It is a theatrical story that aims to resurrect our ability to be human and revive empathy towards a tragedy that concerns us all, against the anesthetization of feelings and our inner gaze in the face of death. In this sense it is an invocation. Heartfelt, and which underlies a strong civil commitment, and the rejection of a “status quo” which celebrates the winners of history but tends to forget the defeated. The show – produced by Scena Verticale, the worthy Castrovillari company which also organizes «Primavera dei theatres», the festival on the new languages of the contemporary scene – is «KR70M16 Naufrago senza nome», by and with the Calabrian playwright and actor Saverio La Ruina, making its debut today with performances until February 1st in a national premiere at the Teatro India in Rome. In the title, the acronym that indicates the province of Crotone and the number that indicates one of the 94 migrant lives interrupted on the night between 25 and 26 February three years ago, when 180 of them, on board a gulet leaving from Turkey, were shipwrecked in our waters. The night of his death on the beach of Steccato di Cutro, not far from Crotone.
La Ruina, in seventy-five intense minutes, attempts a daring operation, comparing the illegal migrant to a victim of the Shoah. He himself plays a Jewish doctor. We reached him during rehearsals at the municipal theater of Castrovillari, together with the other performers of the piece Dario De Luca (in the role of a cemetery worker, who also signs the lighting design and illustrations) and Cecilia Foti from Messina (in the part of the African clandestine Karamu, whose costumes are his), to tell us about the genesis and plot of the show, set in a cemetery (how can we not think of Edgar Lee Masters’ “Spoon River Anthology”) in which meet, in a close dialogue, a migrant, a “camposantaro” and a Jewish doctor, who was actually a guest of the Nazi-fascist concentration camp of Ferramonti di Tarsia.
«“KR70M16 Castaway without a name”, where, in addition to the acronym of the province, the seventieth discovery, the sex and the age of the missing person is indicated, is for me – says La Ruina – above all a challenge, to be able to reflect on this tragedy of horrible deaths in the Mediterranean Sea: I would like to show this infinite drama of migrants with a poetic eye and to make people remember that those who suffer in Libyan prisons or find their tomb in the sea have the right to be mourned by a mother or a relative and not succumb to the insult of an anonymous acronym”.
And again: «The idea of writing this text came to me from a stay in Catania a few years ago: there I heard the tragic stories of those who escaped from Mali, Guinea and Libya and I opted for a scenic space in which instead of things there is the “design of things”, almost in the context of that lightness narrated by Italo Calvino, which however highlights a bitter irony and which is opposed to the reality of illegal immigrants, which is so harsh. The fallen migrant or the victim of the Holocaust are in truth human beings who fully claim their own biography: this is what I want to bring out: behind every shipwreck or extermination there is a name that will never be engraved on a tombstone and, without a body to cry on, there cannot even be the process of mourning, as the poignant plea of Priam, king of Troy, teaches us when he asks Achilles for the return of the body of his son Hector.”
The music is by Gianfranco De Franco, lights and audio by Daniele Nocera.
Saverio La Ruina has received many awards and recognitions, including five «Ubu» (the Oscar in the theatrical field), two of which for the famous theatrical work «Disonoreta. An honor killing in Calabria” (2006), whose twentieth anniversary will be celebrated from 4 to 22 February at the Comèdie -Francaise in Paris, where “Dèshonorèe” will be staged.