Last week, Distant Era had the opportunity to photograph Laughing Stock Theatre’s brand new production, Over My Dead Body, or How to Distribute Generational Wealth.
Laughing Stock is a Chicago company of theatre artists, several of whom connected through commedia performance at the Bristol Renaissance Faire, Evanston’s Piccolo Theatre, and Northwestern University. Their mentor, and director of this show, is a commedia dell’arte master and Renaissance man (actor, teacher, author, mask maker…) from Italy named Antonio Fava, with whom many of the Laughing Stock ensemble trained in his Scuola Internazionale dell’Attore Comico (International School of Comic Acting).
As I photographed the list of shots that Laughing Stock asked for their production, I felt like I was peering around the edges at something special, something magical, uniquely theatrical, something antique, traditional, mysterious, and rare.
Commedia Dell’Arte
In brief, commedia dell’arte is an ensemble theatrical form where the actors improvise and perform comic plays with universal themes using stock characters (lovers, servants/clowns, wealthy old men, braggart soldiers); it often employs exaggerated masks to identify those familiar characters.
If that’s difficult to imagine, to see it is to understand it, and Laughing Stock’s show is a wonderfully traditional style commedia production, which was created and directed by Fava, with the dialogue improvised in rehearsal by the ensemble. This may explain how natural it sounded in the mouths of the actors; there are no strange, awkward, or misconstrued lines in this show because while the scenes came from Fava, the lines all came from the actors themselves.
Here’s the director, Antonio Fava, on the production, quoted from the program:
It is pure Commedia dell’Arte.
Antonio Fava
The classic one, which in the middle of the Renaissance invented modern professionalism and theater.
Five centuries of continuity and it is still alive, lively, vital.
Directing the Laughing Stock Company is a pleasure corresponding to the very nature of the Comedy: dynamism.
The comedy is direct and is not “gentle”, if anything, it is raw, harsh.
With OVER MY BODY; OR HOW TO DISTRIBUTE GENERATIONAL WEALTH, we are in the great classic of repeated, insistent cheating to get something that is important for the characters in action. No one is bad, but they are all gripped by the urgent need to not lose something that, they believe, is their own.
The intrigue around the will of the “dead”, Pantalone, pretending to be such, triggers the hunt for the old man’s wealth.
There is a historical reference to Dante’s Inferno, to canto XXX, dedicated to counterfeiters, where Gianni Schicchi appears, later immortalized in Puccini’s masterpiece.
In memory of the two greats, however, we did something else, an original, timeless, yet concretely human comedy. In Comedy there is no struggle between Good and Evil, there is instead the struggle for survival, between people, who for different reasons are in the urgency of a problem, which gives love, money, hunger, or fear.
In short, normal people. Of the spectacular version of normality that arises from the “mask”, in which Comedy is the whole character.
The aim is to make the public spend two pleasant hours. The Comedy has been doing this for five centuries.
Buon divertimento.
Comfort in Commedia
Perhaps Laughing Stock’s work resonated with me because I too came from a background of commedia-style performance (at Renaissance festivals and theatre school; later on, long form improvisational theatre and then classical theatre), so the characters, the style, the madcap plots, the masks, and the zany humor were beyond delightful—I found them comforting. The world of a commedia play is a world of larger-than-life disasters and confusions, but for all that it’s a simple world, where in spite of everything that goes (often hilariously) wrong, it’s a world where things are going to work out somehow.
This production is theatre in its truest form in that it must be seen live. Theatrical experiences like this are rare and need to be seen, and since the show is a pay-what-you can production, everyone who wishes to have the experience may do so.
Finally, this production features the fantastic Jennifer Mohr, featured previously on The All Worlds Traveller in Distant Era’s Portraits from a Distant Era and Erin Gallagher’s Captain America of the Jazz Age. Jen is a brilliant creative collaborator, performer, role-player, and friend, and I am grateful that she brought me to Laughing Stock’s producer, Aaron Quick, to photograph this production; enormous thanks to Aaron for making it happen.
Finally-finally, while photographing images for this show, I noticed the cover of Antonio Fava’s book, The Comic Mask in Commedia Dell’Arte, which portrayed him wearing a commedia mask. This gave me an idea… which we’ll take a look at next week.
In the meantime, if taking a break from all your worries sure would help a lot, may I recommend Laughing Stock’s silly, wacky, highly stylized show at the Atheneum Theater?
Here’s a gallery of images from the show.
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