Review: "My Mama Notarizes & Also Makes Risotto" Tells–and Sings–a Story About Stories

My Mama Notarizes & Also Makes Risotto (Mia mamma fa il notaio ma anche il risotto)

Written and performed by Filippo Capobianco

Presented by Teatro Pubblico Ligure in collaboration with Dominio Pubblico at Culture Lab LIC (5-25 46th Ave, Queens, NYC), May 11, 2025, and Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimo’ at NYU (24 W 12th St., Manhattan, NYC), May 12, 2025

Filippo Capobianco. Photo © Roberto Mieli
The unexpected juxtaposition in the title of Filippo Capobianco's award-winning solo show My Mama Notarizes & Also Makes Risotto (Mia mamma fa il notaio ma anche il risotto) may suggest the complexity of an individual, but it also points to 2023 Poetry Slam world champion Capobianco's artful facility with language, obvious throughout the performance. Words–and the stories that they enable–are in fact a primary focus of Capobianco's show, which incorporates influences from Teatro Canzone–literally, "song theater," which mixes songs and monologues–and performance poetry. The play tells the funny and ultimately quite moving story of a young man whose connection to his work-burdened mother runs through the library and its contents, which are most often described with a sense of awe and some of which he recounts as stories within the larger narrative of the play. Presented in a combination of Italian and English, with supertitles for the former, My Mama Notarizes & Also Makes Risotto 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.

The first story that we hear concerns a boy called Little Bug who becomes an actor despite–and later embracing–speech difficulties. The protagonist of the play loves and repeats this story so much that Little Bug becomes his own nickname. He comes from a family of Important Persons–lawyers, judges, professors–and this includes his mother, who is more likely to tell him to go outside than listen to him play his guitar and whose relationship to her son is nicely summed up in the image of her behind a stack of papers so tall that he can't see her. The library, in contrast, never pushes Little Bug to get some fresh air, and he anthropomorphizes this pillar of his inner life to an extent as the female-gendered "Biblì," always there with a book meant just for him. He prefers the stories that books provide over, for instance, small talk, which robs words of their meaning, and as he reaches 18 years old, decides that he wants to escape his town–a place that he wants to hate but can't, full of both towers and dog-sized nutria–which leads to the reading of a uproarious parody of an application letter.

As Little Bug moves into contemplating fading romantic love and the oppressively pedestrian documents of adulthood, far divorced from the rich treasures offered by Biblì, well-deployed structural callbacks prepare the way for a poignant conclusion. Capobianco is a charming and charismatic presence, and peppers moments of audience interaction into the show along with a couple of immediately catchy songs with an acoustic alt-rock feel–think classic John Darnielle or Ani DiFranco but using The Iliad to comment on regrettable decisions and homesickness or tutoring schoolkids in physics to describe mathematics as its own language with its own beauty. Language in My Mama Notarizes & Also Makes Risotto is, in the end, a gift: a way to meet the need to express the sounds bouncing around inside us as words, as story, as poetry, as song.

-John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards

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