Review: "Tale of a Potato" Presents a Great Reckoning through a Little Tuber
Tale of a Potato
Written and directed by Angelo Trofa
Presented by Batisfera Teatro
May 5, 2026, at Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò at NYU, 24 W 12 St., Manhattan, NYC
May 9-10, 2026, at Culture Lab LIC, 5-25 46th Avenue, Long Island City, Queens, NYC
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| Protagonist (center) and some coworkers in Tale of a Potato. Photo courtesy of Batisfera Teatro. |
Tale of a Potato condenses a (representative) life into a humorous and poignant half an hour, and it begins with performer Valentina Fadda, dressed in head-to-toe black and a safety harness, selecting the show's potato from several scattered on the table onstage and discarding the rest in a small sack–the first suggestion that any tale, any life story, represents one choice of focus among many possibilities. We hear both that this potato was born under the "vast sky" and through "blood and pain" "like everybody else" (in an aromatic May, a cold January, or a fertile August–those specific variations on the universal) in a mix of voiceover by Chiara De Giorgi and spoken dialogue by Fadda, who converts the chosen potato into the play's protagonist with a simple pair of eyes and a slice of the knife that allows it to stand upright. In another intersection of the specific and the universal, most of the dialogue, which continues its contrapuntal blend of voiceover and live speech throughout, refers to the central potato as Protagonist, but it also receives an individual name based on audience responses (resulting in it being christened, at the performance we attended, Rick Kate). From there, the show follows Protagonist through events–through a sequence of todays, which the play points out are generally only assigned importance or meaningfulness in retrospect–including being parented with "violence and grace, scorn and praise"; meeting an Other Character with whom he (since this Protagonist was Rick) falls in love; going on a kidnapping-related quest; facing pressure at the office (vis-à-vis promotion and his work rival, the eggplant Antagonist, who of course is only the antagonist of Protagonist's tale and not of his own); coming up against the tomato Unnamed, a rival in love; having offspring; and, of course, aging.
As Protagonist racks up todays, one motif that emerges is the repetition of the phrase "At this point in the tale, they'd probably say," which again highlights the tension between specific and universal in his tale. Also recurrent is the question for Protagonist of whether "this is what you wanted" (there's a corn on the cob, for instance, who repeatedly pops up to push Protagonist to "go to work every day" and "put something aside," which is probably not the tale that any of us really imagine for ourselves). Further, the play prompts us to consider, what, for any given one of us, counts as part of our tale? If this seems like a lot to put on a potato with a couple of eyes stuck on, Fadda in particular and the production as a whole ensure that we are thoroughly invested in this table of vegetables long before its movingly constructed final tableau, which forms as a litany of months and memories repeat. In addition to providing one of the main narrative voices, Fadda distinguishes the vegetal characters by different voices and puppeteers them such that she draws the audience irresistibly into their world. Excellent lighting design helps in this as well, with small lights, held in the hand or clipped to the table, spotlighting or illuminating characters from below, suggesting rotations of the sun, creating a radiant tree, and more. As Tale of a Potato draws to its close, Small Potato moves to the fore of the tabletop and the play assures us that there are new tales to come, leaving us not only to contemplate the succession of generations but also to look forward to the next tale from Batisfera.
-John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards
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