Made In Italy: Between Inheritance & Absence

Theatre Calgary is staging Made in Italy at the Martha Cohen Theatre from the 26^th of August to the 27^th of September. Written and performed by Farren Timoteo, a true solo ensemble (one-person show), channeling the voices of multiple generations in this story of Italian immigrants. Timoteo is an evocative and brilliant showman, using physical and verbal humor to create boisterous characters.

The play follows the travails of a young Italian (Francesco Mantini) in Canada, the son of a first-generation immigrant (Salvatore Mantini), looking for a palpable identity, one that is distinguishable from the cultural inheritance of his family. Salvatore, in the vein of every first-generation immigrant, works hard to provide for his son even against the weight of losing his wife far too early in life. The labor and sacrifices of Salvatore and his abidance to an inherited culture are acts of love, but they bind Francesco to a world that he cannot understand – like every young man he relentlessly searches for an identity beyond the one provided by his father. Francesco struggles to find his way, he flips and flops between different performative identities (dancer, singer, Vaudevillian exhibitionist, etc.), struggling to determine who he is and what he wants. Is this why he is taken to being a performer? Is there a sense that immigrants are always existing under a ‘performative weight’? Francesco is Canadian, but he is not, he is also Italian, but he is not. What and who is he? And what is he to do with the indeterminacy of identity that he so desperately fights against? How much cultural integration is integration enough? When does he truly become Canadian, when he renounces his Italian heritage? But who is he without his Italian heritage? Canadian by subtraction, Italian by absence?  This is the difficult arithmetic of the immigrant; cultural integration seems to require a sort of subtraction, but such a subtraction creates a void that no integration can fill. The dilemma of the immigrant forces us to ask ourselves a discomforting question; does culture enable or obstruct human freedom? As someone with a quasi south-asian background this question has become a salient one for me.

Terrence Mckenna, American ethnobotanist, famously stated that ‘culture (read as Western culture) is not your friend’, he saw it as a collection of dangerous tradeoffs that stripped the human spirit of its beauty and nobility, forcing us to do things that are dehumanizing and debased. Herbert Marcuse (German Philosopher) in his seminal book, One Dimensional Man, discusses how technological rationality has infiltrated almost every social dimension in the West - his argument, like McKenna’s is that radical spontaneity and the creative life forces that replenishes human communities are replaced by a blunting of personal freedom. Communities that were held together through some sort of organic solidarity or transcendental awareness, are now reduced to disorganized expressions that are saturated with technological and economic excess.

In short, for Marcuse and McKenna, modern culture is not liberation, it is stupefaction. Progressivist writers like Steven Pinker & Thomas Friedman (championing the brilliance of modern society, arguing that modern institutions have made life better) would see these arguments as far too pessimistic. Both sides have compelling arguments and certainly touch on truths that have immediate weight – maybe though, there is an alternative way of understanding this, that culture is, both, malleable and prescriptive. It can give us just as much as it takes from us. South Asian communities  in Canada will acutely feel the absence of their inherited communities in the West, their identities are structured around the normative vitality of the collective. There is ethical comfort in the collective, but the price to be paid for this comfort is high - with it comes the erosion of personal autonomy.

In Made In Italy, the normative gaze is comedically dramatized at various points throughout the play – we see Francesco drawing on the mental images of a saint and the characters in his community to guide and influence his decisions in real time, sometimes he listens to them and sometimes he does not, but the symbolism is very clear, these images are all representations of what Jacques Lacan (French Psychoanalyst) called the Big Other (the broad canvas of language, culture, myth and communal expectations that shape and influence our identities). It is the imagined presence of authority and tradition. In the West, we might find this hard to understand, the de-transcendentalization (the absence of a cosmic and communal mythos) of our social imagination and the radical deification of the self as the final arbiter of happiness and meaning might have left us bereft of something – communal traditions that stitched human existence into a larger fabric of cosmic necessity and belonging.

To go out on a limb on here, I do agree with Hebert Marcuse that the Big Other in the West is technological rationality. We are enmeshed in its logic and the calculus of wealth and productivity is equivalent to a secular oracle, guiding our choices and sense of meaning. I do not see this as an irredeemable situation. There are existential aspects of technological rationality and the West’s cultural permeability that speak to the very real needs of 2^nd generation immigrants. There is a reason many of them remonstrate against some of the inherited moral and cultural structures of their parents. The communal and mythic imagination of communities in the Global South should not always be romanticized (this is a form of cultural exoticism that is reductive and problematic), there is much in them that causes an immense amount of anguish and pain - For example, surveillance capitalism is a term that is used to describe how States and market actors monitor our expressions and identity in the west, but equivalent to this is the moral surveillance of bodies and freedom in South Asia. Here, it is not always the State that does the policing but the hyper-vigilant community, neighbors, kin, and even strangers, who become informants of moral propriety. The community, and the family takes on Stasi (secret police, former eastern Germany) levels of inter-personal oppression. In some way this is worse than the surveillance practiced by the State - loved ones become torturers, informants and enforcers, complicating the boundaries of love and fear. It is never as bad as this in Made in Italy, but Salvatore's obsession with his son's future is a very real symptom of how hollowing out the inner freedoms of subjects in traditional societies leads to dysfunctional attachment patterns and styles.

Like all cultures, though, there are contradictions, ones that challenge the monolithic understanding of how conformity operates in a place like South Asia. Example, in Made in Italy, the young second-generation immigrant is taken to an Italian brothel, by his father, to become a man. This was for a certain period of time, a cultural undercurrent in South Asia – A man could not make matrimonial decisions in isolation from his family, but he could prove his masculinity in controlled spaces of vice - desire was policed in love but lust was given license in threshold spaces. Interpreted through a feminist lens, the play reveals (wittingly or unwittingly) a great deal about the nature of gendered authority to us. The young Mantini’s life is authored through patriarchal authority, and the play’s depiction of femininity is skewed through that lens (this is not an ideological critique of the script, I do not see as a weakness of any sort, it simply imparts important sociological insight to us), femininity in the moral ecosystem of these characters is pushed to the margins, and this is a reminder of the difficulty that some traditional societies have had with interpreting femininity. Francesco's inability to locate his identity may, at some level, be the result of the unprocessed absence of the maternal voice. This silence haunts the play, but only if you look for it.

Not to belabor this point, as I have touched upon it in other pieces, but femininity is bifurcated through incredible levels of reverence and suspicion in some of these traditional societies – sanctifying femininity while silencing it in lived experience. In South Asia, I have often noticed that Mothers are seen as asexual human beings, emblematic of the Madonna (virgin Mary), pure and childlike,  but such sanctification and infantilization strips them of their complexity as flesh-and-blood individuals. Many women, based in South Asia, flee to the West as a form of rebellion (rightfully so) against the cultural subordination of their bodies. Immigration, in this sense, becomes not just a cultural transition, but also an existential one, a struggle to reclaim the right to be desired and, more importantly, to desire. That being said, there are numerous surveys and sociological studies that show that first generation immigrant women (when moving to the West) as opposed to men, are more likely to develop symptoms of depression. There could very well be issues of validity and reliability around these studies, but they potentially show us something very striking - how culture can, both, diminish our inner lives but also give it shape and form. We can resist our cultural heritage, but we can never fully step outside of it.

To be an immigrant is to live in this double bind; to seek liberation from the old only to find that such a liberation potentially conceals the anxiety of freedom. There are profound risks and perils around the uses of our freedoms, we can advocate for them but are we assured that our advocacy for freedom will always lead to personal happiness? Nope, there is no such guarantee, we can mess up and mess up real good, the uses of personal freedom can plummet us and others that we love into profound states of destructive ruination. There is philosophical merit in the arguments that traditionalists present to us in this regard; freedom without the normative and jurisprudential strictures of the collective is problematic. Freedom, in abstraction, from the broader considerations of the collective is freedom towards what? Francesco's existential design; to find himself through diffuse performative identities, all the while untethering himself from the cultural architecture of his community proves unfulfilling. There is a hollow plenitude that his freedom has evoked. It is clear, that freedom alone is not the destination; such a freedom is always unfinished and incomplete. I remember speaking to a friend of mine (Islamic law researcher) about this once, stating that traditional structures were woefully inadequate to meet the needs of modern human beings, that they were rooted in a past that no longer existed. To this she said something to the effect of; 'we negotiate the spaces between the perils of individual freedom and the arbitrariness of the community, there is no golden mean, only a wager that our inherited traditions will provide safety against the double precarity of the collective and the individual.' I found this interesting, because what this suggests is that this is a perilous wager, but are they any more dangerous than the wagers that we make around our radical freedoms?

What do we do at this intersection? Both, the West and the East constrain existential freedom in their ways, can we renounce 'culture' wholesale from the register of human aspiration or will culture always be the medium through which freedom discloses itself?For all of the security that tradition provides, we cannot uncritically accept the inherited mythologies and axioms of our communities (Western of Eastern) nor can we exercise freedom in a cultural vacuum. Culture offers a script, but maybe freedom demands that we also write our own? The paradox, like Francesco's, is that we must be able to reject something before we can accept it. We are condemned to always choosing something and in this exercising of this choice is the renunciation of some quantum of human agency. Freedom will always cost us something that is irretrievable - the wager is that we will have written a script of our own that gives us the strength to live within the inconsistencies of all our choices.

I do not want to reveal the end of the Made in Italy, but let us say that the end symbolically represents a third space of culture, one where the desperate agency of Francesco finds partial resolution and comfort in the inherited culture of his father – it is a wager that demonstrates that issues of culture must always be resolved at the level of our personal relationships. Philosophy and ideology finds its threshing ground in difficult human relationships; outside of that it is sterile and untested.

To the production – Farren Timoteo scorches the stage with brilliant showmanship, his use of physical humor is excellent and he dramatizes his characters with inexhaustible energy. Commanding the stage for over two hours is a hell of a job, and he does it with vaudevillian charm. His movement is structured and guided but is also suffused with dazzling surges of creative spontaneity. The performance straddles the lines between charisma and exhibitionism; the script does not lend itself to understated acting and requires immense amounts of self-confidence. The direction (Daryl Cloran) is commercially astute, working through the scenes with frenetic pace (Laura Krewski). The production values are perfectly scaled to the genre, the lighting work (Celeste English) especially the red spotlights during the mental representations of the Saint are evocative and creative. The set design (Cory Sincennes) is excellent, creating familial warmth and homeliness, it is lovely to look at.

The script takes fantastic shots at the penchant of immigrants over dramatizing their situation ('when I was your age I traversed mountains and seas', etc) - this is excellent, and shows us that, sometimes, the memories around hardship are more traumatic than the actual experiences around hardship. The script recognizes that memories are not artifacts, but living reconstructions, always embossed with the running pulse of human distortion. It is often said that memory is a boon and bane - it can preserve and maintain human dignity, but can also exert unbearable pressure on us.

Beyond this though, I was not drawn to the script. The reason being that I think there is much more room for poignancy in the script. The comedy is thick, very thick, but with this comes the unfortunate loss of dramatic potential. There is a lack of dramaturgical risk, I understand that this works for revenue generation, but it does not necessarily allow for the audience to develop a nuanced view of the immigrant experience, nor does it leave us with anything particularly powerful. Maybe trusting that audiences have the intelligence to appreciate moments of dramatic nuance is not a bad starting point for a production house.

This script has excellent potential to create some serious depth, punctuating it with some gravitas would not have under-served the script, it would have heightened it. The only thing that kept me interested in the play, at the halfway mark, was Timoteo’s performance, it was an exhilarating performance but after a while it became pure motion, increasingly unmoored from emotional depth. As a one man show it is an impressive showcase of talent. As a script, the comedic intent outpaces the emotional potential. The symbolic aspiration of the play is admirable, very admirable but at the level of execution it is unlikely to leave the audience with questions around the transitional pressures of immigration. Can caricatures speak to us, sure they can, and they can speak to us in riveting ways – they can amuse and wound. Charlie Chaplin’s work draws (in some instances) a balance between boisterous characterization and emotional weight.

The script is always on the cusp of almost discovering moments of dramatic vulnerability but it never reaches beneath the skin of the comedy. It gestures very loudly towards the pain of longing, but never embodies it. Like the immigrant in motion, it remains unfinished between inheritance and absence.

This product feeds the machine, but not the imagination.

Final Rating – 5/10