Review: "AMARA SAPIENZA" Trains its Light on an Unruly Woman Artist

AMARA SAPIENZA. To my mother.

Written and directed by Giulia Bocciero

Presented at Theaterlab (357 W 36th St., 3rd floor, Manhattan, NYC), May 15, 2025, and BAAD (2474 Westchester Ave, Bronx, NYC), May 16, 2025

AMARA SAPIENZA. Photo courtesy of Emily Owens PR.

Goliarda Sapienza (1924-1996) was born the same year that fascist Benito Mussolini's National List won power in Italy in the country’s last multi-party election for two decades, a fact alluded to in an early section of playwright and director Giulia Bocciero's AMARA SAPIENZA. To my mother. Sapienza was raised in a feminist, anarchist household and became, first, a stage and film actor in the postwar period and then, beginning in the 1950s, a poet, memoirist, novelist, and eventually acting teacher. She suffered periods of depression, twice attempting suicide in the early 1960s, for which treatment included electroshock therapy, and her later years were marked by poverty and a five-day imprisonment for theft. Sapienza has more recently, like other marginalized writers and artists, been subject to increased attention and reappraisal, and Bocciero's entrancingly evocative play takes Sapienza's life and work as its subject while eschewing conventional biographical realism for a more impressionistic bricolage of voices and writing, choreographed movement, and light and shadow. Presented in a combination of Italian and English, with supertitles for the former, AMARA SAPIENZA is currently part of the 2025 In Scena! Italian Theater Festival, which runs from May 5th through 18th, with performances in all five boroughs, almost all of which are free with an RSVP.

Among the phrases in a recorded voiceover played during the play's opening, "Remember me" is repeated, an injunction from Sapienza, via this play, to the audience and the world. Sapienza was born in the city of Catania, in Sicily, the emblem of which is an elephant statue, known as u Liotru, and, after performer Alice Camoriano emerges, silently bearing a lighted ball, from a trunk (with its multiple interpretive possibilities, from storehouse to grave) at one end of the performance space, we are told the first part of a fairy-tale-esque story of a young girl whose desired encounter with a local elephant (again, offering multiple interpretive identifications) does not go in the way that she envisioned. The performance area is defined by a wide sheet of white paper that stretches from the trunk at one end and curves up into a vertical wall at the other. Camoriano spends most of the remainder of the performance writing out Sapienza's poem "To My Mother" ("A mia madre") on this paper, beginning at its vertical end and making her way back towards the trunk, at one juncture trading swooping, spiraling forms for the horizontal lines with which she begins, and often emphasizing through the almost dance-like enactment of her transcription the physicality of the act or writing, even of words themselves.

At the conclusion of the first part of the elephant story, Bocciero too, even more unexpectedly than Camoriano, her costume adorned with yet more words, arises from the trunk bearing a different, book-like light, which she also uses to represent a seagull during the continuation of the young girl's story. Bocciero will herself represent both Sapienza and others connected with her, as the play moves through moments including Sapienza's desire to become an actor, a lament for what Rome has become (this beautifully sung by Bocciero), and rejections from publishers of Sapienza's now highly regarded novel L'arte della gioia (The Art of Joy), which included a bisexual woman protagonist and was not published until two years after her death. The representation of an explosion, involving one of the production's numerous impactful uses of lighting changes, briefly halts even the transcription before we hear about the destruction of the Catanian neighborhood of San Berillo by the Christian Democrats for an urban renewal plan that displaced 30,000 people before being abandoned after a decade. At one point, the play poetically catalogues the smells–good and bad–of Catania, and Michel Foucault would certainly agree with Sapienza's remark in a section about her imprisonment that one can know a nation best through its hospitals, prisons, and asylums. At another point, the actors break into a joyous, gender-bending dance to Edith Piaf, and the end of Camoriano's transcription coincides with contemplations of death, and of both potential remembrance and displacement after death. Even as AMARA SAPIENZA considers these issues, with its expressive, physically eloquent performances, atmospheric production design, and echoes Sapienza's unconventionality in its own, the production itself contributes undeniably and meaningfully to the remembrance of a significant, underrecognized woman artist.

-John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards

Review: "Like an Octopus in a Guitar" Wraps Its Arms Around Vanishing Memories

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