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

Like an Octopus in a Guitar (Come un polpo nella chitarra)

Written by Marco Ziello

Directed by Licia Amarante and Marco Ziello

Presented by ON Teatro Formazione Cultura at NOoSPHERE Arts (520 Kingsland Ave., Brooklyn, NYC), May 17, 2025, and WOW Cafè Theater (59-61 East 4th Street, 4th Floor, Manhattan, NYC), May 18, 2025

Annachiara Castorino and Marco Ziello. Photo courtesy of Emily Owens PR

To whatever degree one believes continuous identity to be a construction, surely memories are vital underpinnings to any sense of a stable self, no matter how illusory. Failures of memory, then, might proportionally increase the urgency of the question voiced at one point by the protagonist of Marco Ziello's Like an Octopus in a Guitar (Come un polpo nella chitarra): Who am I? An inescapable melancholy underlies the absurdist humor and mesmerizing kineticism of this production, winner of Best Drama 2024 at Roma Comic OFF, as it presents to the audience a sick man whose memories are deserting him, including his own name–even as he continues to, for instance, keep count of the number of blueberries in his pies. Presented in Italian with English supertitles, Like an Octopus in a Guitar was part of the 2025 In Scena! Italian Theater Festival, which ran from May 5th through 18th, with performances in all five boroughs, almost all of which were free with an RSVP. The festival's Closing Night and In Scena! Playwright 2025 Award Ceremony is May 19th at the Italian Cultural Institute.

Having forgotten his name, the protagonist, played by playwright Ziello, is happy to be known merely as Elder Brother. He has similarly, he tells us early on, forgotten the name of his longtime partner (Sabrina La Regina)–whom he intended to marry but never has–but various endearments have long since served in place of her lost name. Elder Brother does not leave his home anymore; he is attended there by a private nurse (Francesco Del Gaudio) and often present as well are his brother (Gerardo D’Amato) and his brother's own partner (Paola Santamaria), whom Elder Brother at one point refers to as a "robot." Rounding out the people with whom Elder Brother spends his time is a robed young woman (Annachiara Castorino) who may or may not actually be Death. This sort of ontological uncertainty, reflective of the protagonist's mental state, extends not only to identities but even to whether Elder Brother is really sick, another thing that he says that he can't remember anymore. Fittingly, in a scene in which he watches Death dance, it is also ambiguous as to whether he is commenting on or directing her performance. If Elder Brother is at the center of the play, we also witness how his illness affects those around him, as in at least one segment in which repetitive movements suggest monotony of caring for someone like him and in his partner's increasingly prominent feelings of loneliness and invisibility.

The production makes brilliant use of white morph suits for the characters other than Death and Elder Brother, allowing the actors, when they are wearing their character costumes over the suits–which is not always the case, enabling further transformations–to pull up the suits' masks, making their heads and faces blank white surfaces that perfectly emblematize the fading of their identities from Elder Brother's memory. A similar effect is achieved in one segment by the actors donning and holding identical glow-in-the-dark masks, filling the space with floating faces and blurring the inside of Elder Brother's home with the inside of Elder Brother's head. Elder Brother's sickness also lends him a kind of innocence, which perhaps bleeds into the tone of the show's comedy; but at the same time, a certain sadness accompanies even the performance of a children's rhyme or a joke about the nurse stealing the protagonist's nose when we recall why he has regressed to a more childlike state. Ziello's often funny performance also includes moments of vulnerability that acknowledge such sadness, breaking into tears or a silent stare, and creates a more grounded contrast to the stylized performances of the other actors–whether D’Amato's strapped-on smile as the brother, Santamaria's hilariously rapid-fire description of her wedding plans, Del Gaudio's nurse feeding pills to Elder Brother like treats to a dog, or La Regina's pain and almost melodramatically frustrated desire as the partner–with Castorino's playfully mysterious Death falling somewhere in between. The physicality of the performances, which include not only dance and synchronized movements but also merge the cast into a multi-limbed whole (more like a centipede than the titular octopus) at one moment and erupt into chaos at another, is impressive throughout a production that continually surprises. The symbolism assigned to the guitar-bound octopus–a creature losing its essence by living in an environment not its own but clinging on desperately nonetheless–is directly acknowledged by the Elder Brother to apply to himself. But this image also nicely emblematizes this production's winning blend of the surreal, the silly, and the poignant–meditating on losing identity, Like an Octopus in a Guitar forges a personality uniquely its own.

-John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards

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