Pleasure of Writing: Critical Essays on Dacia Maraini

Dacia Maraini's "Barricade Theater"

Daniela Cavallaro Dacia Maraini's '~Barricade Theater" The decade of the 1970s was a period of intense struggle and remarkable success for the Italian women's movement. As Lucia , Chiavola Birnbaum recalls, it achieved such changes as the divorce law (established in 1970 and confirmed in 1974), protective legi,slation for working mothers, equal. family rights, equal pay, equal treatment of male and female workers, and the legalization of abortion (established in 1978, and confirmed by a popular referendum in 1981) (89-90). Women's theater during those years, from the first all-woman company La Maddalena, established in Rome ii:l1973, to qther smaller experimental groups that performed their plays in the streets, garages, and political festivals, expressed these same social and political concerns. "That was the 'white-hot' time ,of feminism," recalls Dacia Maraini. "We started out with a theatre that broke with the past, attacked, set up barricades.... We wanted to spread ideas that very few people held and very few people agreed with" (qtd. in Bassnett 455). Theater was the privileged means of expression for the feminist movement of the 1970s. It was considered the best way to elicit reflection on the social situation and on women's condition. When writing for theater, Maraini declared in 1974, "I always start with content and stay close to reality, since 1 believe that theater, more than any other art form, is imbued with ideology" (Fare teatro [Making theater] 8).1 Thus it was the period when Mataini wrote what she later defined as her "ideological texts": "I used the allegorical, almost religious theater above all in the ideological texts, where 1 wanted to make a polemical statement, to oppose the female condition-treating abortion in La donna perfetta, and discrimination against women in Manifesto: these are ideological texts" (qtd. in Anderlini 159). 135 Daniela Cavallaro I have chosen Il manifesto (1969; The manifesto), and La donna perfetta (1974; The perfect woman) in order to present what appear to me exemplary expressions of the feminist and political issues ofthe time. In addition to their ideological value, however, I will highlight how Maraini's mixture of prose and poetic elements, and her refined use of biblical and fairy-tale images and references, go well beyond the immediate political purpose ofthe plays. Through the analysis ofthese examples of Maraini's early dramatic production, I hope the reader might gain some appreciation of this kind of "barricade theater," performed in Italy between the late sixties and the early seventies , which opened the way to today's women's theate~. Il manifesto,. completed in November 1969 and staged as Manifesto dal carcere (The prison manifesto) in March 1971, originated from a survey of the conditions of women's jails that Maraini did for Paese sera.2 Il manifesto stages the exemplary story oftheupbringing and maturation ofa young woman, Anna Micolla, .her rebellion against authority and the system, her consequent violent death, and a promise that her suffering was not in vain. S~enes in prose from the life and death of Anna are alternately framed by sections in verse in which already deceased women ask Anna to tell her story, comment on it, and in which they recall their own experiences.3 Thus the text is divided into two styles:, one realistic, aggressive, at time~ violent; the other poetic, more reflexive, almost sacral. Maraini, in fact, has admitted that she often mixes two different styles in her writing: on the one hand, an "attachment to reality, a mainly illuministic, rational and realistic vision; on the other hand, a temptation, a strong feeling of something which cannot be explained rationally which in myworks is embodied in death" (Montini 102). The presence onstage of life and death, prose andverse, "document and lyricism" (Tian), gives this playa tone that goes well beyond that of pure testimony. IiI fact, t~e play's language, plot (story of the birth, life, teaching, suffering, death, and "resurrection "ofAnna Micolla), and scene division (thirteenframed by fourteen interventions by the dead women)4 bring to light the religious connotations of this work.5 Il manifesto can be .compared to the "Way of the Cross," a series of "14 chosen representations of the suffering of Christ on His way to Cal136 Dacia Maraini's "Barricade Theater" vary. Each station orstop," the New Catholic Encyclopedia tells QS, "is a halting place at which the soul ofthe onlooker is moved to sorrowful...