Ovation Fellows are current students or recent alumni from Los Angeles area universities. Fellows are paired with a Mentor, currently serving as an Ovation Award voter, and see productions and meet artists around Greater Los Angeles throughout the year. Their articles, posted on LAStageBlog, are intended to be their personal responses to their experiences, and not as critical reviews or representing the views of LA Stage Alliance.
Daniel Everson is an Ovation Fellow from the California Institute for the Arts.
UCLA LIVE- The Freud Playhouse plays host to the US premiere of Purgatorio by The Societas Raffaello Sanzio Theater Company, directed by Romeo Castellucci.
Large-scale plant puppets slide across a circular glass window, a mechanical glass structure attempts to mix aqueous liquids, the Freud Stage completely disappears into the rafters, a giant robot attempts to communicate through grunts and beeps, and this is only a glimpse into the world of Castellucci’s Purgatorio.
Purgatorio is part of a three part theatrical work about Romeo Castellucci vision of Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy. It is my belief that while there is no direct attempt to recite any part of Alighieri’s work, Castellucci instead creates a modern conscious that oversimplifies projected text against a visual world of what purgatory might look like through the eyes of a child. Castellucci forces us to be patient while his diabolical dimension continues to grow with an actor-less stage and where the sounds of a young boy being sexual abused by his father float about the theater, as if it were a Mozart overture preparing us for the grand opera to begin. This is when the most magical and surprising events occurred. Theater patrons throughout the theater left. They got up and walked out. This is the first time I’ve ever seen a significant amount of people leave a production but it all made what was about to happen even more exciting. It’s a shame those that left missed out, big time.
From here on out the mono-tonal production turned into a multi-sensory explosion of sound, color and waterworks, something I will never forget for the rest of my life. Audience members began to stand at times to see what was happening on stage. A fundamental law of theater, “stay seated” was broken that night, allowing some lucky patrons to catch the last glimpses of Romeo Castellucci’s work. And before you knew it the performance ended abruptly, as if someone clicked on the lights, illuminating young and old habitual theater attendees that simply enjoyed an experience they couldn’t at all explain. And in my opinion, that is truly remarkable.
For more information on Purgatorio or UCLAlive, click here!
