Teatro (review)

The publication of the collected theatrical works of Futurist founder Filippo Tommaso Marinetti is a real cause for celebration. Long awaited by those of us who have been desperate to find Marinetti's works for theater collected in one book, Jeffrey Schnapp's edited two volume set of Marinetti's theater proves to have been well worth the wait; indeed it represents a monumental moment for scholars of Futurism. Here for the first time are collected Marinetti's most important theatrical texts in Italian, many of which were scattered across a number of different anthologies, or others that had for one reason or another gone missing. Entitled simply Teatro, the book is a real treasure trove of decadent scatology, Marinettian agitprop, Futuristic flights of imagination, and theatrical pieces, some of which are just too over the top to be easily categorized. If there is one overarching impression, however, that emerges from the roughly 800 pages of Marinetti's writing for and about theater, it is the centrality of the stage for Marinetti's, and more generally, for Futurist aesthetics; a point Schnapp makes repeatedly and eloquently in his stellar introduction.

The book's organization certainly contributes to such a reading. Divided into five sections by genre and followed both by a helpful chronology of Marinetti's theatrical activities and by an exhaustive bibliography of works related to Marinetti and theater, volume one contains the longer and more "traditional" pieces from Marinetti's opus in the first part entitled "Opere teatrali e sintesi incatenate." Not only do we get the truly bizarre "Re Baldoria," a play that turns the world into a gastronomic carnival in which critiques of materialism are linked to flatulence, bodily fluids, and streams of blood that would have made even Lucio Fulci blush, but there's also "Il tamburo di fuoco," an "African drama of heat, color, noise, smells" (195) interspersed with Russolo's noisemakers; a send-up of the drawing-room drama transposed aboard ship ("L'oceano del cuore"); a pair of literary experiments in which an oxygen tank figures prominently ("Come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on. I implore you to live just a little longer," it murmurs to a dying man in "Il suggeritore nudo" [395]) and simultaneity itself as conflicted modern protagonist ("Simultanina"); and finally a series of Marinettian takes on, surprise, surprise, the battle against nature ("Vulcano" and "Locomotive"). The real rediscoveries of the first volume, however, are "Elettricità sessuale," and "Prigionieri," the first a short play about robots and nerves that puts a twist on a Frankensteinian motif and the second, a series of dialogues that take place in an Austrian prison camp during the First World War. "Elettricità sessuale" of course draws deeply on late-nineteenth- and early twentieth-century discourses of nerves and hysterical bodies, and looks forward to some of Bontempelli's theatrical works, in particular Nostra Dea, while "Prigionieri," for its part, merits attention since here Marinetti doesn't celebrate war, its hygiene, or its velocity, so much as offer something like a non-ironic hymn to mothers and their sons. Influenced perhaps by D'Annunzio's own Notturno which appeared four years earlier, "Prigionieri" is one of the few instances in which Marinetti marks the horrors and loss of war distant from the bombast and hyperbole of the better known Futurist manifestos.

The remainder of Marinetti's theatrical works are collected in the second volume, which is divided into four parts: "Sintesi brevi, compenetrazioni, sorprese teatrali e drammi d'oggeto," "Sintesi radiofoniche," "Misurazioni," and "Manifesti e altri scritti." There's so much of interest here, it is hard to know where to begin. For those interested in the connections running between the stage and the wireless studio, the fifth part will be a likely first stop. Here we find grouped all of Marinetti's manifestos and writings from the 1930s, in which he attempted to think a new form of theater that could withstand the assault of cinema and radio. What emerges clearly is a [End Page 770...