Just before leaving for Edinburgh towards the Fringe Festival, in July 2018, we had a little chat about the show with Maggie Rose, who also translated our play.MAGGIE Why the title Alma, the Human Voice?
LORENZO It is a summary of the two starting points of the show: Cocteau’s “Human Voice” and the figure of Alma Mahler. The Italian title, “Vedi alla voce Alma” is a sort of untranslatable word game that sounds like “look up the entry Alma”, but also contains the word ‘Voce’ (Voice).
M What was the seed that kickstarted your play, Alma?
L At an exhibition in Vienna, I saw a picture of Alma Mahler’s doll – the doll Oskar Kokoschka had built after she left him. She was lying on a sofa, peaceful and scary, immersed in a timeless solitude. Somehow she reminded me of the abandoned woman in “The Human Voice” … so I tried to weld together these two images.
M Like Godot, it’s a play about waiting. Beckett wrote about men waiting in very different circumstances, you choose women, who are feeling absolutely desperate because of a relationship gone wrong.
L I guess that time is a central issue in theatre, as theatre is a real-time experience shared between stage and audience, but of course a symbol as well. So for me it is a really funny but also honest question: how can I let time pass on stage? How can I represent waiting?
M You ask the audience at one point is there a difference between a man and a woman waiting for an unfaithful lover. In your role of man\woman, using drag techniques, you seem to place yourself in excellent position to try and answer this question.
L I think that the interesting thing is that you can ask yourself this question. It means that, in our mind – and in our society – there are things for men and things for women, or, at least men-ly ways and woman-ly ways to do things…
The question also give me the opportunity to say that, as a drag, I’m not exactly interested in representing a woman. Femininity is just something that I love as a theatre game, an expressive key. Being a man playing a woman, I put myself somewhere in the middle, as you say. In particular in Alma this happens a lot and it is very fluid: I am the nameless woman on the phone, but also Oskar, Alma as muse, Alma as a doll, an actor, Jean Cocteau, a milliner… I just express human nature.
M You interweave two other story lines into Alma. Cocteau’s Human Voice, in Ingrid Bergman’s splendid interpretation, and the Alma Mahler-Kokoschka story. What kind of writing process enabled you to achieve this?
L I worked on the two stories separately, so much so that every now and then I asked myself if I wanted just to rewrite the Human Voice, or just to tell a story about Alma’s doll.
With Cocteau’s play, I feel a deep bond, a love-hate one. In a way it is something very old and old-fashioned, in others it really is something that never changes: violence in human relationships, unrequited love, lies and so on. So, trying to decide if I liked this one person, one act play or not, I began a dialogue with it and I started taking just the stage directions, which were sometimes more interesting for me than the play itself. The lip-sync provided the rest and gave me one more chance to engage in a dialogue with the “living” material.
With Alma’s story, the writing process was very simple. I just wrote down the facts that I had collected thanks to a little research, as if it was a sort of dark romance. Then I cut it to keep it as sharp as possible.
Then, the composition of the show itself meant understanding how (and where and when and why) I could put together these two story lines and the music materials. And we can say that it was only than that the script was written: on me, together with the director.
M Do you think the way Nina’ s Drag Queens usually start from classic plays to rework them makes them fairly unique in the world of drag? Or did you have a model in mind when you started working in this way?
L It is of course very common to rewrite classical works in contemporary theatre. Most of the time it is probably done in a less visible way than ours, sometimes it is just the director’s point of view … and I think this is a healthy way to study a big story if you change it, open it up, so you can call it into question.
We had no specific models in mind when we started, we just wanted to have fun and were excited to discover something new about characters – the drag queens – who are usually connected exclusively with performative acts and cabaret.
In the end, I think that putting together drag world and classic plays created a very specific style and poetics … and the result is, yes, quite unique.
M Alessio Calciolari directs Alma – How do you work together to achieve what is a stunningly beautiful piece of total theatre?
L Thank you for the stunningly! Alessio began as a dancer and basically his vision is all about the body, and the body in space, so it was charming and challenging to understand with him how to give shape to my words onstage (in particular the Alma Mahler’s parts are very literary, by choice).
Together, rehearsal after rehearsal, we built this “metaphysical room”, a place where the two stories could cohabit. Alessio’s staging and my writing basically hinge on the question: how can they intertwine?
M When did you start working on costumes and set in the rehearsal process?
L We use very simple items, and most of them were there from the beginning (the carpet, the trolley bag, the armchair, some dresses). As we went along we simply changed some of them with something more functional or more beautiful, together with our set and costume designer Rosa Mariotti – who, for example, literally dressed the armchair.
M Are your costume and set designers people you normally work with?
L Yes, we usually have long-term collaborations. For example, Rosa is currently designing the costumes for our new production, Queen LeaR. Andrea Violato, who did the lighting design for Alma and built the lamps we use on stage, will also be part of Queen LeaR’s artistic team.
M Music is a key element in Alma. For Italians some of the music is virtually classical What do Ornella Vanoni and Patty Pravo mean to you?
L There are two very famous Italian song in Alma: “La bambola” by Patty Pravo (in a cover by Giusy Ferreri) and “Mi sono innamorato di te” by Luigi Tenco (in a cover by Ornella Vanoni, mixed with a Gustav Mahler’s symphony). The first is one of our most iconic pop songs, the other is one of the most romantic. Both of them strike a vibrant chord with Italian audiences.
For me these singers are part of our culture, using their voices in a show gives me the opportunity to establish a deep emotional bond with the audience and to make the story closer, creating a sort of “common language”.
M This is the first time you are doing a solo show? What are the challenges?
L My first time, yes. The challenge is the measure. Too much, to little. Usually you have stage pals to help you in find the balance, when you are alone is all on you…
At the same time, this is a deeply desired show, which had a long and organic creative process: so I know every detail and I feel at home while doing it. Moreover, it’s almost 2 years from Alma’s debut, so it has grown. The real challenge, now, is to do the show in English!
M In Italy, where there is no funding body like Creative Scotland or the English Arts Council, independent theatre companies like Nina’s Drag Queens struggle to survive. How did Nina’s Drag Queens manage to fund this show?
L Along with many initiatives and open calls we follow to find some resources, we just started a membership campaign.
Anyone can now sustain our company, becoming a Nina’s Sister, therefore part of the Sisterhood! We’re so proud of this project, that collects the energy of all our friends, fans, and pupils that in these first ten company years have followed and appreciated our work … so I’ll just close this nice chat saying something that I’ve repeated a lot in these last month: who finds a Sister finds a treasure!
