BOOKS BECOME VIBRANT SOURCES OF SECRETS AND MYSTERIES ONCE OUR DEAR READER GETS ACTIVELY INVOLVED TAKING A DEEP DIVE INTO ALL THOSE WORDS WRITTEN BY ITALO CALVINO
By Chuck Graham, TucsonStage.com
photo by Tim Fuller
Virtual mountains of hard cover books dominate The Rogue Theatre stage to tell what happened in Italo Calvino's "If on a winter's night a traveler" as adapted by John Capecci.
Trust me, reading a book, any book, will never be the same kind of experience once you've seen The Rogue Theatre's exceedingly brilliant stage adaptation of Italo Calvino's postmodern literary scene-stretching epic, “If on a winter's night a traveler.”
Filled with clever humor and unexpected insights about the private lives of books, this play becomes an imagination-expanding production of thoughtful fun and games for book lovers of every stripe.
Do you ever wonder why works of fiction always use that same old format of a beginning, middle and end? Do you really trust the publishers of a book translated from its original language? How do you know for sure the translation is even the same book?
Or what if the book's beginning was written by someone other than the official author. What if, just suppose, there is an underworld market for “beginnings,” so that you the author stuck for knowing how to begin his next novel could just buy one of these anonymously written “beginnings,” finish it up with a clever resolution and have the whole thing become a best seller? What then?
Calvino's real intention is to upend the literary world by celebrating, not the writer, but that seldom appreciated mass of restlessly searching intellectual souls – the readers!
Who, after all, has kept the works of Shakespeare alive for centuries? It isn't the writer. It is the many millions of readers who never tire of reading and re-reading the Bard.
Scholar and writer John Capecci has made it one of his life's objectives to spread Calvino's insightful thoughts even further by adapting this book to the stage.
Now the Rogue Theatre has picked up the swirling Calvino baton to present Capecci's adaptation with this full-voiced world premiere production directed by Cynthia Meier.
“If on a winter's night a traveler” is a game-changer, for sure. What might seem at first to be frothy fun with language and logic also contains deeper conclusions. So the literary intellectual could be laughing at one set of jokes while that restless blue collar reader of pulp fiction will be laughing at others.
My personal favorites include noting how the play's narrative portions all have the men wearing heavy overcoats and slouchy Fedora hats just like in the finest film noir.
Another is how music director Russell Ronnebaum uses haunted accordion playing by Linda Ackerman to give the whole atmosphere a provocative feeling of 1950s art house cinema.
There is a plot of sorts, actually more like an orchestration, with the play's title also being the first line of the play. The Reader (Ryan Parker Knox) reads a little further into chapter one, only to discover some pages are missing.
Returning to the bookstore, he gets a replacement copy, but then discovers this is not even the same book. Which sends the Reader off on a whole new set of bookish misadventures.
The cast is one of those Rogue specialties where 10 actors play 50 different roles. This time the singular characters are played by Christopher Johnson as the appropriately authoritarian Il Maestro, Bryn Booth as the provocative Ludmilla and that dismayed everyreader Knox. Seven more players create 46 other personalities to complete the tale.
“If on a winter's night a traveler” runs two hours five minutes, playing through Nov. 24, with 7:30 p.m. performances Fridays and Saturdays, 2 p.m. matinees Saturdays and Sundays, at The Rogue Theatre in the Historic Y, 300 E. University Blvd.
Tickets are $47 general admission, with discounts available. For details and reservations, visit https://www.theroguetheatre.org or phone 520-551-2053.
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