CANGIULLO’S TWO MINUTE FUTURIST PLAY

Francesco Cangiullo (1884-1977) was an Italian author, playwright and painter who after he met the movement’s founder, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876-1944), became actively engaged in the development of Futurism.  The year when this initial meeting took place in Naples was 1910, but Cangiullo’s official entry into Futurism is recorded in 1913.

It was 1915 when Cangiullo wrote his play Detonation (Detonazione). The entire script for this

play appears below:

   

______________________________________________________________________________                                                                        

DETONATION

                                                Synthesis of All Modern Theater

                                                            CHARACTER

A BULLET

Road at night, cold, deserted.

A minute of silence. –A gunshot.    

                                                               CURTAIN

______________________________________________________________________________

I believe Detonation was written to provide an example of the criterion for the perfect Futurist Synthetic Theatre drama.  In 1915 the manifesto titled THE FUTURIST SYNTHETIC THEATRE was written by Marinetti, Emilio Settimelli (1891-1954) and Bruno Corra (1892-1976).  The manifesto stressed modernity through sensations, speed, movement and industrial development. The idea was to compress the entire drama into a few minutes while the play created for the viewer multiple situations, sensations, ideas, symbols and facts. The Futurists wanted to destroy the theater inherited from Ancient Greece and replace it with “creating synthetic expressions of cerebral energy that have THE ABSOLUTE VALUE OF NOVELTY.”  The Futurists also wanted their theatre to excite audiences who were to forget the monotony of daily life by being swept through a labyrinth of sensations that were combined in unpredictable ways.

The Futurists also had a political agenda for their dramatic presentations. Their aim across all their artistic endeavors was to express themes of war and conflict.  These broad themes were to urge Italy to immediately enter the war since Futurists, like the Expressionists, believed war would provide a social cleansing.

Detonation not only fulfills the philosophic and artistic requirements of the Futurists, but it expresses several of the basic impulses the Futurists wanted audience members to experience. Did hearing a single gunshot during the night in 1915, signal the start of war for Italy? Did it mean war had entered one’s city? Did it make some individuals want to join the battle? Did it make audience members want to hide or flee? This moment of theatre had the potential for audience members to generate many individual reactions.

The Futurists held their theatrical events in large regional cities (Naples, Rome, Venice, Florence, etc.) and the performances were widely publicized. The plays and speeches were held outdoors in large public spaces. Martinetti believed that in 1915 ninety percent of the Italian population attended theatrical performances while only the remaining ten percent read books. He wanted audiences to forget the monotony of their lives and become swept away with the novelty, energy and ideas that Synthetic Theater provided.

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Since Detonation appears to possess all the elements desired for successful Synthetic Theatre and the timing for its creation being 1915, I imagine it as the perfect piece to present during the year that Italy entered the conflict one step at a time. Italy was a member of the Triple Alliance with Germany and Austria-Hungary, but on May 3, 1915 it revoked its membership. On May 23, 1915 the Italian government declared war on Austria-Hungary but deferred any declaration regarding Germany; August 20, 1915 declared war on Turkey; October 15, 1915 declared war on Bulgaria and August 28, 1916 declared war on Germany. It was this slow pace of inching in to the major war fronts that frustrated the Futurists and prompted them to keep pushing their agenda to the Italian citizenry.

Were these plays successful in their time? Obviously, the Futurists were never able to destroy conventional theatre as they desired.  I have not read any reviews about these Futurist performances, however, John H. Muse in his book titled Microdramas: Crucibles For The Theater and Time states: “Professional theater critics rarely took the Futurists seriously enough to bother attending their events, so responses come primarily from other newspaper staff.” 

Apparently, the Futurists’ evenings provided curious, thought-provoking free entertainment to keep attracting audiences throughout Italy. However, Professor Muse comments: “audiences complained that performances of the sintesi were too slow.”  This refers to the entire evening of these plays since “the plays were very short and the intervals very long.”  It is hard to hold an audience when the total length of ten plays during an evening was approximately thirty minutes while the length of the entire program was two hours.

This structure for an evening of plays may have occurred from time to time; however, I am under the impression that other Futurist events such as political speeches, visual art presentations, etc. filled the time that it took to set-up the next short play.  It is also possible that the programing for the Futurist evenings may have varied from one city to the next.

The initial movement of Futurism was concluded by the end of World War One. 

THE SHORTEST PLAY I EVER READ

The shortest play I have ever read is titled Connecting Vessels (I vasi comunicanti) written in 1916 by Italian playwright Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876-1944), the leader of the Futurist movement (1909-1944). The English translation I read is by Jane House and it is in 20^th Century Italian Drama: An Anthology:The First Fifty Years.

Tommaso Marinetti

Futurist member of the Lombard Battalion of Volunteer Cyclists and Motorists, 1915

Connecting Vessels contains eleven sentences of dialogue. The remaining two-thirds of this one page play contains stage directions. Not only is it the shortest play I have read, but it is also the first non-antiwar play I have written about on this blog.

Central to understanding the intent of this play is a very basic knowledge of Futurism. Marinetti wrote the Manifesto of Futurism in 1909 and published it immediately. This document supports the glorification of war, the beauty of speed, the love of danger, the excitement of labor, the fight against moralism and the excitement of rebellion. Since Marinetti was pro-war, he joined the Italian military as soon as Italy became involved in World War One. He saw combat during the Fall of 1915 in a cyclist unit that was fighting along the Italian-Austrian border. Eventually his unit was disbanded since cycles were inappropriate for use in the mountains. 

 

When Marinetti was not involved in combat he supported the war effort with speeches, articles and very short theatre pieces he named sintesi, which means synthesis.  Marinetti strived to apply new methods of expressing ideas in the theatre. The new medium of the motion picture was exciting to Marinetti and he believed theatre needed to be reinvented. Thus he wanted the sintesi to be very brief and to compress many situations, ideas, feelings and symbols into a few minutes. He worked to covey in a few short scenes the essential elements of the traditional five-act play.  Marinetti also desired to draw his audiences into the scene thereby eliminating the feeling of observing the action through the safe vantage point of the fourth wall. The playwright’s goal was to glorify daily heroism; to endow the Italian people with a spirit for hopefulness and to promote within them the spirit to achieve victory. Connecting Vessels is an excellent sample of Marinetti’s vision for Futuristic theatre.

The stage for Connecting Vessels is divided into three sections: 1. Left is a room with a bier and a coffin surrounded by priests, weeping relatives and lighted candles. 2. Center stage is a street in front of a tavern door with a table and a bench where a woman is seated. 3. Right of center is the countryside with trenches. The play begins on the left with priests praying and relatives grieving. Suddenly someone cries “Thief!” The Thief runs from the funeral scene towards the audience and into the street scene. He sits next to the Woman on the bench and talks to her. A group of soldiers appear and walk towards the Thief. They ask him to join them as a soldier.  He agrees and declares he is willing “To die for my country!”  The soldiers and Thief move into the trenches. They fire their weapons and gain ground. They come out of the trenches and run through the street scene area where they claim to have outflanked the enemy. The soldiers burst into the funeral scene and cause disarray. When the soldiers reach the extreme left side of the stage, they are shot dead. They fall down backwards, all in a row.

My account of this entire play illustrates the characters movement patterns and the manner in which the stage areas are utilized. The Futurists called this type of stage design “simultaneous setting”.  These set pieces replaced the usual painted backdrops used in Italian theatres during this period. The simultaneous setting for Connecting Vessels was necessary to ensure the intrinsic flow of the plot. This type of setting also allows the play to move with ease like a film, from one location to another.

Marinetti wrote numerous sintesi between 1915 and 1916.  Two other playwrights who developed the futuristic theatre ideas with Marinetti are Bruno Corra (1892-1976) and Emilio Settimelli (1891-1954). The brief plays of these three dramatists were produced by several theatre companies that traveled to various cities such as Venice, Bologna, Padua, Ancona, Naples, Genoa, San Remo, Savona and Verona. The program of several sintesi, eight to eleven, were played once in each city. Marinetti reported to his colleagues that the performances were attended by hundreds of enthusiastic young persons. These performances also included works by futurist poets, composers and painters as well as theater pieces. In order to cover their expenses and make a profit, the touring companies also presented a conventional play on the previous evening.

There were several touring companies that presented this type of program, but two of them are better documented. The initial touring company to present the sintesi was Zoncada-Masi-Capodaglia headed by Luigi Zoncada, actor. Another touring company was headed by Ettore Petrolini (1884-1936) an actor renowned for his parodies of well-known nineteenth century actors, opera divas and popular variety entertainment acts. The touring companies undoubtedly had to curtail their activities when Italy became more engaged in the war during late 1916 and throughout 1917. Also Marinetti had returned to active military duty during this period. 

    

Connecting Vessels was initially published in an issue of Teatro fururista sintetico dated April 2-9, 1916.  The English translation in 20th Century Italian Drama was published in 1995 by Columbia University Press.

NOTES:
Photo from Italian Futurism and the First World War by Selena Daly. University of Toronto Press, 2016.