Review: "Closed for the Holiday" Opens the Imagination

Closed for the Holiday (Chiuso per Festa)

Written and performed by Matteo Porru

Stage advisor: Marleen Scholten

Presented by 369gradi at Casa Italian
a Zerilli-Marimò at NYU, 24 W 12 St., Manhattan, NYC, on May 6, 2026, and at Culture Lab LIC, 5-25 46th Avenue, Long Island City, Queens, on May 8, 2026

Matteo Porru. Photo by Azzurra Primavera.
Typically, storytelling involves channeling other voices, and that becomes not more true but certainly more literal when theater is the mode of storytelling. In Closed for the Holiday (Chiuso per Festa), a solo show from Matteo Porru–a novelist, playwright, and winner of the prestigious Campiello Giovani Award–a writer puts on and off various identities, creating for the audience simultaneously a series of short character-driven narratives and an image of the creative process. Closed for the Holiday, presented in Italian with English supertitles by Francesca Triolo and Arianna Intra, represents Porru's (extremely impressive) onstage debut and has come to New York as part of the 2026 In Scena! Italian Theater Festival, which runs this year from May 5 through 19 at various venues throughout the five boroughs.

Closed for the Holiday begins with Porru entering from behind the audience, dressed as a woman, Annaré, in an apron and headscarf calling for her sweetheart, Tullio. She interweaves her thoughts on the benefits of and decline in eating cherries with her account of her relationship with Tullio, its daily pattern of tension and release. We hear next from the writer, whom we can see as Porru's stand-in and who speaks as he divests himself of Annaré's lipstick and clothing about a cinematic inspiration, one that showed him that the absurd could be possible and that would send his brain on holiday, as it were. An anecdote about family and crossword puzzles segues into the writer as a stooped, flat-cap-wearing older man with a walking stick, and, similarly to the first segment but explicitly articulated, there is the sense that time has passed him and his significant other by without them noticing, and he speaks of the "courage" of staying close to someone. In further segments, the writer talks about how his mother invented a job for him at an imagined bureau of "Complication of Simple Affairs," after which Porru takes the table and chair which are the sole stage furniture as a desk and hilariously enacts both sides of a succession of calls to the organization, and, after citing Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium as a rather unexpected creative catalyst, becomes a shoemaker whose loving relationship with his very young daughter comes movingly face to face with his own mortality.

According to the play, our shoes know a lot about us. So do (good) writers. And Closed for the Holiday is certainly adept at walking in others' shoes. Porru, who often comes off the stage to deliver dialogue directly to audience members from up close, gives an amazing performance, transmuting from one character to another with protean skill and proving equally comfortable with rapid-fire comedy and heartstring-tugging pathos. Near the play's conclusion, the idea is raised that it is up to us to give shape and meaning to life, and Closed for the Holiday shows that, for a writer anyway, such shapes need be limited only by the imagination.

-John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards

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