Review: "The Perky Theresas" Calls Up a Fond Remembrance of Aunts Past

The Perky Theresas (Le Vispe Terese)

Written and performed by Alessio Piazza

Presented at Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimo’ at NYU (24 W 12th St., Manhattan, NYC), May 12, 2025, and Casa Belvedere (79 Howard Ave, Staten Island, NYC), May 13, 2025

Alessio Pizza. Photo by Giuseppe Farina.
Before Alessio Piazza speaks his first line in his warm, funny solo show The Perky Theresas (Le Vispe Terese), a recorded voiceover talks about how memories mix in the mind and how those who are gone live in the stories that we tell and are told about them. During this opening, Piazza, center stage, faces away from the audience, turning towards it to begin sharing some of his own memories, a bit of staging that both hints at the process of revealing and anticipates a lovely, almost haunting final image that Piazza again turns away from the spectators to create. In the author's note to The Perky Theresas, Piazza cites Natalia Ginzburg's Family Lexicon (Lessico Famigliare; published in 1963 and available in a 2017 English translation by Jenny McPhee), variously described as a novelistic memoir or autobiographical novel, and director Ettore Scola's decade-spanning 1987 film The Family (La Famiglia) as inspirations for the play's affectionate, impressionistic peregrination through Piazza's memories of a trio of colorful grandaunts. Presented in Italian with English supertitles, The Perky Theresas 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.

Alessio Piazza. 
The aunts in question, Rosa, Dora, and Dina, were teachers who never married and spent all of their time together. Piazza remembers their house–from the balcony of which he recalls watching a religious parade as a child–as a magically overstuffed jumble (which serves as another image of memory itself). He paints Rosa, the eldest, as easily dominant, of changeable affections, and occupying the role of family historian, with a love of repeating anecdotes. Dina, the shy middle aunt, collects amulets and talismans and claims some ability in related areas of the occult, while Dora, the youngest, has settled into a life of apathy and hypochondria. Through Piazza's stories, we gain a vibrant picture of the aunt's individual and collective quirks and idiosyncrasies, and we're introduced to some other family members along the way, specifically cousin Tera, a master of gossip, and a further set of aged cousins who appear once a year at the aunts' for the aforementioned religious celebration. The fox coat of the former also hilariously becomes a sort of multi-headed impromptu puppet representing Tera and the aunts as they trade scuttlebutt, and Piazza's childhood view of the latter as cold and cadaverous is effectively manifested via an atypically placed mask. There is also an uncle whose once-mysterious departure becomes less mysterious for our adult narrator, and a series of housemaids with their own unique temperaments.

Piazza gives these family members individual voices, and even, in one, again hilarious, section about the aunts' walks through the cemetery, pulls up the outer layer of his costume's long skirt to act as a woman's head-covering. Piazza's delightful performance is well complemented by periodic musical cues that range from whimsical to jazzy to majestic, and in Piazza's hands, even a simple blanket can become loaded with significance. The Perky Theresas reminds us how close beneath the surface our memories always lurk, asking, for instance, whether we ever really leave our childhood homes. The play's title, we learn, refers to a poem in which a girl catches a butterfly and sets it free when it pleads for release–an apt symbol, perhaps, for both the important people in our lives and our memories of them.

-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
Review: "Alfredino" Taps into an Emotional Wellspring
Review: "In the Name of Mary" Sees Love Cut Short
Review: One Migrant Undergoes a Sea Change in "Lampedusa Beach"
Review: "The Popess" Looks Back to Spotlight Forward-Looking Women
Review: In "Pelle," the Beast *Is* Beauty

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Review: "How To Eat an Orange" Cuts into the Life of an Argentine Artist and Activist

Image
How To Eat an Orange Written by Catherine Filloux Based on the writing of Claudia Bernardi Directed by Elena Araoz Presented by La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club at The Downstairs at La MaMa 66 E 4th St., Manhattan, NYC May 30-June 16, 2024 Paula Pizzi. Photo by Steven Pisano How To Eat an Orange , making its world premiere at La MaMa, does in fact include a real orange as a prop, and its multifarious symbolizations–evoking at different points cultural specificity, family history, matriarchal inheritance, and even a skull–are representative of the play's boundary-blurring, non-linear presentation of memory. The memories in question belong to visual artist, educator, and activist Claudia Bernardi , who lived through several years of her native Argentina's military junta, which held power from 1976 to 1983, before departing her country and eventually settling in the United States. How To Eat an Orange , from Catherine Filloux, a French Algerian American award-winning playwright,...
Read more

Review: The Immersive "American Blues: 5 Short Plays by Tennessee Williams" Takes Audiences on a Marvelously Crafted Journey

Image
American Blues: 5 Short Plays by Tennessee Williams Written by Tennessee Williams Directed by Jim Niesen Presented by the Irondale Ensemble Project at The Space at Irondale 85 South Oxford St., Brooklyn, NYC October 27-November 26, 2023 Shadenia Savid in Moony's Kids Don't Cry . Photo by Natasha Rotondaro In 1948, Tennessee Williams published American Blues , a collection of five one-act plays, and a remarkable new production of this collection by Brooklyn's Irondale shows that these works have lost none of their power to both entertain and challenge audiences in the intervening three-quarters of a century. Comprising plays written in the decade between 1936 and 1946 - Moony's Kids Don't Cry (1936); The Dark Room (1939); The Case of the Crushed Petunias (1941); The Long Stay Cut Short, or, the Unsatisfactory Supper (1946); and Ten Blocks on the Camino Real (1946) - American Blues represents the second part of Irondale's American Century, the first install...
Read more

Review: From Child Pose to Stand(ing) Up: "Yoga with Jillian" and "Penguin in Your Ear" at the Women in Theatre Festival

Image
Yoga with Jillian Written by Lia Romeo Directed by Andrew W. Smith Presented by Project Y Theatre and Richard Jordan Productions in association with The Pleasance June 2-17, 2023 Penguin in Your Ear Written and performed by Eliza Bent Directed by Jess Barbagallo June 10, 2023 Part of the Women in Theatre Festival , presented by Project Y Theatre at A.R.T./New York Theatres Michole Biancosino. Photo courtesy of Project Y Theatre This June, Project Y Theatre Company presents the eighth annual installment of its Women in Theatre Festival (WIT), which showcases new work by women and maintains "more than 50% female representation of all artists involved." This year, the festival includes a lobby installation project, titled In the Betweens , from scenic designer Chen-Wei Liao, through which audience members pass on their way into the theater proper. One first chooses first between "light" and "dark" rooms and then moves into "the gardens" before re...
Read more