Review Of IVP 2022 Festival

 

I was able to attend all 6 readings that were part of IVP 2022. 

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IVP brings global voices to Chicago stages through commissions, translations and production. We collaborate with consulates, cultural partners and universities throughout the Chicagoland area and collaborate with national and international theatres to promote global playwrights at the national level. A global city demands global art.

Sept 12: The Mapmaker | Spain

Summary:

In present-day Warsaw, Blanca hears the legend of the ghetto cartographer. According to that legend, an old cartographer was determined, while everything was dying around him, to draw the map of that world in danger; but since his legs no longer supported him, since he couldn't look for the data he needed, it was a girl who went out to look for them for him. Blanca will take the legend for truth and she will launch herself, obsessively, in search of the old map and, without knowing it, in search of herself. The cartographer is a work -a map- about that search and about that legend.

My Review:

This was a play where I liked the concept more than the execution. Personally I got lost in the wibbly wobbly time travel that occurred. I also had trouble connecting to Blanca's story and the trauma she experienced felt like an after thought. I will note that the reading was very long (over 2 hours which is long for a stage reading) and the room was very cold so I may not have been in the right mindset to be able to follow and enjoy the reading.

Sept 14: The Shroud Maker | Palestine

Summary:

From the critically acclaimed Palestinian writer Ahmed Masoud, who was born and raised in Gaza. Hajja Souad, an 80-year old Palestinian woman living on the besieged Gaza Strip, knows about business. She has survived decades of wars and oppression through making shrouds for the dead. A compelling black comedy, The Shroud Maker delves deep into the intimate life of ordinary Palestinians to weave a highly distinctive path through Palestine’s turbulent past and present. Loosely based on a real-life character still living in Gaza, this one-woman comedy weaves comic fantasy and satire with true stories told first hand to the writer and offers a vivid portrait of Palestinian life in Gaza underscored with humor.

My Review:

I really enjoyed this moving and meaningful comedy. The suffering of the Palestinians, the day to day lives of the Palestinians, and the hopefulness of the Palestinians despite it all are not typically expressed nearly enough. This was an important play. In addition this play had been performed before in England which meant that it felt more polished than some of the other readings. 

Sept 19: Give Me A Happily Ever After | Norway

Summary:

Welcome to Life! Fasten your seatbelts, it's gonna be a bumpy ride! Living is scary, will we be okay in the end?

My Review:

This was a fun comedy looking at our interactions with anxiety and how both anxiety challenges us and makes us better people. 

Sept 21: Turks, Fire | Germany

Summary:

When a residential house is engulfed in flames five people are killed, three children and two women. The perpetrators are youths from the neighbourhood. The name of the small town is soon known nationwide thanks to a flurry of media reports. But the nation’s attention soon turns elsewhere to other, more pressing issues. Yet for the survivors and victims of the arson attack that fateful night will never end. The mother who leapt from a window cradling her child trying to protect the baby with her own body tells her story over and over, detailing the moment of her death. The mother of one of the perpetrators talks about the silence that enveloped her home, of her inkling that something had happened, of her doubts about her son’s guilt. A female relative who survived the fire sees the flames every day, feels the heat and smells the smoke. Each person is trapped in their memory and pain yet searches for a way to talk about what happened, yearns to meet other people and find a way to communicate.

My Review:

I am not sure how I feel about this reading. I liked some of the exploration of what it means to die for different people but had trouble following who was which character which meant it was harder for me to connect to the struggles of the characters. This was a play where we were told in the talk back that it did not have any punctuation which probably added to my struggle to feel like it was a cohesive whole. 

Sept 26: A Dictionary of Emotions in War Time, Call Them By Their Names,

The Peed-Upon Armored Personnel | Ukraine

Summary:

Three voices from the War in Ukraine meld together chronicling thoughts, emotions, and horror from the war in Ukraine as it begins and changes the world. Call Them By Their Names by Tetyan Kitsenko, The Peed Upon Armored Personnel Carrier by Oskana Gritsenko, and A Dictionary of Emotions in a Time of War by Elena Astasyeva immediately transport us to the moments that changed their world and ours in an instant and presage a rupture that will take generations to heal.

My Review:

This was an fascinating combination of 3 works by Ukrainians about the current Russian invasion. It was filled with hope, resilience, and strength. 

Sept 28: Totentanz: Black Night, Black Death | Poland

Summary:

March of 2020, Bergamo, the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Francesca, a former model and her husband, Luca, a television host, have invited some neighbours to an illegal dinner. This innocent social evening gradually turns into a quarrel over the pandemic, Italy, European values, social solidarity, and political and ideological views in the crisis situation.

My Review:

I first want to say I had an exam to go to afterwards so my mind was not totally focused on the play. I also only had the above summary and know I did not understand many of the references that were being made which made the reading feel long. 

As I looked up more info I found this expanded summary which would have been useful to know beforehand. 

The play is built on structures drawn from commedia dell’arte: the protagonists come from various regions of Italy and personify the stereotypical attributes associated with dell’arte characters, yet the conflict rests on twenty-first-century divisions. Venetian wealth and Sicilian poverty, the refugee crisis in Lampedusa, immigrant labour, the breakdown of the health system during the pandemic, the collapse of faith in European solidarity—these are only some of the subjects the drama raises. The story of the murder of Pier Paolo Pasolini in 1975 hovers over everything like a sinister omen—this was a homophobic and political crime that smacked of wild capitalism and the fascist history of Italy and Europe.

Yet two characters seem to belong to another world entirely. These are Salvatore, the equivalent of the dell’arte Dottore and his helper, Chiara, a young girl, a character who seems to be a mix of Arlecchino and perhaps an Italian Lisbeth Salander. It is they who ultimately take one of the guests into the underworld. Who are they? Etruscan gods? Messengers of Hades? A delirious dream of Claudia, who turns out to be a doctor in a Covid unit?

The play makes a wide range of references to Italian, European, and world culture. We encounter Pier Paolo Pasolini, Boccaccio, Petrarch, Tarkovsky, Tarantino, even the opening words of the Comendatore from Mozart’s Don Giovanni and allusions to the Aeneid. The action is broken up by intermezzi—some take the form of television shows, others resemble musicals. There is also a grotesque parody of Wheel of Fortune, ending with the prize of a luxury coffin, and the performance of a medieval song that is an ode to Pluto, lord of the underworld.

In the finale the violinist dies, the bourgeoisie are ridiculed, the helpless doctors await international aid, and Chiara performs her contemporary song, which might be read as the triumph of death.

Comedy mixes with tragedy, mythology with the global problems of the twenty-first century. The Italian context turns out to be merely a costume for the challenges standing before most of the societies of the West.