Review: One Migrant Undergoes a Sea Change in "Lampedusa Beach"

Lampedusa Beach

Written by Lina Prosa

Directed by Nadia Kibout

Presented at Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimo’ at NYU (24 W 12th St., Manhattan, NYC), May 7, 2025, and the Calandra Institute (25 W 43rd St Suite 1700, Manhattan, NYC), May 7, 2025

Nadia Kibout in Lampedusa Beach. Courtesy of Emily Owens PR
Nadia Kibout and Daniele Onorati begin Lina Prosa's play Lampedusa Beach standing back to back, a pose that suggests solidarity but also, after experiencing the performance as a whole, might also subtly evoke the inhumane crowding imposed on migrants seeking to reach the eponymous shores. Kibout plays one such migrant, a young African woman named Shauba, who sets out for Lampedusa, an Italian island which one article describes as "the gateway to Europe for the thousands of migrants who cross the Mediterranean every year," and Onorati provides atmospheric onstage musical accompaniment for her tragic and timely tale. Presented in Italian with English supertitles, the poetic and heart-breaking Lampedusa Beach 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.

Shauba, and her aunt, Mahama, to whom she primarily addresses herself–although government functionaries and Italian and African leaders, for instance, also receive direct appeals–hail from an unspecified African nation, allowing Shauba's story to take on wider symbolic resonance. As the play progresses, it becomes clear not only that Shauba has purchased a place, along with 700 others, on a boat that promises to smuggle migrants to Europe but also that she is speaking to her aunt and to the audience from the aftermath of the shipwreck of that boat. The narrative of how she came to this point is interwoven with her experience of sinking to the bottom of the sea within sight of Lampedusa, past corpses and fishes and debris, releasing her story into the world as drowning takes her out of it. The play highlights the exploitation, sexual violence, and unbearable conditions risked on such journeys by migrants such as Shauba, who is seeking political asylum in what she frames as a land of capitalists, a land of wealth (lovers, according to a poetic counterpoint from her aunt, don't need capitalism to survive). Shauba's descriptions of her descent also emphasize at various moments her own bodiliness (and by extension that of the other migrants), including by one of its various emissions the point that her body will never exercise its creative potential for reproduction.

There are bright points amidst the tragedy, however, such as when Shauba experiences an intense feeling of interspecies connection on the seafloor that she calls a high point in her life, as well as in her refusal to allow the place that she, and innumerable others like her, occupy in Italian history to be ignored or erased. Kibout's performance is at once fiery and lyrical, and Onorati, using a small selection of instruments, including an accordion and ceramic oodoo drum, provides not only musical accompaniment but also the sound of wind or waves, bringing the feeling of a windswept shore into the performance space. Lampedusa Beach contains the lovely image of Africa and Italy being connected by the land beneath the swallowing sea, and in our current times, we would do well to remember that, if we zoom out, the same is ultimately true of every nation on the globe.

-John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards

More from In Scena! 2025
News: In Scena! Italian Theater Festival NY Announces Venues and Performance Schedule for 2025 Festival
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