Review: "White Noise" Finds Empathy for a Serial Killer in the Static
White Noise: Confessions of an Unsuspected Serial Killer with a Background Hiss (Rumore Bianco – Confessioni di un insospettabile serial killer con fruscio di sottofondo)
Written by and with Danilo Napoli
Directed by Yari Gugliucci
Presented by Vitruvio Entertainment
May 14, 2026, at WOW Café, 59-61 E 4th St., 4th Fl., Manhattan, NYC
May 15, 2026, at BAAD - Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance, 2474 Westchester Ave., Bronx, NYC
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| Danilo Napoli in White Noise. Photo courtesy of Vitruvio Entertainment. |
If the pressing relevance of the critique by solo show White Noise: Confessions of an Unsuspected Serial Killer with a Background Hiss (Rumore Bianco – Confessioni di un insospettabile serial killer con fruscio di sottofondo) of transphobia and homophobia weren't already obvious, we read about the murder of transwoman Juniper Blessing, a University of Washington student, on our way to the performance. The brutal killing of Blessing belongs to a long and ongoing history of violence towards trans people, and queer people more broadly, and in White Noise, violence, physical and otherwise, aimed at enforcing heteronormativity not only damages its victims but, as a consequence, begets further violence and creates further victims. This multi-award-winning play, written and performed by Danilo Napoli, immerses the audience in the mind of a character who, it ultimately emerges, has become both victim and victimizer, a dual status that complicates but in no way forestalls spectators' empathy. The NYC performances of White Noise, presented in Italian with supertitles by Lara Verna of Martina Mangrella's English translation, are 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.
White Noise begins with the subtitular static hiss emanating from the darkness. This sound will later be linked to a significant experience from the protagonist's past, but at the show's opening segues into a news update, a snippet heard in voiceover. Here, the hiss evokes, as it does later in a second fragment from a news broadcast, an old, analog television or radio, and we hear a reporter talking about the continuing hunt for a serial killer of transwomen. The protagonist, dressed like your average businessman, is first seen in a series of brief, bright flashes of light. (The lighting, designed by Eduardo Coscia, is fundamental throughout to creating the shifting atmospheres of the protagonist's mindscape, sometimes creating pools of light among darkness; sometimes brightly illuminating the space, including the audience; and shifting to cool blues or bloody reds at significant points.) When the spoken dialogue begins, the protagonist says "yes, I’m Mrs. De Feo’s son" while on a phone call to order pizza. This comment holds much more significance in hindsight than is immediately apparent, and the mundanity of ordering a couple of pies is undercut by the fact that the said Mrs. De Feo, seated in a chair, is represented by a life-size doll with a very realistic elderly woman's face, which adds uncertainty (as does a late voiceover line) around whether she is real, alive, and so on–not to mention an unavoidable Norma and Norman Bates vibe.
Pizza ordered, the protagonist speaks of a woman named Rossella in the past tense, of having had an entire life mapped out from childhood by heteronormative and religious expectations, of killing "all those women," and of his family's condemnation of his early adolescent attraction to other boys. The audience shortly learns that the group of women killed includes Rossella, whom the protagonist loved and considered "my most precious thing." The protagonist tells his mother that he must tell Rossella's story for her to understand his own, and that story, in which he slides between speaking as Rossella and referring to her in the third person, occupies most of the rest of the play's narrative. We hear of Rossella, who was assigned male at birth and named Cristiano, running away from a hostile home at a young age; living as a sex worker in a "trans ghetto" in Genoa, where she is able to embrace her own identity but also, judging from one anecdote, encounters some frightening clients; and being forced into abusive, religious conversion therapy by her family when she returns to her hometown for a family funeral. Over the course of these various experiences, Rossella, to borrow scholar Jack Halberstam's description in Trans (University of California Press, 2018) of one real-life transwoman, "flickers in and out of historical recognition" (75). By the end of the play, the audience not only gains clarity about the protagonist's relationship to Cristiano and Rossella, but also witnesses how he will decide their respective fates.
White Noise may be set in Italy, but the parallels with queer oppression in the U.S. are self-evident. It was, for example, just over six weeks ago that the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a Colorado law banning so-called conversion therapy. The efforts of Rossella's family to prevent her existence in the first place and then to change her back into Cristiano remind us that, as Halberstam writes, "violence" can occur "through inclusion rather than exclusion" (74). Rossella's conversion therapy of course represents inclusion facilitated by physical violence, but her family's earlier emphasis on things like soccer and heterosexual dating fall under Halberstam's umbrella of violence as well. The violence of the serial killer in White Noise is certainly physical, but it is also a form of (envious) self-hatred, violence done to the self revisited onto others like a delayed reflection. This displaced violence functions, then, as an unsettling image of self-hatred and self-harm. Suicide attempts occur at "unusually high rates for transgender women in particular" (Halberstam 140n26), but like the displacement in the serial killer's violence, White Noise also adds a sort of inversion to its reflection of reality, with Cristiano's attempt to kill himself as potentially liberatory. Cristiano's and Rossella's very selves enact the idea that division is deadly, but the death of one also means life for the other.
Napoli, who sheds his suit piecemeal over the course of the play and replaces it with female-coded clothing, delivers an impassioned performance, blending moments of fondness, vulnerability, and humor with intense outbursts of anger, pain, and guilt. Even the sound of his heels striking the floor as he walks becomes an expressive tool, and the play's use of music, from soft piano to more ominous or off-kilter sounds, powerfully complements Napoli's charged performance, while a Pixies needle drop brings to mind the same song's use in the film Fight Club, which adapts a novel by queer author Chuck Palahniuk and is itself concerned with the damage wrought by normative masculinities. In one way, White Noise's serial killer just represents a more extreme example of the "emotional economies of survival" that Halberstam discusses (75). Cristiano may be right when he says that everything will eventually be no more than static in the "cosmic void," but that doesn't mean we should abandon making what comes before that better for everyone.
More reviews from In Scena! 2026:
Closed for the Holiday
Patria, The Town of Cain and Abel
Tale of a Potato
Traviata - A Free Prose Opera
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