to try to tell her through the dramatic word and make a personal pain a universal narration, Zanghì has decided to give voice to the feelings of those who remain, those of a son and a father. On stage we find Elio (Bonaffini) and his passion for football, Fortunato (Zanghì) who loves to paint but lets himself sink after the death of his daughter, Agata (Lo Presti), a book salesman and Elio’s loving mother. The three lead the viewer on a journey that is sometimes slow and fragmented, torn to shreds like the three existences marked incurably by the infinitely personal tragedy that also suffers from the abandonment and distance of institutions and public opinion. Those who remain must deal with the sense of loss and emptiness, like those who still perceive a part of the body that is no longer there, the “phantom limb” of the title, felt by Elio, who harbors a dull anger that explodes only in some moments in which the tragedy and its absurd consequences are recalled. Anger and abandonment, a sense of emptiness and resignation but also a glimmer of hope that is revealed in the life that continues and that delivers a final message to the spectator, in the awareness that to the memory, thanks to the theater, one can also combine a look towards the future.