An unmarked grave in a cemetery that seems to be suspended between earth, sea and sky. And souls waiting to find a name and with it the dignity of being remembered, in death, to overcome all the pain and atrocities of life. The latest work written, directed and performed by Saverio La Ruina, a Calabrian artist from Castrovillari, who made his debut at the Teatro India in Rome with «Kr70M16 – Naufrago senza nome», produced by Scena Verticale, moves lightly and intensely. With him, on stage, Dario De Luca – with La Ruina, another soul of the company, a living and vital reality in the Italian theater panorama -, and the actress and singer from Messina Cecilia Foti, to give life to a show that speaks of memory and dignity, of identity sought and denied, of the relationship with death and with salvation in a time in which life is too often marked by violence and atrocities, but also of the pure and unconditional love between a mother and a son.
Through a light and at the same time tragic narrative, made up of suffused images, dilated times that dig into the memories of the past and intertwine the threads of life and death, embellished with music that is sometimes soft and sometimes rhythmic (by Gianfranco De Franco), La Ruina puts together a story that starts from a cemetery, a place where the texts of the Calabrian playwright – whose award-winning monologue «Disonored», which turns twenty, in these days is on stage at the Comédie-Française – they land, to unravel in the most intimate and profound folds of life.
Among the nameless graves we meet Karamu, played with grace and depth by Cecilia Foti, a Senegalese boy who lost his life at sea in an attempt to find a better future. Karamu is not resigned to being just an acronym, that KR70M16 which means the place of discovery, the beaches of Crotone, the number of the body, the sex and the age. He, in his clothes carefully chosen by his mother, to present himself well to his new life, does not want to be just a number, but a person, he is a nameless castaway who obstinately claims his own biography and asks to “be” because only in this way, perhaps, can his mother learn of his death. Stories of ordinary inhumanity, lives broken by the sea which becomes a black hole of dreams and hopes.
Existences that are welcomed by the guardian of the cemetery, the only one alive among the dead, in the nuanced interpretation of Dario De Luca (who also signs the lights), who moves well in the middle ground – we remember his intense “Psychopompo”, a show of which he is the author, director and performer, where the theme of death and the end of life become absolute protagonists – very human and direct, in trying to give peace to the souls of the living as well as the dead. The triangle ends with the cold and detached figure of Doctor Schwarz, played by La Ruina himself, a Jewish psychoanalyst imprisoned in the Calabrian camp of Ferramonti who then decided to live his life in Castrovillari and of whom La Ruina had already told us in his «Via del Popolo», a show focused precisely on the recovery of the memory of the places dearest to him.
Those threads woven with delicate wisdom by La Ruina are intertwined until they collide, sinking into the wounds of our time: the drama of migrants and peoples without peace, in Africa, as in Palestine. An emblematic figure is that of Doctor Schwarz, a resentful doctor who is only apparently devoid of sensitivity towards the pain of others, convinced that only his own – and that of the Jewish people who were victims of the atrocities of the Shoah – deserves to be considered and looked at with compassion. But there can be no primacy in pain, in suffering, in violated dignity and, without any kind of do-goodism or false rhetoric, the very human parable staged by La Ruina reminds us of precisely this and invites us to consider the other, whoever he may be, as a bearer of equal pain and equal dignity and to call him by his own name.
After the Roman debut, other stages await ‘«Kr70M16 – Naufrago senza nome»: Florence on 26 February, Milan from 10 to 15 March, Bologna from 18 April to finally arrive in May at the Primavera dei Teatri festival in Castrovillari.