The new comedy by Edoardo Erba is staged at the Manzoni, an unprecedented interaction between theater and cinema, a brilliant comedy that Maria Amelia Monti has always been able to give us
From 28 October to 9 November, “Strappo alla Regola”, a brilliant comedy, will be staged at the Teatro Manzoni in Milan. written and directed by Edoardo Erba, wonderfully brought to the stage by the always bubbly Maria Amelia Monti (as well as his wife) and the equally talented Cristina Chinaglia.
If, when the curtain is opened, you have the sensation of being in the wrong place, of being in a cinema watching a horror film from the seventies, rather than at the theatre, no fear, it’s all written in the script. Because it is precisely on the cinema screen that Orietta (Maria Amelia Monti) will find a way to escape her destiny. In the film, in fact, Orietta, the film’s secondary character, is about to be reached by a mysterious murderer and during her escape, she discovers a providential tear in the screen, falling onto the theater stage! Catapulted into this new world, she meets Moira, an usher who works in that very cinema and who, half incredulous and worried, tries in every way to get her back into the film.
Orietta is a woman of the Seventies, a feminist, so much so that she carried on the battles of 1968, but also feminine, she never abandons her handbag, comb, nail file and perfume. And just talking to Moira, she wonders what happened to all the energy spent on feminist battles! Because Moira is a disillusioned woman, with a tough character, a woman who chose that job to free herself from a difficult daily life and from a dysfunctional relationship, what we today define as toxic. The meeting with Orietta will revolutionize Moira’s life, because that young lady with an airless and naive appearance will teach her the possibility of changing, of finding her own “break” in life and getting out of an uncomfortable, if not downright dangerous, situation. A comedy that, thanks to a Calvinian lightness, crosses delicate themes.
The stage will be inhabited only by these two women, who however interact with the protagonists of the film, such as Asia Argento, Marina Massironi, Sebastiano Somma. Because the film stops on the frame in which Orietta leaves, and here characters (policemen, murderers, psychics) meet, disoriented and confused, because the plot has been completely distorted.
The most attentive cinephiles will find a similarity between this show and “The Purple Rose of Cairo”, a 1985 film written and directed by Woody Allen. In fact, Edoardo Erba admits that he was partially inspired by the sophisticated New York comedian, and just as the American director had built the character of Cecilia, influenced by the characteristics of his wife Mia Farrow, the Italian screenwriter excellently tailored the character of Orietta to the personality of his wife Maria Amelia. But there is a big difference: while in “The Purple Rose of Cairo” the character leaves the cinema to enter another film, here, outside the film there is the theatre, with real people, and the difference is not only on a scenographic level.
As Maria Amelia Monti herself says: “in this world now dominated by social media, screens, artificial intelligence, the theater still remains the only island from which you cannot escape, one of the few, perhaps only, places where you are sure of not having a fake in front of you, but real people.”
